I don't get it. There is no up side. I personally could go the rest of my life never sitting in a jetliner again and be quite happy. I fly because I am good at it and for the satisfaction that comes from making a living. It is my profession. A job. Take away compensation and there is nothing left to talk about.
Then perhaps you should have taken all that money you spent on aviation and gotten an MBA. It's not too late... The business world always needs people who only care about the money.
My opinion, and this is the last I'll say, is that the aviation industry is where it is more to attitudes like yours than the other kind. When the market is flooded with people just looking for 'a job', the people who would fly for the love of flying are priced out of the market.
People who are just looking for 'a job' have everything horribly wrong in life, in my opinion.
Do what you love. Follow your passions and dreams. Anyone can die with a few million in the bank, but you don't put your initials up on the scoreboard at the end with your wealth. What matters is what you do with your life...and that, only to you.
A life lived in fear, anger, or unhappiness is a life wasted... regardless of what anyone may believe, all this fiction about wealth, power, influence... systems of government, social status and influence... is all a meta-world we've created in our minds. Little invisible walls that keep us from truly being happy. Little rules that are beaten into us by society, until we're gnarled old creatures, slavering over our greasy little hoard, daring anyone to try to take what little vestige of a life we've managed to carve for ourselves.
It's a huge, beautiful world, full of sunsets and clouds, the stygian black of a moonless night and a sky painted with stars, the space between two thunderstorms on a lonely evening, dancing a dance that none but a pilot will ever see; a world full of danger and daring and beauty and grace, a magical dance of matter and energy, photons and protons and anti-neutrinos, where the laughing face of God in his many forms looks down on His creation and grants them the one exquisite chance to breathe, eat, play and live in the moment*.
There is so much, and at the same time, so little. Do we really want to spend such precious few moments in the blind pursuit of wealth and status?
A quote from my first flight instructor. "I don't care what I fly so long as they pay me". (as in paid well that is)
I would like to gently suggest that I believe you might have misunderstood the meaning behind that.
Let me close again by saying that I don't expect you to agree with me in any way. I fully expect the opposite, and would invite a final statement in response, as this is my own. I certainly don't expect to change your mind, or anyone else's; I merely wish to paint things in a way that I feel is too rarely considered. I mean, it really is a beautiful world out there, taken as a balance. All the good, all the evil... all colors in a moment, a single moment that will exist only once in infinitesimal duration and never come again, preceded and succeeded by infinite moments of equal beauty and fullness. It always saddens me to see bitter, unhappy people; it always seems, as they say, such a waste of spirit.
Respectfully,
~Fox