If you want a career in academia then you need a PhD. Otherwise you can't really go much further than associate teaching fellow in many institutions. No department I've ever worked in would employ someone without a PhD as a lecturer. It's a bit different in social sciences and humanities, and probably even more so in creative arts, and professional courses (nursing, etc.) will put a greater priority on professional accreditation than academic qualifications, but there seems to be a move in the direction of most academics' being required to have PhDs.
I finished mine in 1991 (medical sciences field) and wanted to try to get into publishing or industrial research after that. Ended up in universities, though, and am still in HE 27 years later, albeit in a teaching & management role with no lab research for the past 8 years or so. Now a senior lecturer with salary in the upper fifties but that's obviously with many years' experience. On the standard pay scale (outside London) you'd expect a minimum of £32,236 in an academic role once you've passed probation (usually 3 years).
I did my PhD part-time while working as a research technician then research assistant so that the institution would pay my tuition fees and a salary. I couldn't have done it on any other basis, and I think it's immoral to expect students to fund themselves through PhDs if their work contributes to the institution's research output and grant income (although I'm not sufficiently senior to be able to do anything to stop it). I had a relatively easy time of it, as I was in a well funded group with a very eminent supervisor. This meant I didn't have to panic about funding running out, as he would always be able to find money for another year. I did have to do a lot of extra jobs around the lab, though, including ordering supplies and maintaining equipment, and had to support a string of visiting researchers from other countries. When I say "relatively easy", though, I mean relative to people who live in constant fear of their funding running out before they've finished. It was very hard work for 5½ years, and I considered giving up several times. But you have to get used to this. I don't believe most academics work as hard as they say they do (the fact they have so much time to complain about how hard they have to work suggests they don't) but there is an awful lot to be done all the time and there are particular times of year when you wake up in the morning - or sometimes in the middle of the night - and can't believe it's possible for you to get everything done by when it's needed.
As others have stated, research is almost always 80% frustration and 20% revelation. It can seem like you take forever to get things working properly, validated, calibrated, etc., and then have a fairly short period in which to generate useful data. And then you have to write it up, which quite a lot of PhD students really, really struggle with. This is partly because they can't write - it's fairly easy to get a good bachelor's degree in a science subject without being able to write coherently - but more because they don't really understand why they've done the work they've done. As an examiner I've made quite a few PhD students spend several months rewriting their theses because their answer to many questions in the viva about why they did something a particular way was "because my supervisor told me to." You're supposed to be proving you are capable of becoming an independent researcher, so this is never an acceptable answer. Even if you did do it because your supervisor told you to, you should understand why your supervisor told you to.