| I have mostly managed to avoid working a normal job. Here are some things I have done: College. It let me continue to live with parents and not get a job. Military spouse and full time parent. It let me see the world, but when I got divorced, starting a career from scratch was challenging. Also, my quality of life went way up with getting a job and no longer being a homemakers. Homemaking isn't exactly a profession that gets a lot of respect or pays particularly well and the retirement plan tends to suck. I have been doing freelance work in recent years. I will recommend the book "How to survive without a salary" by Charles Long. If you can pay off all your debts, pay cash for a cheap house somewhere with low taxes, raise a garden, etc, you can get off the hamster wheel and do as you choose to a large degree. But it takes a lot of time to arrange and most folks don't actually want to make those sorts of sacrifices. This is part of why so many people buy lottery tickets. Wanting an answer with no down side is a popular desire. (No I am absolutely not being snarky. This is reality. Finding one's "dream job" and being jazzed to go to work every day is the exception, not the rule.) |