I can certainly identify with this. Anytime I watch "Catch Me if You Can," I cannot help but marvel and think that maybe I was born 30 years too late.
Here I am, at 30 years old having flown for the last 15. I went at it full tilt sparing no energy, enthusiasm or cash to get into this career line (including getting an aviation related Bachelor's degree from a prestigious university) and now . . . I promise myself that I will do all I can to disuade my daughter from being a pilot. But heck, then I only see her a couple of weeks every 3 months and my wife and I aren't even separated or divorced?
Yeah, there are great memories. Seen great sunrises and sunsets. Landing and being surrounded by banana trees, landing on desert mesas, seeing gorgeous glaciers from below mountain peak level, and others. I have travelled to many places.
But there are so many negatives. I've never managed to hold any aviation job for more than 2 years-- the industry is too unstable so the first thing I do when I start a new job is update my resume and send more of them out. I have rarely been able to make ends meet. I have met some of the bizarest personalities. There are those unwilling to advance you, despite competency and qualifications because they feel that you have not yet "paid your dues" enough. I also remember being invited for dinner by one boss-- expecting to be congratulated for all the hard work I had done for the company only to be the next victim of his paranoid witch hunt and told that I would be terminated (never mind that it was the day before my daughter had to go in for an operation). I have seen pension funds raided to keep a money loosing companies afloat. I have seen our suggestions been thrown by the wayside by management with the condescending attitude of "you don't see the big picture" while the Company loses mega bucks and then comes to the employees demanding "we must all pitch in by making sacrifices" (a.k.a. wage cuts).
Now I find myself in what could be a dream job, but in one novel I read someone explained to the protagonist that "there is no paradise on earth, something must always be imperfect otherwise nobody would want to go to heaven."
I am making good money now (something I have never been accustomed too, hence our single compact 12-year old car). I am also flying very rarely and being treated and fed fairly decently. But here too, things are in decline, the stability and mid to long term prospect wears a big question mark. There has been a constant strain on my family life, I have never been able to know whether I could maintain a "normal" standard of living and I wonder if I will ever have enough money to pay my daughter's college tuition or to retire comfortably (without having to move in with my daughter and her family some day).
Another colleague, a couple years older and also an FO, is seriously thinking about leaving aviation. I sometimes wonder whether I would have had the talent to become a lawyer or some other professional. It overjoys us, at least, when I see our 3 year old putting a bandage on "Teddy" or telling one of her dolls to "take all your medicine and you will feel better."