Doing Work You Love Sounds Ideal Until You Try to Pay Your Bills With It

Sometimes I regret not selling my soul, but I could never get a good price for it

The Venn diagram of jobs I find fulfilling and jobs that pay a living wage is just two circles that don’t touch. (Graphic by Michelle Teheux via Canva)

The best things in life are free, but meeting your basic needs is not.

It’s pretty hard to be happy if you don’t have secure housing, a decent diet and basic healthcare. But the struggle to obtain those things can wreck your happiness.

Just to make things even muddier, a lot of people who think they’d be happier if they didn’t have to work fall apart when they retire or receive a windfall. They’re ecstatic for a few weeks — and then feel bored.

We probably all know people who have no financial need to work but who take a job “just for something to do.” I’ve never understood that because I have always found the world full of more interesting things to do than I could get to in a dozen lifetimes. I cannot imagine requiring someone else to direct my day for me.

The sweet spot is to find a way to do something fulfilling that earns you enough money to pay your basic bills plus a little bit extra for saving and for fun.

But the Venn diagram of jobs I would find fulfilling and jobs that pay a good wage is just two circles that don’t touch at all. (I truly envy people who love and are good at math!)

The conflict

Choosing between meaningful work and adequate income has shaped nearly every chapter of my adult life.

Being editor of a small daily newspaper came close to bridging the gap between those two circles. It didn’t pay well, and it required very long hours and a high stress load, but I loved it. The work I did there made my community so much better, and I was lucky enough to have a lot of people in the community remind me of that often.

If you have ever had a job in which random people you do not know come up to you in public to thank you for your efforts, you know why I never wanted to stop doing it even as the newspaper world began imploding.

A decade ago, that process of industry implosion reached my job and I was laid off. I started volunteering in the kitchen of what was essentially an orphanage.

I loved it! I worked a lot of kitchen jobs when I was a student, and I enjoy cooking. It was fulfilling to prepare food and then to serve the children, mostly troubled teens.

The kitchen director offered me a job and I’d have loved to have accepted it, but she could only pay me minimum wage, and I believed there was simply no way I could live on that. (Of course, as a writer, I generally make less than minimum wage now.)

My desire to perform a job that I am good at, find fulfilling and that serves society in some way is completely at odds with my desire to earn enough money to live a simple, decent life.

Love or money

I could have tried to find a job that would pay well, even if I hated it or felt a bit skeevy doing it. I actually did apply for approximately a million such jobs, but did not land one. Agism is a bitch, and so is trying to change careers later in life.

That pushed me into my old stand-by, extreme frugality, which has allowed me to afford indulging in the ultimate luxury.

It is not a fancy car, fashionable wardrobe or impressive mansion: It is being able to wake up every morning and write whatever I feel like. I make a lot of sacrifices to be able to do that.

Part of making this “job” work is doing everything possible myself so that I can afford the luxury of being a writer. It means cooking everything from scratch, cleaning my own house, grooming my dogs myself, doing my own self-care and everything else. It means that my husband works long hours and does as much of the work on our fixer-upper house by himself as possible.

It means a lot less leisure time than we’d like. It means making do without a lot of things that other people think are necessities.

A year off from poverty

In 2024 I made what was, for me, quite good money. I had a viral article on Medium that has paid out more than $30,000. I made more money from one story about Dutch sex education than I’ve made from some entire years of journalism.

That payday was a glorious fluke, like finding buried gold in your backyard. I don’t expect it to happen again, but it let me breathe for a minute.

I always hope the next Substack article will bring in loads of paid subscriptions or the next Medium article will be Boosted (a rarity these days) and will get hundreds of thousands of reads like the viral one did. Or that my next book will become a bestseller. None of these things is impossible, but I am pretty realistic.

Can you be broke and happy?

If you redefine what happiness means and are willing to do without some things, maybe. It takes creativity. For example, my extremely talented husband used free scrap shipping wood to transform our backyard with a treehouse and pergola. We may not be able to afford to go anywhere on vacation, but we make the most of a nice backyard.

We can’t often afford a night out, but I’m a good cook and we eat inexpensive, delicious meals.

We’ve splurged selectively with an espresso maker that brings us joy every day. My husband and I really enjoy sitting under the pergola and watching the fish swim around in the pond while we indulge in good coffee. It takes a lot more time and effort to provide such things for ourselves rather than simply hit a coffee shop, but it’s satisfying, too.

Others, I know, would prefer to earn enough money to be able to comfortably hire help around the house and yard and to be able to go out often and take nice vacations.

It’s a trade-off, and it’s also at least partly a matter of luck. I can understand the appeal of having more money — I just don’t have any skills the marketplace values.

What I do have is creativity

I understand that making any sort of living at all through writing is a gift that many an ink-stained wretch would envy. I also understand that not everyone has the talent to wrestle a satisfying life out of nearly nothing.

And it makes a huge difference that I’m married, that my husband has a job and that my children are grown.

Of all the seven deadly sins, the one I’m most guilty of pride.

I take too much pride in managing this difficult life, in building something out of nearly nothing.

At least I’m innocent of greed and sloth, and that’s something, right?

Most people can look at my life without risking the deadly sin of envy. From the outside, it just looks like a lot of relentless effort for not much reward.

To be honest, it often looks that way from the inside, too.

Don’t miss my current special series, Poverty and Privilege, which comes out every Saturday:

Poverty and Privilege is the story of Richard, a man with generational wealth, and Lauren, a single mom struggling to keep her household afloat. The twist is they both have Ivy League educations but life has turned out very different for each of them. The story is true but names and certain identifying details have been changed.

Part 1, Unlikely Allies in an Unequal America

Part 2, The Country Club Lunch

Part 3, One Family’s Fall From the Middle Class

Part 4, Billable Hours Don’t Pause for Birth

Part 5, The Value of $60,000

Part 6, How Marriage and Divorce Shape Financial Futures

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. I also have a new Substack aimed at authors who want to self-publish books, called The Indie Author. My most recent book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules. If you prefer to give a one-time tip, I accept Ko-fi.

All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park

For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.

Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.

When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.

Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.

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