Blimey, this discussion goes back so far I think I've had another complete career since it started!

I've always distinguished between career and job - in my head anyway. A career is something I've been interested in, qualified for and earn my lifestyle through. It's an activity that, at some level, is what I am. On that basis I've had two careers throughout my working life. No 1 was working in a research lab throughout my 20's / early 30's. The second was when life opened up for me in my mid 30's (post divorce!) and I started a photography business. At one level I never really saw myself as a photographer but I was good at it, it paid well (for a time anyway) and it certainly opened doors into a whole load of other stuff / places I'd never have been able to otherwise access.

Jobs though, they're activities I take on (usually but not always) for monetary reasons. I don't have to enjoy them (although some have been great fun) but they have to pay and I judge whether to take them on on the basis of stress vs reward. On that basis I've had somewhere around 20-25 jobs over the course of my life.

Some of them have been bizarre - I've been an axe and knife throwing instructor. Some of them have been slave labour - picking potatoes by hand as a child to help out with the family finances. Some of them have been 'rewarding' - I met one of the loves of my life as a stand-in Xmas postman, and some of them have been a waste of time - a 'fender bender' crash investigator for the car insurance world. They paid a flat rate and I quickly worked out if the car was more than three miles away (they almost always were) it wasn't worth the effort of going. Annoyingly one of the post retirement jobs I quite enjoyed doing has not survived Covid so, for the second time in my life, I've been made redundant. No big deal for me but some of the other people for whom it was more career than job will be far more badly affected.

I'm trying to work out now what I'll look towards doing after Covid is no longer an issue. I'm not sure I want another zero hrs / min wage level job - unless there's some other interest in it anyway but temperamentally I'm not the sort just to sit around in retirement with an endless supply of box sets and a big tv. I've been writing travel books (for my own amusement) over the last 10yrs or so - just finishing number 5 - and I might self publish them on Amazon or somewhere out of interest. One sale and that would be another tick in the jobs I've learnt money from list.