Here’s the deal. You know the Hollywood trope where you have to do that big presentation for your biggest client that will earn you the partnership and a lucrative salary at your dream job and it just happens to be during your daughter’s recital when your relationship with your wife and kids is already strained? Leaving you with the career / family choice.
Same sort of deal.
You can pick one aspect of your life to be “perfect”. The other will, however, suffer to the point of being nearly unbearable:
Family - You will have the perfect family life. Loving beautiful wife/husband. Ideal number of bright, awesome kids. The caveat is your job sucks. It’s tedious, stupid and mundane. Your boss is an asshole and your coworkers are jerks and idiots. There is no room for advancement…ever…and it provides you no joy. You make enough to get by, but things are tight. You dread going to work, but look forward to coming home at night to your family.
Career - You love your job. It pays VERY well and you not only look forward to going to work in the morning, you would spend 24 hours a day doing it if you could. Unfortunately your family life sucks. Your wife/husband is a self absorbed jerk and your kids are lazy spoiled idiots.
Enough money is great, more money has never seemed worth the cost to me. I could have doubled my salary on many occasions but I’m pretty sure I’d now be spending that money and by myself.
Fuck that shit.
I’ve seen too many unhappy career ladder climbers with painful divorces or empty lives. Just not worth the risk.
Dreading driving to work is a thousand times better than dreading the drive home.
That said, I think I am a fundamentally happy and reasonably resourceful person, so this sort of choice isn’t likely to arise: for a couple of years, sure, but I’d find a way to improve the job, improve my relationship to the job, or leave.
Also, It’s much easier, I think, to improve your work situation when you have a bedrock of a supportive, stress-free home life than it is to improve your family situation when you have a great job. To put it another way: a great family, by definition, functions as a cheerleading squad and pit crew for all the other parts of your life. A good job, on the other hand, pulls you out of all the other parts of your life and, at best, fails to support you in improving them, and at worst, allows you to neglect improving them because at least you have something wonderful to distract you.
