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.
@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.
@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".
