Disillusioned
Stick and Rudder you have every right to feel that way, so I am not going to offer any advice, just tell it as it is.
First a disclaimer, I am employed as a professional pilot, and I do enjoy the work. I hate the industry.
Reality check! Aviation is an abusive industry whether your at the top or the bottom. It will put enormous strains on your family and friends and your psyche, why?
Because you work shiftwork, travel constantly and have no employment safeguards of any real meaning to talk about. Your income and livelihood is on the line every six to twelve months with your annual or bi-annual check. You will have paid enormous amounts of time, effort and money to get in, get qualified and survive, then you have to find a real job (whatever that is). Then the rest is luck.
As you move through you will encounter, shonks and liars and some really nice people. The shonks and liars are those who pay you, the others your mates. You will have some great days and some horrors, and some times why you wondered why on earth anyone in the right mind would do it. Well it's fun, the moment it isn't then its time to go. While your having fun you can forget that your roster changes continuously, your never home, the local office clerk gets better pay, has proper conditions of employment and does not have to live the back of the black stump to practise their craft. The older you get the worse it gets. Why? this is an industry in decline, as economists say, it is in its tertiary phase. It cycles through boom and bust on five to ten year cycles continuously and without luck your end up on the outer, simple. The opportunities of the past are gone and you need to look at it from a 2002 perspective not the viewpoint of someone who has been it for twenty years and can only think of the good old days.
A 2002 perspective - if you want to operate a thirty to forty year old piece of machinery in all weather for below average wages in depressed and stagnating rural areas, then this is the job for you. If you are independently wealthy, then this is the job for you. If you don't mind losing your job to another newbie on lower rates with a fraction of your experience, then this is the job for you. The alternative, proper paid employment that gives you evenings and weekends off with your loved one or family, and fly for fun, that way you will be able to retire to somewhere on the coast or country, not to a public housing estate or caravan. That's the reality. It's fun when your young, it's crap when your not.
Still love flying though, just grown out of the frontal lobotomy.