OK… I downgrade mine to “low paying”, then 
My job is not especially high-paying. It pays my bills, it wouldn’t allow for any frills if my living situation were different and I had to pay a high rent/mortgage. (I live with my widowed mother and we split household costs.) But I love what I do, and more importantly, I’m not a cog in a corporate machine. I actually provide human service in my work, and that’s what keeps me going. Money isn’t everything, and even a medium-paying job where my sole purpose was to generate profit for a corporation would not be worthwhile to me.
Definitely the low paying job that I love. I’m sort of there right now – at the moment, I’m making great money for a single dude straight out of college, and I have my ideal position with the ideal boss.
Still, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that much money, and if I keep at it for a while I won’t ever be making a lot more. Supporting a family on just my salary, even in the future where I get all the possible pay raises, will be tight.
I’ve only had high paying jobs I hate and low paying jobs I hated just as much. I’l go with the money. How low paying are we talking about anyway? And how much hate?
Middle-paying is, to me, a pretty wide range–anything where you can live on your own (without a roommate) and have decent health-insurance is middle-paying. And it doesn’t start being “high paying” until six figures, and possibly more in really expensive areas.
Lower paying job I love wins.
Love and pay are measured in different units, and love is pretty hard to measure rigorously, so the comparison isn’t well defined.
But the gist of it, I think, is that there is to little time left after you do the job and do the other necessary things in life. It doesn’t work if you try to get enjoyment into this crowded timespace to an extent that makes life satisfying, even if you have more money at your disposal to help.
Higher pay any old day.
Eventually I’ll get to the point where I need to move on and find a job that pays better and offers benefits. I know I can’t go on forever at my current place of employment, so I try to enjoy it while it lasts. I’m glad to see that there are so many other people who agree that money isn’t everything. The fact that I enjoy my job carries over into my personal life, which is definitely a great thing.
When I was in the Navy, I taught chemistry and physics for seven years. It was the best job I ever had. At least I think it was. I have a tendency to be nostalgic about things, remembering the good, and forgetting the bad.
At the same time that I was teaching, I also went to school at night, and got a master’s degree in engineering. Upon getting out of the Navy, I looked for work as an engineer because:
[ol]
[li]I had just worked for 6+ years getting the master’s degree.[/li][li]An engineer gets paid much more than a teacher, and at the time, I was the sole breadwinner in the family.[/li][/ol]
Now, seven years after leaving the Navy and teaching, I recall my time teaching with a great deal more fondness than my current job (which I don’t hate, but find rather boring at times).
On the other hand, there’s nothing to say that I would like the high school environment as much as that of a military academy environment.
I sometimes think about teaching in the future, when I retire, if possible. I kept all of my teaching materials (notes, exams, quizzes, etc.), both electronically and hard copy, in case I ever got the opportunity to teach chemistry or physics again.
That is exactly right. Being miserable for 8-9 hours a day beats being miserable 24 hours a day because you are scared of losing the house, don’t have enough money to go to the doctor, can’t make needed repairs, have collection agencies calling… I would rather have a lower paying job that I could comfortably live doing over a job I hate. I would rather have a high paying job I hate over poverty. At the poverty level you are just one of life’s hiccups away from total disaster.
I’d live as frugally as possible on the hated high-paying job for several years, then seek out something I really wanted to do.
I used to have a not-bad-paying job that had good benefits and that I could have lived with 'til retirement, but the plant closed and I ended up with 2 low-paying jobs that annoy the hell out of me.
I’d love just one job if it paid better than the two others combined. I’m 58 and a high-paid job I hated would only have to be tolerated for another 4 years.
I can’t imagine there’s a job I would enjoy. Anytime someone gives me money to do something, the pressure’s on. It’s my own fault, I guess, but if I was stocking shelves I’d feel pressure to do it faster and neater than the next guy, and also find a way to streamline the whole operation.
So as long as I’m going to be miserable, I might as well make some money.
I can’t imagine any job, or even any activity, that would be enjoyable for the 2,000 hours per year (plus commuting) necessary to make a living. That’s too much time to be dedicated to any one activity.
So, since work is going to be unpleasant, regardless of the nature of the job, I want the money.
If I got paid 5 times as much per hour for a job that sucked, but I could work for one day a week and make the same money I do now, I would do that.
If it had to be full-time, I’m not sure. It depends how low ‘low’ is. I make a little over 40k a year, which is pretty good money for a small to middlin’ city in the midwest. I wouldn’t leave it to earn 80k a year for a job that I really hate, but I don’t think I’d leave it for a 20k a year job that I liked a lot more either.
Reasonable pay for a job I can tolerate.