Having had both dream jobs and jobs from hell the real difference is the difference between waking up and saying "Ah ->-bleeped-<-, I have to go to work today" and waking up and saying "Damn it, I don't work today."
Beyond that I favor work that:
- is not confined to a desk but offers a bunch of different activities and work conditions (indoors/outdoors, physical/mental)
- is not, like most jobs are, basically Groundhog Day
- is meaningful in some way to the human existence (it's about more than just making money*)
- Also part of any dream job is having two dream jobs so you are free to choose and can not be threatened
- But I've found out that nothing is more important than who you work with. Any job can be great if you are part of a team of people who really like working together, and any job can be a job from hell if you have to work with lousy people (defined by me as any one of the following: lazy, entitled, disinterested, bitter, people who can't leave their non-job life at the door, no sense of humor**, psycho - hard to say which is worse, a psycho boss or a psycho coworker, I've had both and its a toss up - poseurs, whiners, snivelers, slackers, people with either superiority or inferiority complexes - equally annoying in totally different ways - no sense of responsibility, and no sense of working on a team as part of a team.)
*Though that's always going to be a part of it, I never forget the old Nick Lowe lines that what we are doing is:
Music for money
records for bucks
playing for pennies
singing for sucks - oh yeah
** In the long term nothing kills the work spirit quite like these people do. The reason that a lot of jobs suck is because someone like this was there before you were.
