Sunder

This may be a contentious thing to post, as my view appears to be similar, but in some ways counter to many of the things I see posted here. At 24, I think there's at least two things overlapping, with confounding factors. One is hormones. The obvious and easy answer, but not complete. But I also think there is a deeper need based on Maslow's heirarchy of needs. Being taught about this in my 20s really changed my life. I did a course in mentoring and counselling troubled youth with a charity, and this was taught then. If you're not familiar with it, it's a theory that first you need to meet your needs in a heirarchy, before being able to seek your next level needs. The heirarchy is: Physiological, safety, love/acceptance, esteem, self-actualisation. I've learned in my life, that the level on your heirarchy isn't one way. It goes back and forth. At 21, my esteem needs were met by being a good junior employee, by 23, that wasn't enough, I wanted to self actualise, and my esteem wouldn't be met unless I was recognised as a senior employee. Likewise at 21, I was happy to casually date, or not date. My acceptance needs were met with a mix of male and female platonic friends. By 25, as friends were getting married, I started to wonder what was wrong with me. Both my esteem and my sense of acceptance had taken a hit. Of course, starting to feel unloved, I questioned my esteem. Do women not love me, because I have nothing of worth? I tried a lot of things that I thought women wanted - Being the funny man, being the tough guy, being the rich man. At the time, all of these were personas, they were fake, but all of them taught me skills that the real me uses when appropriate (like using humor at work to get teams working together), so I don't regret it. But I was trying to build my esteem, before I had a solid base of love and acceptance for who I already was. It didn't work. And here's the thing I think is contentious. I think many modern relationships are a fake fulfillment of the love/acceptance level. If I can take the analogy, trying to build esteem with the way modern dating works, is like trying to find belonging and love when you are still living in a halfway house. Sure, the need for safety is met for tonight. But tomorrow? You haven't fully met your need for safety. This is the Tinder generation. My dad was my mum's first boyfriend, though my mum, was my dad's second. I dated about 5 women before I got married. (I'm 41) My younger co-workers? I ask them how the girlfriend is - Half of them have a different one each time I ask. Relationships rarely last more than 3 months, so you've done well to do 10. At my parents generation, sex before marriage was taboo. In mine, teen girl magazines were advising to get to know him at least 3 months. Now, the advice column is that if it hasn't happened by the 3rd date, move on. I believe this puts unrealistic pressure, and a false sense of love into relationships. So - my sense is that with modern relationships, it's difficult to build a true fulfillment of love and acceptance. At the extreme end, for dating apps, your "esteem" is repeatedly judged on nothing more than a photo and a few words. It's a lose/lose situation. Swiping left and not matching is a rejection. Swiping right isn't love or acceptance. At best, it's "I'd like to give this guy a go". But the flip side is the dating pool appears to be unlimited. You used to meet friends from school, from work, from church, or from clubs and pubs - all of them are fairly limited groups of people. In those situations, you get to know a person more before asking them out, or rejecting them. and even if you end up "rejecting" someone, it's not necessarily a loss of acceptance. We're in an age now when "Friendzoned" is an insult, but in my dating era, there were girls that were just friends you never thought of asking out, and there were girls you were keen on. You could totally feel befriended, accepted - yes, even loved non-romantically by women, even if nobody dated you. It was reinforcement that you were a decent man, you could be accepted, and you just hadn't found the right one. This is my opinion only, but I feel sorry for anyone who is not superficially attractive (Looks, money, power, charismatic), in today's dating scene, because it's fundamentally broken, but it's telling everyone who is not in the top 10% by however you judge, that it's YOU that's broken, and that's very sad to me. This is why I meet so many people - especially men - who say they don't want to get married, or aren't sure. Not even sure how it benefits them, or what they could offer a life partner, yet their behaviour is misaligned with their words. They have real needs - both physical, and emotional, that they deep down, want fulfilled, but physical needs are met with porn, and they don't realise they're drinking salt water, expecting it to quench their thirst, but finding it only makes them thirstier, and eventually say "No thanks, I don't want any more water, I'm not actually even sure I get thirsty any more". It's the game that's broken, not the players, but the game makes the players think they're the ones that's broken. My advice to you OP - Get your love and acceptance needs met elsewhere first. Male first, if you don't already have 3 or more good mates that you know have your back, then female platonic, when you are ready. Choose female friends whom you enjoy their company, but don't find them physically attractive, and make it clear you're not pursuing them romantically. Get to know personalities you like and don't like, get to know how your personality attracts, or grates against women, find out what you're willing to change, and what you're not. Then, when you feel confident that you have a solid group of friends meeting your love and acceptance needs, start dating again.

@girzo, Why is that unfair? If someone produces 10x value for a company, shouldn't he receive 10x the wage? Why do I care if he spent 4, 40, or 140 hours to achieve that outcome?

You could also think of it from a different perspective. You are a business owner that wants to make widgets to sell. You have the option of hiring one of three people: 1. A local worker that can build 10 widgets a day for a salary of $100 a day. ($10 per widget) 2. An engineer, that can build and maintain a machine to build 100 widgets for $500 a day. ($5 per widget) 3. An international business manager, that will negotiate and manage a supply chain, that will allow you to import 1000 widgets for $1000 a day. ($1 per widget). Assuming you could sell all the widgets you make, who would you hire? You don't get to set their price, the market does. If the manager or engineer doesn't get his demanded salary, he works for your competitor instead. Would you really demand that the international business manager work for $300-500 a day, tops, otherwise you'd hire the local widget maker?

This may be a strange first post, but I am still passively working through threads in this forum, and this one caught my attention. The reason? I work with a lot of new graduates - Mostly 21 years old and up, but your post struck a chord with me. Almost exclusively, every graduate I have worked with, has wanted $100k AUD (58k GBP), within 2 years of starting with us. That's not as ridiculous as it sounds, both for the typical wages in Australia, and the nature of the industry I am in. (Infosec), but it's also not a realistic expectation for all of them. The problem is, some of these guys that have been here 2 years, are actually outperforming 20 year industry veterans, and some are barely better than the day I took them on, but the demands are almost inverse to capability. If you've ever heard of the Dunning Kruger effect, you might know what I am talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect My advice to you, after 12 years of mentoring graduates, is that there's no guaranteed ways of getting a pay rise. Even if I wanted to give a person a decent pay rise, I'm limited by my budget too. There have been times where I have had to tell my highest performers, "Take my advice, take your time, find the perfect position for you - I'll even help you - but I feel like you're wasting your potential here, and while the company will suffer for losing you, I don't want to hold you back". That's the reality. That said, there are good and bad ways to both think, and negotiate. Here are some tactics you can use: 1. Thinking - Jobs are either for learning, or earning. And it's never a one way trip. There are times where you will take a pay cut to improve your skills, or take on more responsibility, and not get rewarded for it. If you are either learning, or earning, you shouldn't care too much as long as you are paying the bills. If you're doing neither, it's time to change the situation. Also, don't think you finish learning once you grasp the basics. From an outside perspective, someone who has worked under supervision for 6 months, bills out at the same rate as someone who is a 10 year veteran. But what you can't see behind the scenes, is that the 6 month consultant has his work rigorously checked. This costs money. The 10 year consultant has so much of a reputation, a 10 minute phone call can lock him in for a month of work, where as a sales person might need to prospect and negotiate many times to get the same amount of work - again, that costs. So when the junior looks across at the senior, and wonders why he gets paid half of what the senior does, he sees no difference. He's doing 40 hours a week, the same kind of work, and getting paid half. From the business perspective, the senior is a lot more profitable. They both bring in the same money, but one costs $200k to bring in and deliver the work, and the other costs $300k to bring in and deliver the work. This might not be entirely applicable to a junior lab assistant, but hopefully you see the point. The work may be the same - but the processes behind it may cost the company a different sum of money. "Learning" can include the business side of your job, not just the technical. 2. Negotiating - There are many techniques and articles on this, but the one I find works best, is to work collaboratively, rather than see your boss as an authority figure you need to convince to give you what you want. Many advice books tell you that you can gather evidence of what the market is paying, show evidence that you have achieved great things beyond yourpay grade etc. That's all great if your manager has budget, and is only holding you back because s/he thinks you're not worth it yet. If he or she is not in that position, you can impress them all you like to no avail. The way I work, I tell my boss where I want to be: how much responsibility, willingness to take on targets, what skills I will learn by when, and tell him how much I would like to hit that. Alternatively, I tell him how much I would like to be on, and ask him what it would take to hit that goal. He wants my practice to be bringing in $4m a year? Sure, but I want a cut of the extra growth. I get 5% of everything over last year's target. He needs someone to build a new practice? I'll do it, but as soon as that practice is self sustaining, he's upping my base. For bosses who need to build business cases to get funding for pay rises, this really helps, especially if the pay rise or bonus is tied to measurable performance. He tells his boss that next year he's likely to need a bigger pot for salaries, but his own targets will go up with it. @OP - At 19, and only 3 months in the job, it's hard for any manager to get the feel of whether you are a consistent performer, let alone have learned the skills to make the company the money they need to justify a pay rise. Pay rises are easy to give, but very hard to take back, as is dismissing someone without proof of pretty serious misconduct. Put yourself in their shoes. Give them every reason to want to keep you, and a good boss will see your value when you make a reasoned case for a rise. If they don't, they might not be worth working for anyway. Some bosses really do just want to pay the absolute minimum, and keep their staff in the same position with no promotions or pay rises ever. Learn who they are, and move on quickly. Edit: By the way, you can see how you compare to the industry through sites like Payscale. While everyone would like to be at least "average", it would be unusual to find a new starter position above the bottom quartile (Bottom 0-25%) . So yes, you are probably underpaid, but not by a huge amount. 14.5k pound (sorry, my keyboard doesn't have that symbol) puts you just below the 10th percentile, indicating your employer is paying below market for a new starter. l