When you are young, you pretend. You pretend you are a professional basketball player. You pretend you are a race car driver. You pretend you are a knight. A super hero. A rock star. I once even pretended I was a car dealer. I wore a suit and  carried around a set of car keys. I talked to my grandfather about the types of cars I had available.

You don’t think you’re being a fraud. It’s harmless play. After a few hours you go back to being a kid. You eat dinner with your parents. You take a bath, brush your teeth, comb your hair. You get into bed and your mom reads you a story.

And you grow up. And when you’re in college you get to think about what you really might be. You have no idea, because the types of things you pretended to be when you were 10 are no longer viable options.

So you sort of float into what makes sense. Your dad knows a guy, who knows about a job. Need to have a passion for “land use,” whatever that means. But this guys seems alright. He’s a grown up who has things figured out.  So you give it a shot and you like it. You’re actually pretty good at it and you have a passion for it. You see how people in this business make a positive contribution to the world. The best of them are perceptive about how buildings, streets and parks impact people’s lives, and they use their creativity to come up with viable solutions to real problems. So you run with that.

But the urban planners and architects are not their own masters. The people who control the money – those are the masters. The developers! But when you really dig in, it’s the private equity funds, and the banks, and the high net worth individuals who really control the money. So you play to the test. You don’t want to be at the mercy of some  other master – you want to be the master. If you control the money, you can do all these cool and interesting things that naive planners just dream about. So that’s what you do.

And here you are. On your way. But controlling  some money doesn’t necessarily make you anyone’s master. It doesn’t mean you control anything. It more likely means that the money controls you.

So if you’re having to do these boring mundane things and put up with this bullshit, well in that case you might as well get PAID. And a part of you hopes they say no. But you’re fucking good at this, and they need you. And they’re making money hand over goddamned fist, so ask for the stars and take the moon as a consolation prize.

But still. A part of you hopes they say no. Because that will make it easier. It’s justifiable to all those people to whom you feel you need to justify things (you being at the top of the list): I left because they weren’t prepared to give me an equity stake. So I might as well pursue projects where I can get that on my own.

And the reason you feel that way, the reason that you don’t just fully hope with 100% of your being that they give you a meaningful equity stake so you can continue to help build the company and do quite well for yourself in the process, is because you are righteous. You want to do good in the world, while doing well. And you have some fuzzy idea in your head, reinforced through what people write in Urban Land magazine and what they say at conferences, about the “double bottom line” and the “triple bottom line” and “doing well while doing good,” and blah blah  blah. But in your experience at companies led by people who say these types of things, it’s all basically bullshit. At the end of the day it’s money that makes the whole machine go. Making a decision that maybe isn’t that great for the environment or for human beings won’t cost you. But making a decision that isn’t good for the real bottom line is not fucking acceptable.

So they’re all still pretending. And rather than scoff at that, why not just admit that it’s a perfectly valid coping mechanism. In the same way that you wouldn’t ask a child in the midst of pretending he’s hitting the game winning shot for the Chicago Bulls in game 7 of the NBA finals that they’re just a four foot tall white kid on a driveway in Van Nuys, and go inside and do something useful rather than just pretend, why tell all of these people that they should stop pretending they give a shit about the environment and social equity and city building? The pretending very well may be what keeps us going. And isn’t it better than being a cynic?