I think the only people who truly love their job are athletes, and maybe some actors and rockstars and chefs and pilots (lol). The rest is all cope

No.


ideally I’d want to make fetish videos with bbws

Sometimes, yes.

When you'd been working for the same company for 35 years, it became a big part of your life, in both time and space.

Ha, no.

I used to enjoy what I do, but office politics, the need to do everything as cheap as possible instead of doing it well, the blame game on every project to see who will pay for the add service....after all that its not even worth getting to the fun part of actual design work.

Yes and I admit it's pure COPE.

I've been a car guy since birth really. Had toy cars and that all I played with and was obsessed with how they "ran". My toy tractor I knew had 8 cylinders and was a V8 because of how the engine was laid out and would show everyone and people were just like "WTF". Loved tools and anything with cars. Probably was annoying AF when my grandfather and uncle would try to do anything and I'd want to be involved. Knew the 5 start lug tightening pattern when I was 5 years old. The men weren't mechanics in my family.

I've been working on cars professionally since I was 19. I've tried doing other things, the only thing I did for a while was driving a truck, but got bored Now I'm a master tech, lead tech, diagnostic tech, shop foreman at a dealership and work a lot with the R&D department and engineering or at least that's my direction. However, I don't do anything automotive at home. Then it's all about my dogs. About the cope.... All I do is work, when I'm off I'm resting. A lot of hours.

Idk a lot of people I work with seem to enjoy it

Idk how though since it's boring being in an office all day I get no dopamine in here

I can say that certain aspects of it satisfy a small part of my need/want to be creative. However as the industry advances & evolves its included a lot of $hit that I flat out despise.

Yes my lifelong passion is to sit in my home office looking out the window at the world while answering an email that everyone will forget about 15 minutes after I send it.

not my passion, but i enjoy it a lot and its not a million miles away

I'm a software developer/software architect and i very much enjoy the process of solving problems and providing/modelling creative solutions. There's parts of the job that are tedious, but on the whole i enjoy it, work-life balance is amazing with great pay (i probably realistically work 25 hrs a week or so) and i work from home.

My 'passion' probably would be being a theoretical physicist, however the pay isn't any better than a software developer, it was impractical during my undergrad as i didn't really want to invest years in a PhD that still wouldn't guarantee me a job (there's quite a lot more postgrads than professorships), and in general being a software developer has a more lucrative career path. I still wonder occasionally if i should go back and attempt to do a PhD part time or something though but then it passes.

I do wonder though if it would lose some of it's allure if it was my job. It was certainly less interesting when i was actually studying it at university than it is now when i pursue it in my free time.

no, and im glad. let me tell you why. My passions are weightlifting, mountain biking and road cycling. Im also into cars and motorcycles, atvs ext. The job i have gives me a TON of freedom. i travel for work(technical outside sales), i make my own hours. I can hit the gym or go on a ride any time of day, as long as i am having successful meetings. The pay is such that i can afford to support all my hobbies ext.
If i were to quit and say, open my own bicycle shop, id end up making half the money, working twice as much and actually riding bikes and lifting weights even less.
I suppose it would be nice if i could do my same job in a field i have more interest in but they typical dont pay as well. I think its ok to work outside of your hobbies, it makes the hobbies more fun anyway.

havoc00, is that you?

My actual passion is eating chips and queso and stitching all day.

Unfortunately I am unable to perform this for a living wage

So no

No not really.

But I wake up 2 hours earlier than I need to, to work on it (writing). Wife thinks I’m kind of crazy but I do it Monday-Friday just like showing up for work.

Flying is my job and my passion. Doesn't matter if I'm flying the 747 or my little 4-seater Corvalis, being in the air is GOAT for me

Yes, and I know how fortunate that makes me since I spent the first ten or fifteen years of my adult life mostly working jobs that I didn't like.

wot u do m8?

No. Eventually, all jobs get boring over time if you do them every day.

You cannot find satisfaction in repetitiveness so even if your main job is your loving hobby you will eventually get bored of it and need a bit of rest from it.

Nope

Which is why I'm taking steps to create multiple streams of income that allow me to make a living part time or on my own time.

Special education teacher

I know I'm going to be prone to a lot of tropes and japes here, but I say do the PhD because you want to do it, because the experience if having created and contributed new knowledge is a magnificent end in and of itself.

It's a tough slog, and Im not going to lie, I felt on the verge of a nervous breakdown a few times during the years I was doing mine, but if you can support yourself whilst doing it, I say go for it, as long as you have something to fall back on. And I still don't have the degree yet either; it's still being read by my supervisor.


Post doctoral fellowships and salaries are quite generous where I'm from. You can start at 85-95k a year here. That is pretty damn good. I just got in touch with two different universities offering a dozen or so new fellowships starting in 6 months time. No shortage of work, even in a field as abstruse as mine. I''m sure you would do fine.


I don't know if you would consider coming to my neck of the woods though.

I enjoy what I do and the challenge and getting chit done

Been at it for almost a decade now though and am definitely trying to stockpile $$$ and knowledge so I can do more of my own thing, take on more risk and reap more reward while feeling like I'm contributing more value to society

Electrical engineer working in semiconductors. I'm sort of ambivalent.

On one hand, I like the problem solving. I like the underlying topic... I was building radios on my own in high school, and I'm sure I'd be involved in that hobby today if it didn't turn into my full time job. There's chit tons of money in it. I do feel blessed to be genuinely interested in something that also happens to earn a lot of money... feelbadman for the musician and actorbrahs whose passions don't earn chit.

On the other hand, I know what I'm building (chips for consoomer products designed to be thrown away) doesn't really make the world a better place. At least the chit I'm building is not actively evil (a brah I know from college now helps design the hardware for Amazon's Alexa spy-bots... wood quit before I helped Amazon bug people's houses), but it's just sort of disposable. There's little personal autonomy or control in the work, you're one cog in a 1000 person team. And the lack of sloots is absolutely soul killing.

Thanks for the input, and i have read about your PhD before, mirin srs.

My undergrad was physics, but i moved to a masters in Cs for career prospects. I still think about doing a PhD in physics most days honestly (and i graduated 10 years ago)... issue is i'm 10 years deep into my career and make very good money as a lead software developer (and even though it's not my passion, i do like my job). I know professorships do eventually offer good money, but they still are pretty much on par with what i make/can make now (although of course there's more to it than money, i'd take a pay cut to work in theoretical physics tbh), but there's obviously all the time investment upfront too (and i'm already 31 now), and i don't know if you know the situation in physics, but professorships are SUPER competitive and even a PhD only gives you a 50% or so chance of landing a professorship.. many physics PhD's end up doing something totally different. Lots of people doing physics undergrads ended up doing what i did for similar reasons... and honestly if i did a PhD and didn't end up in a professorship, in terms of my career it would be pointless (although i'd still enjoy the academic journey of course)

But.. i do still think about it daily, i've studied most days in my free time since my undergrad (so pushing 10 years) and read the latest papers, and being back in academia and working on cutting edge physics really does seem like the dream to me. However, i'm really not sure if it's practical... although post-covid the world has changed a lot, so perhaps some kind of part time (obviously taking a lot longer than a full time phd) phd is possible in the future, even if it is just to pursue my personal interest. I feel if this was an option i'd take it, my job gives me a lot of free time although i'm not sure how realistic doing it part time would really be. The other issue is, yes i have being a 'software engineer' to fall back on, but you become out of date with programming languages fairly quickly if you aren't actively working in the field for a few years.

(on recharge atm)

No it's not. If I got paid 40k to do this job I wouldn't do it. Part of the reason I even wanted to do this was because the pay, not due to me having a great passion for air traffic control

Being a pilot would be nice. I'd assume those people probably are passionate about flying and think of it other than just a job.

Generally the people who are around you are a big reason as to job satisfaction... And that's kind of what I assume as doing something you're passionate about, is do you love the people you work around and would you do this job no matter the $$ (within reason)

Alot of athletes don't even LOVE what they're doing. Constantly hurting, constant study, in today's climate your mental health can take a big hit... Lots of them are basically saying "once I reach x amount of $$ I'm good"

I remember a podcast where they asked an athlete with a good amount of years in if he ever wanted to play till 40+ like Brady.. he made the comment that if he's still playing at 40 it's because he's financially fukd. There was no way he wanted to play that long ever

I did’t choose the scaff life, the scaff life chose me