Is it Ever too Early to Pursue our Passion?

This is my first post, and I’m hoping blogging will also help myself sort the whirlwind of thoughts and questions constantly running through my head.  I have a blog on tumblr as well, but I'm experimenting with blogger too.

I have already been here for eight months and it has nearly been a year since I finished my undergraduate.  There are five months left here in Korea until I am free to take the next leap in life.  Time is going by so fast, and as a planner for the future (which sometimes causes me unnecessary angst) I feel torn between the options that lie ahead of me, but with a sense of urgency to make a choice.

Once again I am battling with the haunting question of “what do I do next?”

I am just a mere twenty-two years of age, so young, with so much life left to live, but sometimes with the pressures of society norms, I don’t feel that I have the room to move.  I’m pressed between the walls of letting myself follow my desire to experience all that I can versus going back to the U.S. (where the job market frankly SUCKS right now), putting some sort of roots down and starting a career in hopes to be able to make a decent living for myself.

Many of us hope for some kind of stability.  Stability in the sense of which security offers us, and often times in this world today, security is equated to money and financial stability.  Someday I want a family, stable career, to be financially independent, and to provide for my children.  However, in order to find a happy and healthy relationship with someone, I need to be happy with myself and have followed my dreams and accomplish some of my own goals first.

There are many successful and accomplished people who were the lawyers, the doctors, the accountants…who chose the money route first and later in life quit those jobs and pursued their true passion.  Do I wait that long?
A friend advised me-

make money now, in your youth - so that you can do those things and the things you want to do in life easily, later on…

Is that how it has to be?  Is it really all about the money? Must I go back and settle into a career which I was somewhat “trained” for (a.k.a. what I majored in).
I’d like to hear stories of people’s successes and failures, people who did it one way or the other.

• The ones who waited and chose the money first, and decades later in life broke away and chased their true heart’s desire
• Those who didn’t let the worry about money cloud their vision and went to chase their dreams/search for passion and found it
• The ones who did it, but were unable to attain stability later on when needed

What regrets do these people have?  What advice do they have? - for people like me, people in their twenties searching for their calling somewhere between the rest of all the chaos; between the textbooks, the beers and jag bombs, the messy relationships, or some bad professor’s spitting problem..

I have said it many times to friends, to peers, but nowadays I’m finding myself having to try to convince me that YES we are young!  We have time to live, time to make mistakes - some say that the twenties should be the best times of our lives…WHOA, put the breaks there for a second…The choices we make now are some of the key/most important. If we want a marriage, and a family, by early 30’s, do we really have that much time to get the stable career/money ball rollin?