Everybody has different values in life.
We all have different hopes and dreams; different things that inspire and motivate us, and different ideas for the way we'd like to impact the world and live our own lives.
Most people, unfortunately, tend to make one of these two mistakes in life:
They see their goals and ideas as a dream, a fantasy set apart from the real everyday world.
They believe in their goals, but see a traditional career as the only route to achieving them.
In both of these cases, other values imposed by society or peers can erode and replace a person's own goals. Typical examples of this are the notion that hard work is a value by itself and that an individual must 'give back' to society.
In reality, the value of 'hard work' is determined by the values that work is directed towards. Hard work towards creating art or building a project that changes the world in a way that refelects your own values is a beautiful thing. Hard work in a job with no personal meaning to you is a tragic waste of a short life.
In light of this, the only thing that has universal value to everybody is personal freedom. That means the ability to choose how you use your time, and the resources to support yourself and work towards thr fulfilment of your real goals.
Traditional jobs can never provide this. They eat up huge proportions of your time and energy and pollute your mind with useless ideas and negative emotion. What little free time is left lacks energy and motivation.
What's more, a job's ability to generate income is fundamentally limited by the time you csn devote to it. More money = less time. The level of freedom remains low.
There are countless routes to personal freedom. Most of these involve developing means of getting income that isn't proportional to the time invested. Examples range from creative work like the articles on this site, through to building online business and investing in stocks and property. The list is practically limitless.
The common factors between all of these are hard work and risk. The levels of each vary between different options and people need to discover what route suits their personality the best.
The essential message here is that the illusion of 'security' jobs provide is a honey trap. Risk and value-driven work are the only routes to a real successful, meaningful life. That lucky break isn't coming, but success could be with the right change of attitude. If the risk doesn't pay off, there are always other options.
If achieving meaningful goals matters to you, then it's time to break the mould imposed by the traditional career way of thinking and start pushing towards a life of real personal freedom.