money: a crushing disappointment.

When I was a child, I grew up in a loving Christian home.
I went to Sunday school every Sunday, from kiddie church to youth service and care groups.
I was taught many things, many values, and it has shaped the way I live my life, how I view the world.

Of these things, I was taught that the love of money is the root of all evil (1 Tim 6:10).
I was taught that you couldn't serve both money and God (Matt 6:24).
At a young age, this made perfect sense.
Money makes you greedy. Greed makes it hard for you to serve God wholeheartedly, because greed makes it about personal gain, and there will be no sacrificial love.
And it seems sort of true, money corrupts, so I came to the natural conclusion that money is bad.
This has not been a bad thing for me. Until now.

So it is fast approaching the end of my undergraduate degree, and as a soon-to-be arts graduate, there is a need to further my education to be relevant in this money-hungry soul-destroying world.
However, my personal choices of career paths are not legitimate to that of my parents.
I understand that they mean only the best for me, I understand that they want me to live a comfortable life, to have a well paying job, a nice house, a car that doesn't look like it's going to fall apart, to have stable finances such that I would be self-sustainable. Comfortable. I get it.

But it crushes me that at the end of the day, the success of a career in an Asian society is dependent on how much money the job brings in. Why? Why can't people see that sometimes, it's not about the money?

What if I chose a job that gave me more personal happiness and lifetime satisfaction and less money, than a job that has huge payouts but destroys my soul?

Which do you prefer?

Maybe I'm just too painfully idealistic. ):
The discrepancy between my formed values and the way of the world confuses me so much internally.
Now I'm left with, where did it go wrong?