“When we started writing the show, I said to the writers, ‘In order to write, I think you need to have an idea in your head about what the purpose of life is. It doesn’t matter what idea you have, you just have to have one. So if you think life is a Darwinian struggle for survival, then at any given moment when you’re confused about what to write, you can say, ‘Well, if life is a Darwinian struggle for survival, then I guess this is what we should do.’

“‘But if you’re going to write on this show, you have to provisionally at least go along with what I believe, which is that the reason for living is to love and create. But then you look at the world and you realize that that’s not happening everywhere, is it? There must be a reason why. Why is it not happening? The reason it doesn’t happen is fear.

“People are essentially good, so they want to solve the problem of fear. So they go, ‘I know what I’ll do. I will make money. And if I make enough money, I will then feel safe enough to love and create, and it will immunize me against fear.’ But that’s an illusion, because the fear is too big and the money is never enough.

“The real answer is that people do not need money in order to love and create; they need purpose. So I said to the writers, ‘Armed with that four-pronged idea that love and creation are the positives, fear is the problem, money is the false answer and purpose is the real one, then at any given moment you know how to write a story on ‘Underemployed.’ Every episode, over and over again, is the story of people learning in various ways that the answer to the problems of our age is not money, it is purpose.”

--Craig Wright, playwright, and writer for “Six Feet Under,” “Brothers and Sisters,” and creator of “Dirty Sexy Money” and the new MTV show “Underemployed,” in Jim Walsh's MinnPost article “Craig Wright and MTV's 'Underemployed' Feel the Pain of Millennials”

On the way to see Craig Wright's “Orange Flower Water” at the New Century Theater in downtown Seattle, June 2009

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