When the money and the work point different ways

This site has nothing to say about what anything pays. It does not carry salary figures, it does not rank fields by earnings, and it will not tell you that a direction is worth taking because of what it returns. Those numbers vary by country, employer, year and negotiation, and a website that printed one would be making something up.

What it can do is help with the shape of the decision, which is where most of the difficulty actually sits. "Follow your passion" and "be realistic" are both slogans, and the people offering them are usually not the ones who have to live inside the answer.

Two questions, wearing one coat

Almost every version of this dilemma is two separate questions that have been stapled together.

What do I need? A number, not a feeling. What it costs to run your life, plus whatever margin lets you sleep. It is knowable, it is boring to work out, and almost nobody has worked it out — which is why the money side of this decision is usually argued in vague terms that cannot be resolved.

What do I want to be doing? A direction, not a job title. Also knowable, also usually unexamined.

Until both have answers you are not weighing a trade-off, you are weighing two anxieties against each other, and anxieties do not resolve by being compared.

Work out the floor first

Not what you earn. What you need. Housing, food, transport, dependants, debt, the irreducible obligations. Then a second figure with a margin on top that makes an unexpected month survivable.

This changes the conversation more than anything else on this page, because it converts "can I afford to do the thing I want" from a mood into arithmetic. Sometimes the answer is a clear no and that is worth knowing early, in an afternoon, rather than after six months of vague deliberation. Sometimes the gap is far smaller than assumed — the floor is often well below the current number, and the space between them is where the decision actually lives.

The figure is yours and this site does not want to know it. The point is that it exists, in writing, before you compare anything.

What money buys, precisely

Worth being exact, because the two things get conflated and only one of them keeps working.

Money reliably removes a category of misery: not being able to pay for something necessary. That is real, it is not to be sneered at by anyone who has not been there, and the relief it provides does not wear off.

What money does not reliably do is make a working day better. The hours are the same hours. A job you do not want to be doing does not become a job you want to be doing at a higher figure — it becomes a better-compensated version of the same day, and the compensation is felt at the end of the month while the day is felt every day.

That asymmetry is the whole argument, and it cuts both ways: below your floor, money is the problem and nothing else is worth discussing. Comfortably above it, more of it is a weak lever on how your week actually goes.

The trade is rarely all-or-nothing

The version of this decision people imagine is a cliff: quit the lucrative thing, take the poor thing, live differently. Real moves are usually smaller and considerably less romantic.

The same direction, a different context. Much of what people find intolerable is the organisation, the sector or the surroundings rather than the work. Separating the work from the conditions is worth doing before concluding that the field is the problem.

An adjacent move rather than a leap. Directions next to each other share most of their skills, which usually means a smaller step down, if any, and a much shorter route back if it does not work.

A test before a commitment. Evenings, a short contract, a small piece of real work in the new direction. This is the cheapest information available and it routinely changes the answer — a surprising number of people find the thing they were prepared to sacrifice for is not what they thought it was up close.

A time-boxed reduction. Two years at a lower figure with a written floor and a date to review is a different proposition from an indefinite one, and it is the version people actually survive.

The thing nobody says about the sacrifice

A drop in income is not evenly distributed across your life and it is not evenly distributed across the people in it. If someone else absorbs part of it, they are a participant in this decision rather than an audience for it, and the conversation is better had before the decision than after.

That is not a reason not to do it. It is a reason for the floor to be a household figure rather than a personal one.

Where to start

Two things, in this order, and neither takes long. Work out the floor. Then work out the direction — the eighteen questions give you one and the two nearest to it, without reference to what anything pays.

Then you are comparing a number you know against a direction you have named, which is a decision you can actually make. Before that you are comparing two things you have not measured, which is why it has been going round for a year.