Down one, you pursue What You Really Wanted To Do With Your Life. You’ll be putting in long hours, working hard, and having years of feast and years of famine. However, the work itself is incredibly fulfilling to you, and eventually you’ll be at least moderately successful at it.
Down another, you get a drone job. You might be working civil service, or in a factory - but in any case, while the work is necessary and not particularly difficult, it’s not exciting or fulfilling at all. You go in, work your 9 to 5, and go home. What it is is stable - you’ll be working at one place through retirement, with steady benefits, regularly scheduled raises, pension, etc. You won’t ever have to worry where your next paycheck is coming from.
At the end of things, both will wind up paying you about the same amount over the course of your life.
I think the importance of enjoying “fulfillment” at one’s job is highly, highly, HIGHLY overrated. Having been through more than one “fulfilling” job that left me with variations on: poverty, panic attacks, and permanent chronic injuries, I’ll take my dull gubmint job thankyouverymuch.
Assuming both are steadily remunerative, I’ll take chaotic every time. I had a steady and boring job for several years while my kids were young and was ready to tear my hear out.
My full-time job is an editor, and I volunteer as an EMT. I assure you that I get more fulfillment from saving lives than from fixing the footers in a document. But I like being able to count on having my nights and weekends free, and choosing the hours that I volunteer.
I figure you can get plenty of fulfillment out of life without making it into your full-time (or, in the OP’s scenario, more than full-time) job.
While I would never have thought of “functional consultant” as What I Want To Do With My Life, it’s what I do, it’s quite the rollercoaster and I love most of it; the instances I don’t love are linked to bad people rather than to the nature of the job.
My mother refers to me as “the industrial artist”. While I often work out of factories, and always for a company’s industrial or maintenance end:
I work through agents,
when I don’t work I don’t make any money (and must still pay Social Security), but when I work I make a lot,
when I don’t have a job I’m “considering new projects” and “analyzing possible offers”.
In fact, the main difference between me and those folks who do their taxes under the “sportspeople and artists” model is that my field hadn’t been invented when that law was written. This is something which totally cracks me up, because when I was in middle school and my classmates talked about wanting to be movie stars my reaction was “ugh, no, you never know when your next paycheck is coming!” Now the ones who talked like that are pharmacists or city hall workers and for me it’s normal to not know when my next e-payment is coming.
“Incredible fulfillment” is too vague for me to vote one way or the other. If it means “you enjoy it so much that you’d do it for free using all of your spare time”, of course I’d go for that! If it means “you feel good about it, but you wouldn’t do it for free”, I probably wouldn’t. If it’s somewhere in between, I don’t know.
I’ll take steady and boring. I don’t (currently) seek fulfillment through my work. If I don’t need to worry about my next paycheck, don’t need to worry about working random overtimes and can have a relatively stress-free work life, I’ll have the time and money to seek fulfillment during nights, weekends, vacations and retirement. And I’m fine with that.
I love to solve new problems. I’d go stark raving bonkers in a boring job. In fact if I had one I’d probably immediately start changing things around and make a total nuisance of myself.
I’ve had plenty of chaotic jobs that at the time I thought I enjoyed and found fulfilling, but once I had procured a steady, boring job, I realized how unhappy I was before.
Turns out that what I find most fulfilling about work is working normal hours and getting paid a predictable amount on a pre-set schedule in a laid-back, pressure-free environment. Who cares that it’s boring?
I voted for steady. I’ve got plenty of interests outside work (mostly writing fiction and gaming) that fulfill me just fine. I’d prefer a job where I can know when I need to get there and when I can get home (though I would prefer 7-3 rather than 9-5).
My current job is kind of a hybrid of the two. Usually pretty steady and boring (but enjoyable), occasionally hectic, and mostly just pleasant and predictable, with enough opportunity to use my brain that it’s not a drone job. I like it.
I love my family and being able to count on being there for soccer games, romantic dinners and family vacations means more to me than any job, no matter how fulfilling.
