You guys make me laugh. Life is all so black and white for you all, eh? So full of definite and clear extremes and easy decisions. Desert Dude asks, "If you're so unhappy and miserable, why are you hanging around?" Others have voiced alternatives of the same question.
The problem is, it assumes that I am a) unhappy and b) miserable (depressed?). It assumes that I am filled with self-loathing and constantly whip myself over a lifetime of poor career choices. It assumes that I find flying helicopters unbearably unpleasant. The truth, for all you amateur armchair psychologists out there (T. Coupling), is quite different.
As I've said, I love flying, and love flying helicopters. It gives me great joy to know how to do it. The twenty years I've spent doing it (although the last two have only been part-time) have been a gas...fun and thrilling and challenging and all the good that we know it can be. However (now try to follow this), IN RETROSPECT, I see that to do it as long as I did simply was a mistake...a waste of time and that I should have done things differently.
When I came to that conclusion, I changed things - I quit. I never did fly around, angrily thinking, "Gee, I hate my life, hate this job," and I don't now. In fact, now that I fly on my own terms (how much I want to or don't want to), things are a LOT better. My life is now in balance. I will never have another full-time flying job, fixed-wing or rotary.
I'm amused that it actually pisses people off that someone might not be as irrationally addicted to helicopters anymore as they are still. If you don't love it, GET THE HELL OUT! It sounds so resentful and immature.
So kill the messenger if you want to. Some of you need to grow up.