dream job / dream wife

To have a dream job is to have a job that you consider is meaningful within the greater context of your life.

Is it better to find your dream job? Or is it better to get the highest-paying job you can put up with and then in your free time, work on the stuff that coincides with your purpose in life.

18th century model:

Work: Hobby

Wife: Mistress

20th century model:

Love what you do (work).

Love who you marry.

How have we fared? Most people are dissatisfied with their jobs and dissatisfied with those who they married (divorce rate is over fifty percent). Instead of going around feeling sorry for ourselves that we failed in the game of life by not finding the perfect person to marry or finding the dream job that we should have, maybe we just have the wrong attitude or perspective. Who said that we were going to get that dream job or dream girl?

Instead, I think the better more reliable way is to go back to the18th century model. First, get a job that pays the highest that you're willing to put up with. Investment bankers make a lot of money but it's a hard field to get into first of all, and the hours, stress, and competition is the price you have to pay to make millions of dollars a year. Doctor, lawyer, and other similar professional jobs require years of training and study. There is no free lunch. So deciding which high-paying job depends on one's ability to delay gratification. In any case, find the job that pays the most that you can put up with, and in your free time, work on the stuff that provides meaning and flow for you, whatever that may be. This way you'll be both financially stable but also feel content and balanced.

Second thing, find a marriage partner that is chill. Someone you can deal with for at least ten years. Someone who is emotionally stable, frugal, reasonable, intelligent, etc etc. Passionate love, like any drug, can never last forever. Love is ultimately a verb, not a noun. You don't fall into love, you practice and build love day by day, year by year. Rather than a diamond that keeps on glowing from day one, love is like a plant that needs to be taken care of and nurtured and slowly it grows to be a thriving tree/flower/whatever.

I heard somewhere that ideally one should have three partners in life. One for passionate love/sex, one for raising children, and one for retirement, a companion that shares your interests. Now if you found a person that can be all these things, than that's great for you, but often I find that people who end up getting divorced got married for one reason and things start falling apart when they move on into another phase in life.

And for men. Most men just biologically desire sexual variety, even men who have perfect-looking model wifes....Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, etc etc. But I think men that they take the time to truly invest in a marriage and discover agape love don't have this problem. I think for most men, the reason they have mistresses is to satisfy their occasional desire for sexual novelty and diversity.

The top dream jobs people want, I noticed, usually have to do with: food, wine, film, art, photography, literature, journalism, sports, and helping people. The words that come to my head when I think about these things are: art, pleasure, creativity, love. The sense that we want to create something beautiful that we can enjoy and perhaps more importantly that we can share so other people can enjoy.