You know the old saying, ‘Get a job doing the thing you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life!’?

That’s really bad advice. Get a job doing something you like, but not your passion. If you burn out on your passion, you’ve lost the thing that brings you joy.

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I'm very sorry to hear that. I've loved biology since I was a child, and my graduation in biology only fueled that love even further.

What it did not fix however was the absolute dread of seeing the natural world a hair strand away from collapse. You'd think some professor would offer you calming words or a path to the future, but guess what, even the top experts are just as panicked as we are.

I used to love computers... still do, but good god do I hate tech companies and all this shit it's spawned. My last remaining line of defense mentally is that at work we have shifted to a mostly Windows environment, and my interests lie with the Unix side of things.

all numbers are imaginary

It's more complex than that

Chat, is this ℝ?

I love 3D art, and I want to make games eventually. I remember using my cracked copy of 3D Studio MAX to experiment and try things "just to see real quick!" when I was supposed to be doing more boring homework like report writing.

I even kept my obsession after a community college semester with the most joy-killing professor on the subject you could ever meet.

I dropped out of college because of life and found Blender, and kept learning as much as I could because I thought it was my ticket to a real job that didn't involve "How may I help you?" every single day. It was going to be my way out.

Well, just a year or so ago I FINALLY got paid to do a freelance character sculpt. And...It took way longer than I hoped, I hammered on it like every single day, and I haven't touched Blender since wrapping that project.

I really want to get back to modeling, but it made me realize I definitely don't want to be an "industry" 3D artist making stuff to someone else's exacting specifications for money. I still would love to sell a game on Steam or something some day.

...But I put a lot of skill points into these skills already, following what I love...so I'm kinda lost. Business and work is a realm that just makes me nauseous and anxious to think about as the water keeps rising, so to speak.

So I guess I'm saying: don't make the thing you love your lifeline to surviving capitalist society, because unless that thing is "making money", doing it for money or clientelle chokes the joy out of most human endeavors.

I am a first year student in electronics engineering.

I loved watching fun youtube videos on math (ex. 3blue1brown) but was not fond of high school math, due to the lack of proofs and deeper understanding.

Nowadays the stuff I used to watch for fun turned into my job and I couldn't be happier. Finally getting to do real science feels good.

Unlike high school math, I loved high school physics but that one was mostly due to my way of learning. Which is with lots of visualisations in my head and lots of calculus to prove the formulas they made us memorize.

These days, even though my books give me the proof right away, I sometimes don't look at the proof because I miss the magic of fiddling with calculus for hours to find it myself.

I love computers but I felt like my love would diminish if I picked CS as a major. Mostly due to the monotonous nature of the job environment. But i am pretty sure my love for electronics is undying and unlike computing I have heaps to learn about electronics so I picked it.

Calling academia "evil incarnate" for that is a bit much.

I work in what a lot of people would call a calling. I'm extremely happy coding, writing and doing research. I got a PHD and even that didn't kill the joy I get doing it. I work in a big fortune 500 company doing it and that didn't kill my joy either.

My biggest piece of advice for people afraid to get jobs within their interests is: take care of yourself. You've got to find other interests and stabilize yourself when you're drained. There's a lot exhaustion overlapping with joy suck here that has nothing to do with no longer enjoying your interest.

Sometimes you're drained from the job - because it's a job. Or grad school.

Or the skill / interest is genuinely hard and not as playful as before because you got to a really difficult part, like super advanced mathematics. That's true with a lot of skills. You go far enough, and it's genuinely difficult to learn, understand, and grow. And then it's up to you if you can still find your passion in it or not.

Skill issue. Learning to love an academic discipline beyond the flashy YouTube video level and into the depths of actually doing it every day involves, among other things, a lot of work, such as when you reconceptualize what it's all about and where the beauty lies.

"I fucking love science" and loving science are different games.

hobbies becomes

That'll trigger some people's hobby.

If they've not already, for too long, been forced to correct grammar.

Grad school really took a heavy toll on my mental health, but it didn't take my love of the field. Diving into the literature on plant development was... Like, I would go for a walk outside and look at all the foliage and it was like I could see the code of the matrix. Auxin flowing along the edges, pooling to form leaves and lobes and then diving down into the interior to form vascular connections. CUC expressing in the primordia then hollowing out to define the boundaries. PINs relocalizing to reenforce the auxin flow. Ad/abaxial gene cohorts defining the leaf polarity and thereby orientation. It was like some wonderful second sight that showed me worlds that had once been hidden to me. It was this almost transcendental experience and I've never forgotten it even as I've moved on other fields.

I've never had quite the same experience since, but I still have found that, to me, learning what's behind the mystery often makes it more magical, not less

For me it was physics. Was interested in it as a teen, studied it for a degree, and though I did well in it -- I just could not look at it as this fun thing. It would even make me angry to read physics posts on reddit where people shared their enthusiasm for certain concepts.

Then I kept reading reddit, had my mind repeatedly blown by things that I thought I understood but clearly didn't because I was just doing rote memorization to pass exams, and I began to enjoy it again. Now I love it, but it really is amazing what being forced to learn something for little-to-no encouragement other than an exam mark can do to sap your enthusiasm for something

I discovered at a young-ish age that the adage of "do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life" is absolute, unabashed bullshit.

As someone who loves science.

I am so glad i decided to pursue video game development as higher education rather then a scientific field.

Granted the illusions in games are gone, every game is now a dull collection of mechanics and The gap between what modern games are snd how i know they could be is depressingly vast.

But at least i can still enjoy hour long deep dives into quantum mechanics and golden ratio. Definitely a good tradeoff.

For me studying for my master's was the more fun part than studying for my bachelor's. The bachelor's studies included a lot of obligatory subjects that were less interesting to me, or choices that didn't include any fun options.

In the master's studies we were free to specialize much more. There was lots of work, but it was interesting. Like building a small OS. Or reading the newest networking papers and discussing their merit. Or implementing congestion control for ourselves, and playing around with ideas on how to maximise its efficiency.

Now I'm a network engineer at an ISP and things are much more practice focused and I had to learn a ton that wasn't taught at uni, or was taught to electrical engineers instead of me, to get into things, but it's still fun and interesting.

I don't know what the difference is, or how to get my outcome instead of the 4channers, but I just wanted to share an opposite anecdote.

Uh... I did learn about imaginary numbers in high school. It was part of the ranking test to get into uni, even.

Work is work

I used to like math too

when were were counting lil squares on the paper and when were awarded a piece of candy or one of those smelly erasers

but then they were like "hey why don't you just solve this simple problem? its about identifying perpendicular lines on a graph to find an angle measure in a right triangle. but were not gonna tell you what the number is. hell, were not even gonna give you a graph. or a pencil. or a paper. you're gonna have to make your own paper and pencil. and here's a essay for some fucking reason, cause this is math and you need to write a fucking 31 page ESSAY about TRIANGLES!!!!!!!!!!"

that was math for me :)

Academia killed my love of reading. I can't even read for pleasure anymore