What's more important to you at this stage in your life: your personal life or your career?

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What right now is more important to you: your personal life or your career? Do you feel you're maintaining a healthy balance? Would you choose one over the other?

-- Mo (moira@diarist.net), August 03, 1999

Answers

Hi Moira...I am working as a GIS technical specialist for a consulting firm, but really hate it. Our clients are alot of bastardly men who have never had the pleasure of dealing with women in a professional environment (we are onsite at a utitlity company with managers who have worked their way up through the electrician's union to become Administrative Managers...Haaah!! What a joke that is)....Anyway...I also have another job as a sous chef at a really cool little Cafe here in CHicago...I love this job...I get some creative freedom and am aloud to receiver the credit...the problem is that I really have little time for a social life...I am fairly new to Chicago and have had little time to develop a steady social life...sure I hang out with some people from my work place and a few friends that i knew before I moved here...but to answer your question I don't think I am doing a very good job of balancing my social life and my career...it's pretty lopsided right now and it is really buggin me...I guess it boils down to what I really wanna do with my life...right now I would quit my job in a heart beat to just be a chef...but I can't do that and still live in the place I'm living because I would be poor all the time...the fact is I don't know what I want to do...I have thought about Chiropractory and massage...medical school to an MS in Conservation Science...I guess I envision myself someday owning my own BIZ whether that be in the form of a cool street side cafe/music venue or my own Chiropractory practice, a house (with wood floors), a yard for my long awaited dog I will love so dearly and a fairly big kitchen and friends to come by and just hang out and cook and play music and enjoy each other's company.

-- Marta (martagray@earthlink.net), August 04, 1999.

My personal life. But that's nothing new. My career has never been more important to me.

Sometimes I think of how I could be making more money if I had more moxie, and feel regrets (especially because I work here in the Silicon Valley where everybody is supposed to be a millionaire. Yeah right.) But most of the time I feel I have the right balance.

Now I wouldn't mind having a partner who was more career minded and made enough money so I wouldn't have to work...

-- Lizzie (crow@well.com), August 04, 1999.


Right now at 33 years of age and working in minnesota for a silicon valley company, I have to say my career. just two more hard working years and I should be able to quit the damn computer tech support field and retire to the life a a slum lord. ;)

ya gotta luv them stock options!

-- uwe (uwe@uswest.net), August 04, 1999.


I'm beginning to realize that I at least need a balance between my personal life and my career (unfortunately, devoting yourself to being a workaholic in scholarly publishing doesn't get you anything but gray hairs. Stock options? What are those?).

I'm going to go nuts otherwise.

-- Mo (moira@diarist.net), August 04, 1999.


Work, personal life ... I devoted myself to my career for seven years. In 1997 I looked up from my desk and realised that I'd worked through my marriage breakdown, my father's death, and that I was 35. So - I changed. I went overseas for six weeks so I got a really good break, and when I got back I organised things so that I worked part- time, and rented a house in the country, and did that for a whole year. I'm now back at work full time but I'm much the better for seeing the benefits of a fuller personal life. I don't take on work that takes me in to the office on weekends any more (I am self- employed, which makes those decisions easier than telling your boss you don't want to do something. You can have both work and personal lives; but the balance is extremely important.

-- Anna (anna@lucidity.au.com), August 04, 1999.


My company is too cheap to incorporate, so they can't offer stock options.

-- Steph (stephaneezer@usa.net), August 04, 1999.

Uh, I still go to college and I'm 31. So, yeah, i'd have to go with personal life. What would you rather do? Mountain bike, rollerblade, read books, read comic books, watch sports, go to live sporting events, play on the computer, spend time writing things no one will ever read, play guitar for years and never get any good at it, sleep late, stay up late watching movies OR establish a career? Grow up? Nah.

-- Bart (Bdwyblues@aol.com), August 04, 1999.

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