The life you love becomes the job you hate

I love being outdoors. When I was young I thought the ideal job would be some sort of wilderness guide. Being paid to be out in the woods, what could be bad about that? The people you guide, that’s what. It was a bad enough when it was just clueless city people who complained constantly. A local guide had a client on a 7 day wilderness trip. Nice vacation, right? The client decided, without telling the guide, that it would also be a 7 day vacation from psych meds.

Electrical work is interesting. I’ve wired houses and installed solar electric systems. Would I want to do it every day? Nope, then it would get boring. I’m perfectly happy to drive out to a friend’s place to change a faulty charge controller before I’ve even had my morning coffee. Once in a while it’s interesting and fun. If I had to do this sort of thing every day it would bore the heck out of me.

That’s pretty much how I feel about carpentry, plumbing, auto repair and any other trades you can think of. I love it once in a while. Specializing would suck. Life should be interesting.

I was lucky enough when I was a firefighter that I never knew what the day would bring. It could anything from hanging around the station reading books to a major industrial fire in a chemical plant.

One guy I worked with taught me a valuable lesson. The first year on the job he got a bid driving the ladder truck. He liked it -for the next 27 years. Being an officer had a lot of paperwork and politics he despised so he refused all promotions. I felt the same way about driving the pumper, so that’s what I did for most of my career. When the officer test would come around, I’d take them to prove that I could do it, then refuse the job.

Did you ever hear about some management type person complain about how the job is no fun anymore? Darn few ever ask for a demotion. We are status driven people. They’d rather do a job they hate for higher status than a job they love for lower status.

Then there are those people who have a job because they have a job. It’s not their life but something they do for money. Glenn Cook writes Fantasy and S/F novels. For decades he wrote them while working a mindless job at an auto plant. There was a local musician who composed all this songs while working a factory job. He said his hands knew what to do, leaving his mind free to compose.

We all have to do something to put food on the table. Don’t make the mistake of turning some hobby you love into a job you hate. People who do that end up with both a crappy job and one less good hobby.

-Sixbears