interesting question, my answer is two-fold - I had a low-paying job for four years that I loved - active duty in the US Air force, and spent three years of that time living in Spain. It was a great experience, but chose to end my time after that and return to school to finish my degree in CompSci (kind of hard to do back at that time moving every couple of years) and pursue a career in the private sector in technology - end result, a high-paying non-military job that I love about 80% of the time, which is pretty good. However, if push came to shove, and I had to choose all over again, I think I would have stayed in the Air Force a lot longer.