I was sitting in a 1:1 meeting with one of my direct reports last week, and she was expressing her frustration that she only received a three percent pay increase this year. She says that given her long tenure with the company (almost four years, and that’s a long time at a tech startup that’s only been around for five years), she’s disappointed that her pay increase is so small, and that she really should be earning more. “I cannot be turning 31 this year and only getting a $100,000 base salary,” she said to me. “That’s just not enough.” That’s just her base salary and doesn’t include her fairly large bonus.

I told her that I empathized with her situation, but that she would have future opportunities to show her value with new accounts coming down the pipe. At that point, we could try to pitch a raise for her.

That was my empathetic, managerial side speaking. My me-and-I-am-being-real side was trying very hard to not say anything judgmental about this generation’s sense of entitlement and obsession with earning too much money for one’s age. When did a $100K base salary suddenly become small or “not enough”? When I was in my early twenties, as I’m sure most of us working in digital media do, I made an internal goal in my head to hit that coveted six-figure salary by age 30…. as in, total compensation package. Well, I got there a few years before age 30, but to be honest, it was a really underwhelming feeling. We romanticize these situations in our heads and think that these moments will be amazing or pivotal in some way, and then when they finally come, it’s not so incredible anymore. It feels like, “Oh, I got it? Okay, great. Next?” But I don’t mean that as in a “Oh, that was a small, measly sum after all.” Instead, I mean it as “Okay, awesome. Next goal to accomplish!”

But I would never say any of these things out loud — to my managers, to my friends, even to my then boyfriends. Money is important, and we need to survive, but there comes a point where more money really isn’t going to make you more happy. And that’s the exact situation with this report, but she isn’t aware of it yet.