Fediverse

Yes, that's a trap. When you make the thing you love into a job. You blur the lines of whether it still is meaningful or something you do because you love it. You are no longer guided the meaningful, but whether your bloodgivers finds it valuable. In smaller and larger ways your path is steered away from the meaningful.

Hopefully you love enough different things that you can do some of them for work, and some of them as hobbies.

Seems like an odd place to post this but I'll bite.

Even the things I love doing involve work. If I want to do some sewing I still need to tidy up before and afterwards, for example, or spend time pinning stuff (and then taping up the numerous stab wounds). It's a bit reductive.

Instead I try to get paid for things that require minimal emotional "work" from me - that is to say, things that don't leave me sapped of energy to work on my passion projects. I don't dislike what I am paid to do but I'm not super enthused about it. That means that when I'm done working I've still got the creative juice to work on stuff I actually want to do.

If instead I have to spend my working days pushing myself through stuff then I tend to be left with nothing in the tank, even if I still have time left at the end of the day. Instead I get paid to do something I'm good at but that doesn't usually involve extended periods of advanced problem solving or frequent uphill battles of effort (there's always a bit, of course, it's not a perfect solution!). That isn't to say what I do is easy, but much of the stuff involved is stuff I've been doing for twenty years so is comparatively easy for me.