I had a tenure track job - in addition to teaching classes I loved teaching to amazing students, I had to chase grant money to pay for research that wasn't particularly interesting, but made a case for spending money, so the uni could get their overhead. The research I enjoyed and was good at was small ethnographic studies - you can't really spend a million dollars doing that. I also had to do service (review journal articles, run programs, volunteer at the national level), and of course publish or perish. In fact, the only part teaching played in my job was that I had to maintain a bare minimum in course evals, or I'd get fired. That was it - good teaching couldn't overcome the papers I didn't write.
Later, I landed a lecturer position elsewhere, and that was precisely the kind of job you're talking about: teaching interesting classes. I was paid basically a pittance, but enough that I could pay the bills, and my workload wasn't ridiculous, unlike what you normally hear about adjunct positions.
Unfortunately, the uni had to limit my term to three years, because if they kept me for four they were required to offer me security of employment (tenure for lecturers). SoE would have meant real retirement benefits and a much more competitive salary. To date, this particular lecturer position has rotated staff every two to three years (for decades) because they don't want to have to have a SoE lecturer.
I now work outside of academia. I miss teaching and being relaxed (especially during my lecturer stint), but like I said - those jobs are vanishingly rare.
But I thank you for the advice and the good wishes! Perhaps lecturing will be where I go! What happened with your tenure-track position? Was it too stressful?
It's true that tenure track positions in top universities are scarce. But there are many universities. One of the students in my department just took a lifestyle job in Australia at a university I never heard of. Another student took a faculty position at Harvard. They both appeared thrilled with their choices.
Look at the placement record of any phd program, then adjust for the number of students admitted annually, to estimate your probability to get an academic job. In many fields, a top-50 PhD program virtually guarantees academic employment. In other fields, a top-50 PhD program virtually guarantees unemployment. It is important to walk in with eyes wide open.
Again - my teaching was a vanishingly small part of what actually counted at the Uni where I was a professor, and even my research work wasn't quite right. I wrote a lot of interesting software for gathering video data in classrooms (this was the mid 00s) and analyzing student-teacher interaction really closely to show that general models of learning and teacher activity were pretty thin in terms of how they align with actual classroom activity. None of the software or curriculum I wrote was valued in any way by my peers (didn't count toward a tenure case, only r1 journal pubs count).
I had a really hard time getting that work published (too techy for regular journals, to ed-dy for tech journals, and my absolute-favorite piece sat in review purgatory for literally 26 months before coming back with positive reviews and an editorial rejection for being not quite a fit with the journal - this is what ended up sinking me actually, if I had gotten that particular rejection two years earlier, I could have easily shopped the paper elsewhere and been in much better shape for a tenure case).
But ultimately, I was just not happy professoring, as it turned out to not be the job I wanted it to be. Teaching and research are interesting and fun, committee work and being pressured to write big grants and politicking for courses to be offered and all that were not what I wanted to do (stress and just time away from teaching, writing code and analyzing video). Plus side, I'm a lot happier now that I've figured all that out.
Not true. In my experience there are more opportunities in industry which have equal or greater freedom to research and teach than a typical university tenure track.
I decided a long time ago that I would never enter into the proper workforce, as most people think of the term. The plan is to go tenure-track and teach the classes I loved to learn. Basically stay in school indefinitely from this point on. I'd rather learn by myself in my own home, but there are benefits here and I "gotta pay the bills".