This is why I have made it a point to consider my activities that most people would call "hobbies" as my primary and most important activities. What I do for a living is secondary to everything else, and I only do it to give me the funding I need for my real work.

not to beat the constant drum of anti-capitalism, but this is the effect that we get when every company is for-profit and massive growth. curiosity doesn't have a direct path to profit, and so most people are stuck working on moving metrics, and nothing else.

one can make the argument "well you have free time on the side, just do it then if youre truly interested" but realistically most people, myself included, are completely braindead after work. i have a lot of interests and hobbies but i can only find 2-3 hours on the weekends to get into them because i am mentally drained and shot after a day of work full of (mostly) pointless meetings. i don't mind work, i NEED work. but, i also need it to be fulfilling, motivating and the function of those is to me at least, seeing a positive effect on society. i imagine most people deep down inside want to help the world in some way.

this is the life we've created for ourselves in the USofA. R&D/curiosity is reserved for certain demographics, and that's not even saying ONLY the privileged or the rich, that includes young people who have energy and drive before it gets hammered in by <insert corporation>, or the people who are willing to load up on methamphetamines, or the select few people who truly are amazing at having a 9-5 and being cognitively healthy enough to do brain intensive tasks after work.

the point i'm making here is that we are frogs in boiling water. i remember the days (a decade ago) when I was working and exploring new personal frontiers of interest. Projects at the startups i worked on were exciting and interesting even if they were failures. Nowadays I work at <bigcorp> where every work stream is defined by some OKR. Product people have moats and act like feudal warlords. Everything is resume driven development, and the common theme here is more money/income and ultimately capitalistic greed being shoved down everyone's throats. It all sucks. Our culture in America revolves around money and greed, and it's getting worse and worse. Everything glows a certain shade of gray, and soon we'll all be indistinguishable from gray goo

As I've gotten more senior my need for coding has not gone away, so I may even be doing more opensource coding now, on my free time.

Coding C++ at work all day, maybe not C++ all night at home.

Meetings all day at work? Yeah, I still have code that needs to come out.