For Love or Money...

Over the past few days I have had a couple different conversations about career paths and what have you. One of the major sticking points in the conversations was the constant bringing up of "you should find a job that makes you happy", or "you should do something you love doing". Now normally I shrug those people off as pipe dreamers, as so many people on this planet work at jobs they could careless about, but continue working in for various reasons.

I'm coming to realize there are two schools of thought on this, at least among the young adults I know, and a few groups that these same people can be categorized in:

The Liberal Dreamers: These are the people that are currently at jobs they actually like, or are at least in the field they want to be, about a step or two away from doing what they actually want to do. They tend to have jobs in the public sector, in some service capacity. They also tend to not be in it for the money, and are really more interested in having the perfect job for them.

The Financially Securists: They may or may not work at jobs they like or care about, but that isn't the issue for them. Each job they have, or degree they attain is with the purpose of building a more financially secure future. They tend to believe that sacrificing some job happiness now will pay off in the end.

The In betweeners: These people are currently working or not working, taking classes or some other kind of training, and are in more of a transitional period. Some of them have full time jobs they neither like very much, and have no impact on them financially other than being able to pay their bills on time. People from this group can fall into either one of the categories listed above at some point in time.

Now the school of thought that I don't really follow is the one about getting the "Perfect Job" for me. While it seems that it would be cool to do something that I actually genuinely care about, I care about so few things that deeply that the things I would actually be interested in are very hard fields to break into. So my thinking is that everything I do now, should be with the goal to make as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time, thus leaving me with time and depending on how much money I make, the means to do whatever I feel like doing and retiring early than the current average. I feel like I can deal with not being in love with my job, as long as I can enjoy my time off, and its leading me to a day when I can kick back in the Bahamas playing online hold'em on a beach while checking my fantasy baseball scores and talking to Rowe online about Preston Mattingly's offensive numbers.

Maybe it's a jaded point of view, but it seems to be the direction I'm heading in.