I had an old friend years ago who worked in a paper mill. He had been there for over 30 years in all kinds of positions and at the time he was on the verge of becoming a manager with a desk job and big responsibilities. We told him to avoid the management job and to just stick to whatever he was doing until retirement which wasn't that far away from him at the time. Management would have meant more pay, more perks, more money ... but also more responsibility and more opportunities for people to blame him if anything went wrong. Besides, he was making a ton of money in the position he had at the time. We all told him to just stay where he was and he did. He was fine, he had enough money, he had enough responsibilities and he was in a great team of people he had known all his life and he was a senior level worker that everyone looked up to anyway. Within five years of making that decision, he was diagnosed with cancer and he died shortly after. But during all that time, he was happy at work, made a fortune for his family and he got to spend his free time with his family and friends. If he had taken the management job, he would have gone through tons of stress, and probably been blamed for a dozen things and a high likelihood he would have been fired and lost his benefits. It was a company tactic to place long term workers in management positions, give them too much responsibility, and get the excuse to fire them so that the company wouldn't have to pay into an expensive retirement package. It was a high risk position.
Moral of the story is ... if you get to place in life where you get to have some measure of control and you are comfortable ... stick with it because it might not get any better than that.
