I’ve heard this before, but haven’t found it the case personally. I started work in manual jobs and messing around with computers was my evening hobby. Many years later, I now do IT as a job (partly from gaining skills from that hobby) but also have continued it as my primary thing to do when I’m not working. I was worried when I changed into this career that my hobby would become too much like work to be enjoyable, but I’ve not found that.
Is this the same for other people, or am I unusual in doing something in my off hours that’s so close to my career? I’m genuinely curious to know if others have found the same or whether they found another hobby.
I was really passionate about math for years, and I spent most of my free time on it. When I got to grad school and I had to do it to survive my passion dried up. I think it became harder to have fun when I knew I wouldn’t be free to put a project down if I wanted to, and when math stopped being fun I stopped being good at it.
I passed all my coursework and exams but I burned out before finishing my dissertation and dropped out seven years into my phd program. It’s six years later and I still barely touch it. I passed qualifying exams in algebraic topology and today if you asked me to compute a homology group I’d be clueless.
I’m not going to discount that monetizing your passions works for some people, but the experience of finding out you’re not one of those people is soul-crushing.