I must say that I do wrestle with the amount of money I make, but at the end of the day what am I gonna say? I took less money so Rupert Murdoch could have more?

Accept your success without the guilt

There's something refreshingly honest about admitting you're uncomfortable with your own success without pretending you should turn it down. Most of us are caught in this exact tension: we want to feel good about what we earn, but we also sense something off about inequality, so we shuffle between guilt and justification. Hanks cuts through that by naming the absurdity of the alternative. Refusing your paycheck doesn't redistribute wealth to the deserving—it just shuffles money between the already-wealthy.

This matters because it lets us off a psychological hook we often get stuck on. You don't need to feel like a sellout for being well-compensated, and you don't need to perform poverty to prove your values. The real question isn't whether you "deserve" your salary, but what you do with the resources you actually have. A teacher earning $60,000 isn't responsible for CEO pay ratios. A successful actor taking a reasonable deal isn't morally obligated to leave money on the table as performative humility.

Where it gets complicated is recognizing this doesn't eliminate actual inequality—it just acknowledges that individual restraint rarely fixes structural problems. The useful move is accepting your piece without the guilt, then deciding separately what responsibility, if any, you want to take toward larger fairness.