|
If you want to use salary-as-a-metric-of-success, your location is going to help put your situation in context. FWIW I've had super well paying jobs that had awesome work-life balance, and very bad paying jobs that had awful work-life balance. I think it's a false dichotomy, you can have both good pay and good life balance. With that out of the way, "How" to achieve "more" depends a lot on your interests and life goals. edit: I see that 7 and 10 months ago, you basically posted the same "Ask HN". I think you should change job, there's no reason to keep a job that bores you to death. There's no point in trying to learn to love your job, if you don't enjoy it, you don't enjoy it. Luckily as a software engineer, you're not stuck in there. Now your problem seems to be that you don't know what to do with your life, and you feel that somehow you need to accept the routine of daily life to find happiness. You mentioned wishing you could be satisfied with the routine like others are. There's no point trying to fit someone else's enjoyment of life, you're not the same person. It's not true that this is the only way to enjoy life. Again, I don't know your situation/location, so it's hard to put your situation into perspective. I'd just say, on the "how to live a happy life" side of things, that you need to figure out first why you're alive, what makes you wake up in the morning and decide that your life worthy of living. Somehow, by continuing to breathe everyday, you're making the active decision of being alive. Figure out what motivates this decision, and then optimize for it. Personally, I've always thought that life is pointless, has no intrinsic meaning. It's like a video game, you can play it or not, and it won't change anything whether you do or not. However, there's reasons we play video games: they're enjoyable, something in them makes us feel satisfaction. In my personal life, I enjoy the idea of exploring and furthering humanity in the technological space, and that motivates how I govern my life, or at least which goals I pick for myself. It made me pick hobbies, such as sailing and fabrication/manufacturing, that help me live my goals. I've oriented my career choices in a similar manner too: in particular only working for remote companies. I've not always been happy, in the moment, with the job I was making, but it was usually the right tradeoff overall toward my longer term goals. |