My favorite job ever, as far as the job itself, was working peon-tier helping to run a campground for a Summer. Only non-tech job I've ever had, had worked for years in tech before and years more after. Location was even pretty awful by outdoorsy standards, somewhere with mountains or... anything, really, would have been better still.

Too bad it paid, you know, a tenth of what I make programming.

It was great. No screens, just a normal-ass cash register to work from time to time. No sitting unless I wanted to, no meetings, golf cart to drive around once or twice a day. Firewood to carry. People to talk to. Plenty of time to read or write and no-one remotely interesting in claiming the copyright anything I did then, let alone during time I was off the clock. Pretty much nothing about the job was evil, while so many tech jobs are at least a little. None of that general soul-grime of corporate life.

I'd do that for a whole career if it paid anywhere near what software dev does. I'm only in software because 100% of the things I actually want to do pay half as well, at best, and some of them require a lot more up-front spending and time for education. Programming's great when I need to do it for a personal project. As a career, it blows, compensation aside. It's not even high status, for the most part, despite the comp.

I've said for years I'd love to work at Home Depot if they came up $100 an hour on the pay.

I'd too love to work at a place where I could be part of the 95th percentile moving wood around all day.

Or you won't. I traded my desk job for a more active one (my phone says I walked 10 miles at work on Friday), and I'm struggling to remember why I would ever have liked a desk job. (I got to move bits and pixels around in a computer, that nobody would ever see?) I'm loving it here.

Why would a person suggest to another that if they can't be happy where they are, they wouldn't be happy anywhere? Is "a sedentary office job" the summit of all work for all people? Do we not accept that people can have preferences?

I'm going to start a dating website called "The grass is always greener". Customers get matched with one person, ever.

Maybe we shouldn't spend all our lives doing just one type of job and change careers. But then, it takes a long time to get good at something, so changing careers every 5 (or x) years is also not that good an option.

That is an interesting idea. But like you said, it takes time for you to get good at your job and more importantly, it takes time for you to increase you earnings. I don't know how feasible it would be for a senior developer making $200K per year to start off as an electrician's apprentice at $50K per year. Especially when you have a mortgage and family to provide for.

The only way your idea would work if somehow work and income were divorced from each other. That seems rather utopian than practical. Maybe if you were wealthy enough, you could try out multiple careers. Or maybe wait til retirement though that also seems impractical.

I suppose it all depends on what an individual wants to optimize for. If one wants to optimize their life for happiness, then changing careers is an option even if it means less money. But if one wants to optimize for money/title etc (which is what most people do, right or wrong) then it is better to stick to one career and get as good at it as possible.

Or if one lived more modestly. If the person making $200k/year lives on $100k/year and saves the rest, they'd still need to cut back a bit to drop to $50k/year, but not nearly so much.

Mortgage and family would make that more difficult, but from my perspective ($80k/year, single, and quite comfortably not spending even half of that), $200k/year certainly sounds "wealthy enough" to me.