Time is more valuable than money, which is exactly why I incredibly mercenary about getting paid and paid well. Getting paid well allows me to do the things I enjoy and more importantly means I can afford to work less hours.

The reality is that while money might not equal happiness, it certainly helps.

I'd rather be in a position where I want to work more hours not less. (it means I like my job) Getting paid well is a wonderful thing to have and no doubt helps in achieving happiness. The problem isn't money, but the mentality in forcing yourself to do something you don't care about for the sake of money. Most often this is seen as an investment to obtain free time in the future to pursue the things you really enjoy. That investment also costs time and there is no guarantee that you will get free time even when you're financially secure. Also, passionate momentum tends to die down if it is not acted upon soon. I say if you want to do something, then just go do it because there's no better time than the present. Perhaps some will still hold back because of a true lack of resources, but thankfully today you don't need much to get started in things like programming or game development. A cheap computer and some open source tools will suffice--the rest is up to you.

Time is more valuable than money, which is exactly why I incredibly mercenary about getting paid and paid well. Getting paid well allows me to do the things I enjoy and more importantly means I can afford to work less hours.

The reality is that while money might not equal happiness, it certainly helps.

I don't think anyone's disputing that. But if you end up spending a significant proportion of your life doing something you hate, just to get slightly more money, I'm not convinced that well leave you better off in the happiness stakes.

Everyone's situation, and the choices of jobs they have, are different - so advice of "only do whatever job pays most" as the only criterion is unlikely to be useful for most people.

Plus most jobs don't give you freedom to choose how many hours you work - indeed, many higher paying jobs also come with higher demands on time, at least that's the impression I get from friends who work in banking...

[color="#1C2837"]Here's what I suggest. Don't[color="#1C2837"]

try to get

a job[color="#1C2837"]

doing something you enjoy. If you want to do something that you enjoy as your career, start a business. But if you're going to work for someone else, do something that will

pay you the most money[color="#1C2837"]

. Because all doing the thing you love for someone else is going to do is teach you to hate the thing you love.[/quote]

[color="#1C2837"]

To paraphrase Tom Sloper, if you say that a job will always drain the fun out of something you love, you probably haven't had a job you truly enjoyed.

There are some interesting posts in here so far, such as the tendency to want to work more hours if you enjoy the job. But you still want to keep a balance between your work life and social/family life. I would not like to work at a place where there is barely any social interaction between employees. Doing something you really hate/working at a place you hate just leads to more friction between your higher-ups and more likely to lose your motivation at work, thus increasing your chances of incompetence.

To have that mentality to force yourself to work, going through the motions, and not treating it as a transitional job, you have to have a pretty bleak outlook on your career. "Do whatever pays most" has only managed to put a lot more people into jobs they don't really have a feel for, therefore unnecessarily inflating competition in various fields. That kind of philosophy has already been the case for a lot of outsourced programmers in third world countries.

I want to explain a little better what I meant, because it seems it's getting extrapolated in the wrong way.

First and foremost, I want all of you to be happy. Happy people commit fewer crimes. The problem is that the story that we've all been told on how to achieve that happiness by our governments, the corporations, and the institutional education system is a crock of shit: 1) get a degree in whatever you love, going in to as much debt as necessary, because that degree is going to open doors for you, 2) get a job in your degree, 3) profit. There are so many problems with this recipe that it needs the southparkian (did I just coin a term) "???" step at least two times in the middle.

I mean, what does a teenager know about what they want to do with their life? We as a society push kids to go to college right after highschool, asking them to make a life-changing decision with a brain incapable of making rational decisions yet and a complete lack of life experiences to apply to the issue. When I was a teenager, I wanted to study fine art; I got accepted to college for it. What the hell was I thinking? I wasn't an artist, artists say things, they make things with meaning, I just liked making pretty pictures. Luckily I was able figure out early on that A) nobody was going to buy art if they didn't care about what it said, and B) nobody was going to care about anything I had to say because I wasn't a Bolshevik in American Eagle. So I transferred to Computer Engineering within my first month. I liked computers, had played around with some programming in highschool, thought the idea of 3D animation sounded cool, and took the rest of the semester to learn that "computer engineering" wasn't "programming". I eventually transferred to Computer Science, which may not have been the best choice for what I'm talking about, but the general gist was there.

I left college with significantly less debt than most people, but a hell of a lot more than I cared for. When you have that kind of debt (and student loans aren't forgivable by bankruptcy proceedings), you don't have a lot of options but to... go further in debt: get a job right away and buy a car to get there. But fast forward 7 years later and I'm now debt free. No student loans, no car, no credit cards, nothing. I'm now working for an extremely small company in the wireless automation space. We have free beer (kegged! Victory Brewing Company!) in the break room. I make 25% less here than my last place. But it took that time at jobs that I hated making more than most of my peers to get to this place. Now, maybe I can save up some money and think about being an artist again, because now that I'm older, I've figured out a few things I want to say.

If I had to do it over again, I would want to know that I would hate working for other people. I have some rather strong anti-authority issues, which is probably from my non-traditional upbringing. I'm like a cat, the worst way to handle me is to squeeze me harder, but the standard way to "manage" an employee who comes in late is to make him come in earlier. And then they wonder why I come in even later... but regardless, it's meant that I've never had an easy time once employed. The only reason I've ever been paid well was because I've delivered the goods despite my "attitude problems" and "persistent tardiness" and "insubordination".

That's what I'm talking about "do the thing that pays you the most". I don't mean forever, I mean until you can get out of the debt cycle. The promotion of the debt cycle by the "institution" is intentional, it keeps people working and ostensibly keeps the economy going around (I'm neither convinced that is true or convinced that it is necessary to grow economies indefinitely). The highschool where I grew up had a motto that they displayed in their administrative office, "we are not here to educate people, we are here to build good consumers and patriotic citizens". The goal is not to give people the tools they need to navigate life themselves, the goal is to mold them in to being cogs within the system, fitting neatly together in lines to march to and fro. If I had understood the debt cycle before I graduated from college, I would have probably stayed in computer engineering and worked in a much smaller job market and probably made more money. I do like programming, I do like working with technology, I just hate being "managed". If I had done that, maybe I would have been out of debt 3 or 4 years earlier. If I really had the stomach for work, I would have gotten in to finance and been debt-free almost right away. But you live and learn.

So I don't understand these people who are going to Brown and Columbia and Stanford and getting bachelor's degrees in Psychology to go in to social work. And I'm talking Bachelor of Arts, not Bachelor of Science, so it's not like they're going to eventually get in to a doctorate program and become a clinical psychologist. I understand wanting to get in to social work, I don't understand going in to massive debt to do it, debt they have no hope of ever paying off. If social work really is the thing you want to do (and more power to you if so), then it would be much, much more prudent to go in to something like finance for five years, make a load of money, and then get in to social work. First of all, you're going to be older and wiser, get all of your irresponsible partying out of the way (well, the only thing that changed with me getting older was being able to afford better booze and being able to plan the night better, so maybe not), so you will appreciate the studies and absorb them better. Second of all, you won't be tied down to "the man" or setting up a tent in the middle of the streets of New York City because you're upset you couldn't afford to go to Burning Man this year.

So here is my proposed alternative career happiness recipe:
1) stay out of debt,
2a) get a job that pays relatively well, something like bartending in a big city (I have friends here in Philly who make $60k/yr bartending, but you have to take it seriously, you won't do that being a jerk-off working in a dive), or dealing black jack in Las Vegas, or
2b) or start a business in a creative field. Your expenses won't be very high and it won't matter if the business fails, because you didn't make the mistake of using your own money to get it going (right? RIGHT?). Hell, failure in business, especially in creative fields, is expected. You just dust yourself off, find some new investors, and try again.
3) enjoy some money (HEED #1!) You have to live life to know what you want out of it. Eat. Drink. Travel. Do all three at the same time.
4) save some money. Also, buy some dividend-paying stocks. As much as you can.
5) when you've saved enough and lived enough to know what you want, then maybe go to college to study what you really want. But only use it for credentialing, not for learning. College is the worst place to learn because it's only 4 years of your life. The rest of your life is a lot longer, so you had better figure out how to learn outside of college. Ask yourself what you really need. If you need the degree, then go to college. If you need the knowledge but the piece of paper doesn't matter, then skip college and open up Wikipedia.org, there is a bibliography there for what you want to study that will get you started on learning everything there is to know about that topic far quicker than college can ever do for you.

And your track is pretty much decided from there, depending on your degree. You can't start your own business as a social worker, you're kind of stuck working for an agency of some kind. You can't really get a job as a fine-artist, you're kind of stuck freelancing.

Well indeed, with fees so high in the US, and the poor job prospects, there's some argument that one should do something other than a degree. But note that's separate to the debate of money versus enjoyment in a job. For some people, getting a degree still provides a way for better money, even if they don't enjoy it. For people not doing a degree, they might still rather pick something they enjoy - I wouldn't recommend bartending to someone who hated it.

I'm not convinced setting up a business to make a money without losing any of it is easy, otherwise everyone would do it. You need investment - which surely is harder right now, just as finding a job is harder?

I'm often a great believer in Wikipedia, but I'm not convinced that looking things up online would have replaced the lectures, tuition and supervisions of my maths degree. I mean yes, it's good to know how to learn outside of college too, but then how far do we take it - should we not bother with school either?

Personally, I find that too much comfort becomes an obstacle to personal progress. I hear this all the time: "My plans are to obtain a career doing X but I will only stay at this temporary job until condition Y occurs." Y could be until I'm debt free, until I finish my degree, until I get married, until I take a course in Z, etc... Then what ends up happening is that the person meets their condition yet they still put it off because they get used to the nice paychecks that are paying the bills and providing the extra cash for doing things like go on vacations, buy nice toys, etc... Before they know it, they've been working there for many years so they now have promotions, benefits, extra-pay, etc... and it starts to bother them to change to something else because they will lose out on retirement plans and benefits. They can't imagine starting all over again and taking a big pay cut even though it's more in line with what they enjoy. So what do they do? They put it off again until retirement. Of course, by the time they retire it's too late--they either don't care anymore or they don't have the years or the energy to see it get done.

I believe people get trapped doing something they don't like because their jobs provide too much comfort. If they would've starved a little or lived in some vermin infested apartments I bet change would have been much easier. After all, when you're in that situation you don't have much too lose and everything to gain so you're willing to take more risk and attempt things that are more in line with what you like--it becomes your only source of happiness.

Incidentally, this is much easier to do when you don't have a family. If you have a family, then your passion ought to be your family not your career--in this case, taking a higher paying job may be the best choice if it means that your kids won't suffer. The main issue is that humans are creatures of comfort so once we develop a pattern of living that meets our daily needs and provides some measure of happiness, it takes a lot of effort to change to something else especially when we consider that nothing in life is ever guaranteed.