Dream-chasing comes at a cost. Many professionals who do everything necessary to earn their dream position find, instead, a disappointing mirage and their dream jobs turn into nightmare.
We have identified true stories of professionals who attest that “dream job” can be a cautionary phrase.
Teacher
3-4 months off per year. A workday that ends at 3 p.m. A fair amount of downtime compared to certain other professions. Teaching sounds sweet, right?
Depending on the school you choose (or are assigned to), you might be a mare bouncer or a court jester than a teacher.
Script Writer
Being a writer ain’t what Hemingway cracked it up to be. Stephen King? He’s true writing royalty whose life does not reflect the typical writer’s.
One scriptwriter notes that they’re basically throwing darts at a board, hoping that the requested “edits” won’t translate to a “complete rewrite.”
Doctor
Young doctors are sometimes shocked by the workload. When you factor in the long hours of doctor work, the massive salary doesn’t seem so lucrative. Plus, a mountain of college debt can make the MD life feel mad and draining.
Non-Profit Executive
When they read “charity” in the job description, one non-profit executive didn’t realize they were referring to their salary.
Chemist
One chemist describes life in the lab as highly volatile, lamenting, “The amount of pettiness, sabotage and frankly fraud is rather pathetic.”
Boy, it’s no wonder why Walter White abandoned mainstream chemistry for alternative research.
Veterinarian
Vets don’t only deal with brutal injuries and ailments affecting cute, cuddly pets. Veterinarians don’t only have to calm down distraught, rude customers. The worst part may be that every pet a vet meets will inevitably die on their watch.
All dogs may go to heaven, but that’s little solace to vets who must see each dog (and cat) leave this earth.
Criminal Forensics
Also known as What They Didn’t Show You in CSI. One criminal forensics professional notes that forensics is a “dark world” that led them to “lose their smile.” They probably should’ve predicted that analyzing crime scenes wouldn’t be a giggle city.
Flight Attendant
Back in the Pan Am days, being a flight attendant seemed like a glamorous ticket to all-expenses-paid globe-trotting. Today, the job description for a flight attendant should read, “must be willing to break up fights, duct tape drunk passengers to seats, and be the unwitting subject in viral videos.”
Does it surprise anyone that the Spirit Airlines paycheck doesn’t overshadow the headaches of being a flight attendant?
Traveling the World
All those video vloggers you see on YouTube seem like they’re living the dream of traveling the world, right? You don’t hear about the pressures of being “on” for a living, malaria, or the soul-sucking monotony of riding the TSA treadmill again and again and again.
Magazine Designer
The magazine editor position could be the pathway to Conde Nast status, right? Not for one creative, who found that “my workload doubled with no raise, the raises I was promised never came, all of the people I liked working with the left, and things just got gradually worse.”
Choose your employers wisely, folks.
This thread inspired this post.