A lecturing job gives you a comfortable lifestyle to pursuing other leisurely things, but not a comfortable pay, at least not as fast as the people around you. An academic career builds very slowly, when compared with corporate ones - promotion in respectable universities is based on academic papers published in high tier journals and no. of graduated postgrad students. I cannot help but feel bitter sometimes when I see people much younger and with "lesser" education easily earning double or triple my salary as a lecturer. And over time, the passion of transmitting knowledge will probably be replaced with the responsibility of artificially producing exam results that fit some prescribed statistical measures.