Hi Linda, 

I've done a variety of things. Check my profile but they all seem to involve selling or imparting information. My motivation was always to understand the world: "Searching for the truth in what for him is a totally quantifiable universe" as my old headmaster, who loved the Doctor Angelicus, St. Thomas Aquinas,  put it, with some annoyance. He didn't quite get the last bit right. Some things are a little tricky to define quantifiably. I don't enjoy selling information. It is imposed upon me by the structure of this capitalist world. Information ought to be free is the sentiment. Why should I profit from others ignorance? I enjoy what I am in the process of not enjoying I am, which is to say, undermining myself and being at war within, in order to challenge what I am. For who will else with do that for me with such insight and power? I would not labour away at something I could not stand, that would make little sense and one feels sorry for those who have to; they have my every sympathy. I sense and share, your frustration with those who who not care. Your words bend, and verge on poetry towards the end. Who lives with an ear for that in life? Not priests or clergymen, five at my school were indicted or charged with you know what. People are individuals first and their jobs last, I never ask a person their job. I listen and watch their flow and manner. Who would have guessed that Wallace Stevens, the lawyer for an insurance company was a world class poet or that T.S. Eliot was a banker? We are also defined by our avocation as vocation. If anyone else answers might they include that too. 

Hi Martin,
Don't sell yourself short about selling information.  That's what all teachers do.  It's the manner of the buying, selling, trading that counts.  If you're selling falsehoods to fuel your penchant for high-living, you're nothing more than a snake oil salesman. But if you're casting your info onto the buyer because you've studied and researched and found it to be true and useful--well, then you're participating in a mutually enriching exchange.  The information is as valuable as the money you're receiving for it and the money enables you to eat and clothe and shelter yourself--and to do more research and study for the benefit of others. Bravo!
Don't separate the human from the work they do.  The work we do becomes part of us--we learn from it and if we're doing it because we love it it makes us more human.  If we do it as part of a mutually enriching exchange--you know, passing things across a semipermeable membrane--we become part of the whole--Bravo again.
And everyone is a teacher.  We teach the people we're involved with and they teach (inform) us. 
We have to try to keep our actions and interactions with the world useful and elevating--God, that sounds so high-minded and boring!  But, yes, go for it! 
As long as we have to interact with the world around us we have to try to encourage and teach and liberate by our example. 
And now I have to stop before I start quoting Aesop...

Oh you like me, you really like me!? To quote Sally Field. Almost took me to heart and task by the looks. Ant and the Grasshopper was it going to be? Reminds me of The Ondt and the Gracehoper in Finnegans. Of course there is value in work, it makes us human, teaching and compassion and honesty and perseverance and many other things. But that is in this world and sometimes I prefer to be not of it. And I am a secular man. It is easy to forget some of what is valuable in the real when the other foot is in the ideal; what there ever was or will be. There is beauty in the clouds and they are usually above the world. I distrust the classical, it is a part of what we were, but not the whole. Nothing reflects all of us; a work in progress. What are men and women, is there a thing as personality? Or does it depend on circumstances? 

Some of the things one sells as information are available to all, existing only because of a lack of imagination so you feel the unfairness all the more.

I did want to say that a person is not their job, people make that mistake now but you drag me back to earth, I thank you for that and also for your passion. It would be nice to be married to you! And I do not always talk like this, it is just to entertain!

love,

Martin