I'm a rather upbeat person. A glance at virtually anything I've authored tells that story. That said, I'm also a firm believer in truth, and sometimes "upbeat" and "truth" conflict.

Today is one of those days.

Welcome to your personal tour of Sacrifice City.

A Lifestyle Choice

First, a clarification: when I encourage the pursuit of meaningful work on this site, I am, in essence, endorsing a lifestyle choice.

The search for and retention of a life filled with purpose and deep life satisfaction isn't some fad diet we pick up and try for 10 days to see if it'll fit. On the contrary, such a life arises from consistent and committed choices made over the course of hard-fought decades.

I wouldn't support this lifestyle if I didn't deeply believe it is worth having. Every single piece of data I can get my hands on - including my summated first person experiences - indicates it's the way to go:

I believe the 1000 older adults psychologist Karl Pillemer interviewed who all - all! - DID NOT say anything resembling "to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to be able to buy the things you want."
I believe researcher Martin Seligman and his positive psychology breathren who find that life satisfaction comes from deep engagement and meaning in life, not from pleasures and "feeling good" in the moment.
I believe my mind when it wakes me up early to sit down at a task I care intensely about, and my heart when it spends summer long days with my family on the beach instead of in an office, padding my paycheck.

But anything worth having comes with sacrifice.

And right now, I'm feeling it.

Benefits, Meet Cost

Staying true to my upbeat nature, though, let's first consider the benefits I've gained through a commitment to meaningful working - and living. Benefits I believe any of us can reap, if we want to badly enough.

Freedom
- The following questions make me pause long and hard whenever they're answered:
  - Who's your boss?
  - What are your work hours?
  - How many sick and vacation days do you get a year?
  - What's your work phone number? (I honestly have no clue - who the heck uses the phone these days?)
- Not being able to readily provide a straight answer to those questions = freedom (to me, at least)
Autonomy
- Related to freedom, autonomy goes one step further, into the moment-by-moment decisions of my day. I pick what I want to do when. Some tasks are non-negotiable - like, say, grading papers and exams - but precisely when they get done on a given day is up for grabs.
Purpose-driven sense of mission
- In contrast to the work-structure questions I can't answer, there is one question I can answer without pause: "Why?" Ask me why I'm doing just about anything in my life and I have an answer. A personally meaningful, deep-seated answer. That's not for nothing.
Concentrated time with my family
- Researchers find that 100% of respondents say "relationships" create meaning in their lives. 100%! In a society where we can't agree whether we prefer the cookie or the cream in an Oreo, that finding seems pretty compelling. So my husband and I have both made conscious decisions to maximize family time, including taking jobs that give us summers off (and thereby foregoing the many better-paying and potentially satisfying jobs that don't meet this requirement) and choosing to turn down freelance and coaching gigs (athletic for him, career for me) to have late afternoons together year-round.

Good stuff, right? Absolutely. I'd make the same decisions a thousand times over to gain what I'm so fortunate to currently have.

And yet.

Yet there comes the moment of reckoning when you have to look hard in the face at all you've sacrificed to get what you have.

We're talking here, of course, about the ol' four-letter word that always accompanies benefits: cost.

Meaning or Money?

Without a doubt, the most notable cost for my life's many benefits is money. The big buckaroo. The almighty dollar. The smacking smackaroney.

Wait, that last one didn't make sense.

The point is, there's a whole heck of a lot I'm not going to have in life because I'm so committed to meaningful, purposeful living. And sometimes it makes me downright ill.

At this very moment we're preparing our house to go on the market and searching for a new home in a community with strong schools and highly engaged parents.

Shorthand: we want to move to a place where a good deal of money is flying around.

Put another way: we're looking to move where we can't afford to be.

Speaking of which, here's a great way to get acquainted with meaningful working/living costs: Spend a Sunday afternoon house hunting. Drive by the houses that are too "low-income" to warrant an open house. Step inside the "fixers" you can barely afford. Then torture yourself a bit by visiting a house $100K or so outside of your price range. Before long, "meaning", "freedom", "autonomy" and "family time" become a jumble of nonsense words an infant spews out at the dinner table.

Seriously, as of last night I wanted to take my high-values, eye-on-the-big-picture, creating-a-life-I'll-respect self and shake the bejesus out of her, screaming, "go off and finally accept a fricking job that'll pay you what you're worth and will enable you to afford a house in which you and your kin can stand upright in the bedrooms!"

Man alive!

[Note: Is this a first world problem? Abso-total-lutely. I get that. I see that. I feel gratitude for that. And now on with my (extremely common) first world crisis.]

We've occasionally touched on money at Working Self in the past - most directly in Money and Happiness: What's the Right Balance? and less so in the recent How to Pursue Creative Passions While Paying the Bills - but I don't write about money often because I honestly don't think about money often. Again, an amazingly fortunate situation, I know.

To be clear, it's not that I don't think about it because I have so much of it - cue the laughing cat there - it's because I don't typically see the value of beyond-basic-needs money.

I learned early on that the best way to stay true to a meaningful lifestyle is to steer clear of commercial traps like, say, the mall, or magazine ads, or, well, just about any public place in our society.

Before you think I'm a major hermit (!), I should clarify that I steer clear mentally. We did visit the mall this weekend, for instance, but I didn't set foot in a single store or browse in a single window. We were there for the food court, the Easter bunny, and the carousel, thank you very much. (And even at that, it would've been much cheaper to stay home.)

Bottomline: when I don't look at all I'm not able to have, I don't realize what I'm missing. That way the benefits are free to loom large and splendorous in my mind, enabling me to continue to make the tough calls in life, like turning down a ten-thousander in exchange for some quality family time.

The real estate search, however, unavoidably flips this whole approach on its head.

The Final Reel

Why am I bothering to tell you all of this? Truth in advertising.

You need to know what you're choosing when you say, "I want a job that feels meaningful." Or, "I want to create a life I can feel proud of." Or, "I want to make a difference."

What are you willing to sacrifice to have those things? Seriously: how much are you willing to give?

There is no "half in." You either pick the path ripe with freedom, autonomy and purpose, or you're a slave to the clock and the dollar. (Show me the lucrative, fulfilling part-time job that you can get without sacrificing your morals and I'll change my take on that.)

Bottomline: we have to be 100% clear on that answer before starting pursuit of a life filled with meaning and life satisfaction, or else our commitment to the path will prove as steady as Russell Brand's commitment to Katy Perry.

Intentionally and actively creating a meaningful life necessitates looking at the whole picture - the entire, un-airbrushed, ugly cracks spidering from the edges sort of picture - and considering whether we've truly got the stomach for it.

Maybe in your case what feels meaningful will also happen to be lucrative. Kudos on your luck, if so.

For most of us, however, the path that picks us can cover the bills (and only after some major strategic tweaking), but it ain't gonna buy us the house we always imagined our children growing up in within the sort of neighborhood where parents invest time and energy into being present and aware.

I trust that my future self won't care about the latter part of that sentence. I trust that she'll review her life and think of the memories made within the walls of the ranch house she never wanted, not the "cozy" square footage encased within those walls. I trust that she'll know she conducted the right cost-benefit analysis for her and her family, and will have great dignity and integrity about her choices.

My current self, though? The one who wants a hit of in-the-moment pleasure now and again?

Quite honestly, she's feeling quite blue.

And that, my friends, is the whole picture.

Photo Credit: DecoDesignCenter.com