That same friend of mine confessed this week that....

... he has hated his job every single day for the past 30 years. In fact, he says he knew he didn't want to be a lawyer from the minute he sat in his first class on the first day of law school. I was dumbfounded by this news and more than a little weirded out. The concept of hating what you do every day for years and years is bad enough, but to stay with it when you had a chance to bail at the beginning of the process? It gave me the heebiejeebies. So I called a second friend, also a lawyer, and relayed to him the basic gist of all this, keeping discretion intact. This second friend listened to my story, then revealed that HE TOO has hated every second of being a lawyer, from the day he passed the bar. I don't know about them, but I'm old enough to be seeing the end of the pavement ahead, and while I have plenty of miserable days at work, I can't say I hate it every day. In fact, there are parts of it I like pretty much every day. The idea of taking such a huge chunk of your life and spending it in abject hatred of what you do... and the fact that I know REALLY well two people who are living lives like this... it has really freaked me out.