Can a high salary compensate for a lack of job satisfaction?
It’s possible.
But in my case, it didn’t work out.
I was a mountain rescue worker, and the pay was low.
I worked in Norway, and even here, the pay for this job is low. Wanting to earn more, I ambitiously became the director of a major company’s Eastern European branch.
With the right academic background, getting that job wasn’t too challenging.
Additionally, I spoke Norwegian fluently and had a good grasp of Danish and Swedish, making it suitable for working in a Scandinavian company, mainly staffed in Poland.
Financially, I became comfortable and made a lot of money.
But it only lasted three years.
That first winter, I saw my fellow rescuers digging through the snow, searching for the missing in an avalanche on TV, and I was already on the verge of breaking.
By summer, I watched them descend from helicopters.
I continued to feel guilty for not being there.
Overall, I never felt I was in the right place.
I didn’t become close to anyone at work, except for one person from the Faroe Islands who, like me, never participated in the company’s social activities.
I never felt like I was doing something necessary.
In fact, I felt my work was meaningless, unimportant, and needed by no one.
No one was waiting for the results of my work.
On top of that, it was boring.
Sitting, surrounded by walls, looking out at a parking lot was incredibly frustrating.
“The conversations by the coffee machine” did not reflect the world I grew up in, and I had nothing to share with my colleagues.
In the third winter, during a company ski trip to the Dolomites in Italy, I saw the women from the accounting department wearing the latest, unused high-end ski wear, comparing it to my old Gore-Tex gear with hand-repaired holes. At that moment, I realized I didn’t belong in this crowd.
Moreover, they drank heavily and smoked marijuana.
They couldn’t ski at all.
Not at all.
They knew nothing about skiing.
I’m not an exceptional skier, but as a mountain rescuer, I’m really good at it.
I ski at a high level.
Everyone in this profession does, neither better nor worse. Almost 60 years old, I’ve been skiing since I was 4, sometimes over 100 days a season, so I can’t be bad at it.
Back to the Dolomites, on that company trip.
That night, I saw the completely drunk company executives barging into an Italian restaurant, singing, “Hey So Cold, Oh Mighty Mountain’s Sun…” and that night, I submitted my resignation.
I lost an income of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but mentally, I became healthy.
So, to such a question, I would answer:
I’ll never do it again.
No amount of money will make me do it.
Now, I have the privilege of seeing this view every day from my “office”:
I’ll add a little more. I lacked the courage before, but a conversation with Mr. Marek Wesowski made me decide to add something:
In May of 2004 or 2005, my friend Fred, who worked at the Oslo Stock Exchange, had become a star, had a radio show, and received a salary and bonus of 3 million kroner a year.
One day, he carried a banana box from the grocery store (like a cheap American movie, but this is true), packed his things into the box at the office, declared that he was done with work for the day, and from now on, he would ski.
He hasn’t been seen since.
Fred was an excellent skier since childhood, but compared to thousands of other skiers, he wasn’t particularly exceptional.
Now, he’s a star in ski touring, not in the corporate world:
Feeling the wind on his face at noon, the moisture of the mist in the morning, pulling a woman out of her sleeping bag after a day of walking in the mountains, and inhaling the scent of her sun-kissed skin on a warm summer morning…
Or the frozen air at minus ten degrees, with fresh snow gleaming, inviting carving, these are irreplaceable by any high salary.
The sound of snow whispering under the skis at sunset… The temperature drops at sunset, the snow that melted during the day starts to freeze, becoming icy. The sound when you break through that snow with your skis, the sound when we go out searching for ptarmigans…
I’ve grown older, but I want to say: Don’t get caught up in the corporate system.
The world is waiting for you.
With women and children, with tents, forget about corporations.
Amen.