There's these competing beliefs, "turn your hobby into a job and you'll never work a day in your life" vs. "turn your hobby into a job and you'll never enjoy it again"...
And I think I've finally worked out where the disconnect is: it's all about the agency you have in your work. Whether one or the other is true depends on whether you can make a living doing the thing you wanted to do anyway, or whether you're dragged along in a maelstrom of industry misery.
By this point I feel pretty safe concluding that for me and tech, it's mostly the latter, especially in more recent years.
@freakazoid Yeah, I have much the same experience. And there's a pretty clear point where my brain nopes out - the point where I realize that it's either steering into some miserable hype or harmful industry, or that they just don't care about the well-being of people.
My only thought by that point is "any effort I put into this is going towards something I despise".
@joepie91 Yes. This could not be more true
@joepie91 also in my case, I continue to pursue my hobby aggressively outside of work because I refuse to let it only be suffering
@joepie91 I think the main distinction between work and not work isn't even what you do in itself, but the fact that when it is work you have to do it regardless of whether you (still) want to or not. If you are lucky, what you want is enough; if you don't, you have to push through.
So for hobbies it is a question of how long I'd want to do it, and in what conditions... what would make me not want to do it, and how likely it is to happen. If I want to make games but only a certain kind of game, is that going to be viable or will I have to compromise. If I want to cook, do I want to do it full time or only occasionally. And so on.
@joepie91 a learned a depressing bit of psychology that suggests that the second one may be more than a belief... the principles of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. it is said that if an extrinsic reward is introduced, it causes the intrinsic motivation to go away.
If this is truly inevitable, I believe that the solution is simply to do different things. And in the framing you gave, that would mean having an environment that allows the freedom of diversifying tasks before burnout happens.
@joepie91 This is exactly why I get outright snippy at anyone who tells me that I could be rich if I sold my knitting and crochet. Writing for a living made me hate writing. Also with fiber arts you're competing with Walmart and Amazon selling literal slave labor. I've written a couple of patterns and those I might sell. But production line BS is not healthy for me and I find it insulting when people demand Michelin star food produced at McDonald's speed.
@joepie91 One of my favorite shows says this: keep your favorite thing as a hobby and do your second favorite thing as your job.
@joepie91 Same. I can't really find anything about computing I enjoy thinking about for any length of time anymore. I start diving into a topic that seems interesting, and before long my brain just nopes out. Part of that might just be age, but I think overall despair about tech is the biggest contributor.