From I Got Fired Two Days Ago:
It’s not like having a job you hate makes you appreciate your free time more (Very Optimistic Tumblr Teen Voice The bad makes you appreciate the good!) Having a job that eats away at your very core actually sullies your free time more. You realize how little of it you do have and often forsake it. You dread having to go back. It poisons your psyche. I was miserable from 8:30 am to 6:30 pm five days a week, and when I came home the transition from miserable to happy was slow.
And then we have the other extreme. From Doing What You Live Is Going To Be F****** Hard:
Because work is always going to get hard. And then get better. That’s the cycle of everyone’s professional careers, even the biggest and baddest billionaires on planet earth. You don’t always enjoy your work, and you don’t always want to do it. If your work is something you love, you can even wind up completely losing your passion and feeling absolutely zero interest in it.
No one is happy with their profession all the time, whether it is one they like or not. I've certainly gone through the highs and lows in my 20 year career. Worse: I went through a low in the middle of writing my second book on Check Point FireWall-1.
The good news is, at that time, I was in a spot where I could work on different things for Nokia--things less directly related to the Check Point products I was supporting. It effectively gave me a break from the things that I formerly liked and allowed me to explore some other things while remaining gainfully employed for the same company. I also took on some side projects that went through their own love/hate cycles.
When the time came to come back into the Check Point fold in 2009 as part of their acquisition of Nokia's Security Appliance business unit, I was ready and attacked it with the same fervor that I did many years before. The timing of that change was fortuitous because I had reached that point yet again where a change of some sort was needed.
While every job--even one you like--is going to have highs and lows, you may reach a point where the bad moments start outnumbering the good. I have learned to recognize and acknowledge when there's a noticeable increase in the bad moments--well before they become overwhelming. I take action before I lose my passion for what I'm doing, which for me has meant mostly changing what I do for a given employer, not changing employers. That said, changing employers may be necessary in some cases.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel once said "Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion." As I plan on doing great things, I don't want to lose my passion.