Crazy indeed. Grass is always greener then? Your 70k in bioinformatics is something I'd drop my current job in a heartbeat for!
I'm very interesting in knowing what are your motivations to switch towards "something less altruistic". Could you share some more details? Maybe it really is that no matter what you do, no matter how meaningful, it'll always become a boring chore? Maybe I didn't have an meaningful job yet, so I'm not disillusioned?
I think the best way to describe the issue is to consider why people claim being in healthcare is bad (try googling around for whether it's worth being a doctor because you feel called to help people). Healthcare (and biotech feeds into healthcare) is very heirarchial, so advancement gets blocked. There are better ways to find meaning than the field you work in. Like all technology jobs it's viewed as grunt work compared to MD/PI/regulation visionaries. My main motivation is cash and experience that are difficult to get in an underfunded and sinking industry; genomics is really struggling to float as science progresses to new fields not out of the ninety's. I feel like someone stuck in a third world country watching America glitter into the sunset. Sure I make very interesting products but it is boiled down into the same day to day mundane work, but for less pay. We might get a thank you letter from someone thanking us for extending their life and that is awesome for someone like me who is not their doc. But I'm like a firefighter- utterly unappreciated by everyone else no matter what interesting piece I work on. And it's hard to save much for retirement. I haven't felt the void you feel. I would rather make a less drastic but equally important impacts on people in my spare time like as a coach- think of Maslow's heirarchy of needs and how healthcare inverts parts of it.
I see in this thread lots of people who have their security level established and are now looking to fill their social level. I feel inverted on the subject and let's just say Maslow's order matters.
I'm very interesting in knowing what are your motivations to switch towards "something less altruistic". Could you share some more details? Maybe it really is that no matter what you do, no matter how meaningful, it'll always become a boring chore? Maybe I didn't have an meaningful job yet, so I'm not disillusioned?