Yes, it's not easy to find, but it exists out there.

I think a lot of people's dissatisfaction comes from the narrative surrounding "financial freedom". We get bombarded with the idea that financial freedom is the one, true path to working on your passions.

For a variety of reasons, I think that's bullshit.

It creates a false hope that there is some state one can achieve that is free of misery. There is no perfect job. Every person working on their passion project also has a lot of chores they don't like that they have to perform or their project will never see the light of day. C'est la vie.

But more insidiously, it denies the concept that one could be happy working as an employee somewhere. It makes me wonder whether it's a narrative intentionally designed to keep people "in their place". By creating a narrative that "financial freedom" is necessary to work on one's passions, it pushes the worker to not look elsewhere for greener pastures. "Stay where you are, the grass is always greener, blah blah blah". Sure, we can certainly get into situations where we are blind to how good we have things. But there are also lots of very toxic places. And just because you're more likely to go from one toxic place to another doesn't mean that the toxicity is "natural" or "inevitable" or "just the way things are".

So the first step is to accept that happiness and satisfaction and having a contented disposition are choices one can make now, not the result of achieving some financial endpoint. Your boss wants you to work overtime to make an impossible deadline happen? His problem. You weren't the one to set the deadline. He needs to own up to his failures.

And then the second step is to be more open minded about where you might work or what work you might do. I used to do nothing but web and database development. I thought that was the only thing I'd ever get hired to do. And I had only ever done it for consulting companies. I tried to get out of it by getting a job doing software product development at a bunch of companies. I kept getting told that I didn't have any product experience, that my consulting experience "didn't apply", that I had never worked on a single project for 10 years straight.

Uh, I don't know a whole lot of people in any field who have worked on a single project for 10 years. They exist, and that's amazing, but that's just not the bulk of people in any industry.

So I just stopped asking permission to do the things I wanted to do. I just started writing exactly the software I wanted. I dragged it into my consulting work (a little easier when I was freelance, but ultimately not that hard even when I wasn't). I didn't ask approval for anything. Occasionally, I got in trouble for it, but most of the time either went completely unnoticed or the benefits were recognized, and it was fine. But the key point was that, even those few times I was getting in trouble for doing whatever the hell I wanted, it was still better than the long period when I was doing what I was told and getting brow-beat all the time to work overtime and do things "The Company Way" or whatever.

That's one of the reasons I constantly advocate for exclusively working for smaller companies. Most small companies don't care how the work gets done, as long as it gets done. Sure, Microsoft and Google and Facebook are going to flip their shit if you unilaterally decide "this code that I wrote is open source". They want you to ask permission first, to write up a business case for why it's better to be opened first, probably develop it in-house for a while before opening it, if ever opening it, if you ever get approval to work on it at all. And some smaller companies attempt to cargo-cult this behavior, but if you just end-run around them, they don't realy care. They just put up with it.

Or not. Maybe they fire you. But if they do, it's not the end of the world. I've only ever been fired from one job, and that was unrelated to my technology decisions. It was also one of the best things that ever happened to me, as it broke my fear of getting fired. I started on this life of "do whatever I want, but do it to the best of my ability" after that and everything has been so much better ever since.

Just... protect yourself. Be a little mercenary about your work. It's your work. Most places actually have lots of jobs, you just don't know where to look for them. Get out into the community and meet people to find them.

Most of our fears about what could happen with our employers and our work situations are pretty unrealistic. It's pretty rare for people to end up on the street, homeless, just because they refused to work overtime. It usually takes a substance abuse problem, or a mental health crisis. Which you're more likely to fall into if you're unhappy. So choose to be happy. And then do whatever it takes to protect that happiness.

I work at a company that's very much not FAANG (more of a small, niche CAD-flavored Adobe), and I do a lot of what you describe.

Namely, a lot of "whatever the hell I want," almost never asking permission, and I don't recall ever needing to beg forgiveness. The end result seems to be that I now know lots of trivia about dusty corners of our massive, legacy code-base and my manager seems to be consulting me on a bunch of architecture-level decisions. Granted, I ... exercise savvy about playing in a leaf-node sandbox vs. a trunk-node jenga tower, and I'm a fluent English speaker with a PhD-level math background so maybe I get a little more latitude than other people.

Still, I find that I feel a lot more free working here, under considerably less pressure to ship, than I did in the PhD program.

This post reads like someone who has achieved (or perhaps inherited) financial freedom and now does whatever they want and doesn't understand why others don't do the same thing. Your first third of your comment argues against trying to obtain financial freedom, but then tries to nudge the reader to do things that likely require financial freedom to achieve.

> Or not. Maybe they fire you. But if they do, it's not the end of the world.

For the majority of people, if they lose their job and don't get something new within two weeks, they don't pay their rent and lose their home.

No. We're not hurting, but we are not by any means financially independent.

You're kind of proving my point on "fears are typically unfounded". Missing a rent payment one month does not usually lead to immediately losing your home. Also, I would wager that a lot of people have friends and family through which they can get assistance if it goes longer than that. It's going to be extremely stressful, but it's not usually going to mean the person is suddenly homeless.

This is what I'm advocating: being more realistic about the worst case scenario. You're probably not actually going to get fired, and you're probably not going to end up homeless if you do.

If your personal, intersectional position is much more precarious, by all means, proceed with more caution. I'm just some dude on the internet. I don't know you. But I'm not writing specifically to you, I'm writing to the aggregate. It doesn't negate that most people have more fear than they need to about getting fired.