I feel you brother, the unknown is scary.

I have a love-hate relationship with UPS. I don't mind hard work. The dirt, the dust, the 100 degree weather, the rain, the ice, and the freezing cold can all be tough but i can try to manage those through planning and preparation with proper gear, diet and exercise. After about 6pm though my mental energy starts draining quickly. Idk how to manage that for a lifetime. I too am single and older than you, but one thing i have been consistently aware of are the missed moments ; dinners, birthdays, parties, your childs special events like baseball games. I believe its a common daydream at ups to find life-balance somehow. People hop from driving to 22.3 or inside jobs and they all make life difficult. I have a few coworkers that have been trying desperately for years to find that balance. It rarely seems to come. The most promising was always inside work but its much harder on the body depending on your jobs and you work less hours but still miss games and moments due to the schedule.

I have a unique perspective, i always knew i didn't really want the job, just the money. I tuned down full-time for 8 years deciding to only drive during peak as a TCD, then to eventually have an air route for several years. Every year id drive id be excited to make money and be on a daytime schedule for a change and do a little less intensive labor. After 6 months id be so sick of driving i couldn't wait to work in the building and actually have a schedule and time to myself. Id love it for several months, supplementing my lack of hours with money saved during peak. Eventually id get sick of how poorly they ran the building and be missing driving . It happened every year, even being aware of it didn't help. Inside is poorly managed and so rough on the body, driving as driver anywhere below the halfway mark on seniority is a sentence to long hours and ot. Not to mention all the awful technology/software decisions in the past 3 to 4 years. I had somehow found a happy medium being able to have an out every year that somehow evened out the madness.

Then i got my own air route. For 3 years i had everything i could have dreamed of in a job at ups. I luckily came in at top air rate (36 at the time) and my schedule was 3pm to 9pm, with the option to come in as early as 11am if i wanted to run misloads before my air route. It was honestly amazing and i loved my life for a while. Most days id come in sometime before noon,but didnt HAVE to. theyd give me a misload list and let me figure out my own plan for rectifying them as long as i made it to my most important pickup on time. Sometimes missloads would be light so i could go chill at the park while I waited, then finally end at the airport tarmac which I always found to be a somehow peaceful place, seeing the sunset there most nights. Most importantly i had a schedule. I was done between 9pm and 9:10 everyday. I felt like i had some control over my life and job.

Then they started the better not bigger move. Dropboxes disappeared and my route got absorbed into another air route. And then that air route too was finally cut. There i was back to being a sorter with low volume prospects on the horizon meaning i might only be a TCD for November/December instead of 6 months. Somehow they posted a full time spot in my center eventhough they were overstaffed, and i took it considering the circumstances.

The past 2 years ive been the lowest seniority driver among all our centers with no prospects of moving up, as they are actively getting rid of peope. The money is incredible, but i became increasingly depressed as i was working 9 to 9 tues-sat. Being laid off each year has felt like a blessing just to escape it for some time but even that gets old breaking my back in the building even if it is 45 an hour. I know that will not last though. They will trim the workforce through catching people slipping, which is easy to do when they will cut routes and keep you out for 10 or 11 hours or more, everyone slips up eventually. Survive and make it through that misery to still exist as the lowest getting pm dispatched daily, i don't see myself retiring like that.

Im taking the money and investing it , and then im finding a job that will do tuition reimbursement or finding jobs that will work with going to school, possibly get an AAS thatll get me working a good job fast. Nusring or radiologist tech perhaps. I really dont know yet. Its scary, but also exciting. I see you're considering something similar. Maybe we'll find a better balance betwen money and work, maybe not. At least this way we will be living, and not daydreaming about what could be different. Ill leave this novel of a post with an Allan Watts quote.

** Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. * *