dsanz said:
Just a couple of thoughts: Do what you love, not what will give you money.
It's really rather complicated. One problem is that doing what you love often involves spending money. Another problem is that it's not either/or. I'd accept a massive salary cut to do astrophysics, but I wouldn't starve or live in a cardboard box to do it.
The number 1 resent of old people is that they didn't do what they wanted in their lives, and rather did what they thought was EXPECTED from them, which a lot of times means doing what gets you money.
It really depends on the old person that you talk to. With one exception, the old people that I know don't have that particular resentment. The older people that are important in my life are either teachers or family people, and as long as the grandkids turned out alright, they did what they wanted to do.
One thing that is interesting is that a lot of the older males in my social circle basically spent their lives in the office making money for the kids, and none of them have any particular regrets in doing things that way. The women tended either to be housewives or took jobs like nurses and elementary school teachers, and they don't seem to have many regrets about career.
The other thing is that family expectations are different from family to family. In my family, I was expected to get a Ph.D. Now once I got the Ph.D., then that was it. Declare victory and do something else.
- You will probably invest over a third of your life on your work, so you'd better enjoy it. Otherwise, you will really live miserably.
Then again, it's called work. If it was "not work" then people wouldn't have to pay people to do it. Again there are trade-offs here.
- If this is not enough, talk to people. I have heard it from friends, family, etc... that choosing your job for money alone is a HUGE mistake.
Not so simple.
One thing about money is that it's never just about money. Money means different things to different people. For me, it's security. If your country falls apart, and you have gold coins somewhere, you can buy your way out. Also this is why education is important. They can point a gun at you and make you give up your coins, but short of shooting you (which can happen), they can't make you give up your education, and part of being smart is to figure out when to act stupid when the people with guns come out, and if you get shot, then you can make sure that someone gets out.
This might seem extreme, but it's part of my background and it's also part of the background of a lot of people that have studied physics.
One other problem is the "show me the money" problem. Doing something for cash isn't necessarily a bad thing, but a surprisingly large number of people are willing to do something for the *promise* of cash. It stinks if that cash never arrives.
how much you enjoy your job is light years more important than how much you make.
The older people that I know would find this conversation weird. They were so concerned about simple physical survival (i.e. how not to get shot by the Japanese, the warlords, and/or either side of the Chinese civil war and how not to literally starve to death) that the fact that we are talking about love versus money is odd to them.
But that's what they were fighting for so the fact that the grandkids even have a choice is maybe why they didn't seem to have regrets.
