What Futureman said is very well stated and thought out.

I want to share a pet-peeve of mine when I sometimes come here and read these boards. Something that is starting to get under my skin lately is the proverbial "well, it beats sitting in a cubicle all day" mentality.

A person chooses a CAREER as a means to provide an INCOME. When a person does something they enjoy which supplies an undesireable or nonexistent wage, that is termed a HOBBY. I will agree that it is important to enjoy what you do for a living, but a hot, heaping bowl of job satisfaction isn't going to put food on the table at the end of the day if the job lacks income.

Yeah, I've done the cubicle thing and I did not enjoy it as much as flying. However, the only reason I continue to fly is because I happen to have an income that can sustain my QOL - and my QOL isn't what many would perceive the proverbial "airline pilot" to desire. i.e., the Jones' are on their own.

It probably sucked, back in the day, to leave the cave and spend all day tracking and killing a Brontosaurus. But when it was brought back to the cave and grilled for dinner, the rewards for the family probably far outweighed that of a dinner consisting of plants and berries.

Flying can still be a rewarding career, it probably won't be as rewarding as it once was. Your job is as enjoyable as you make it, and that goes for every career out there. Ideally you will want the income scale and the job satisfaction scale to be equal. However, one should be prepared to sacrifice some of the job satisfaction in order to raise the income.