[hbn]

There's a line you have to draw somewhere on what kind of interests you can pursue as a career. A person who is full-time writing bad poetry that nobody wants to read provides about as much value as someone who majors in Drinking and Recreational Drugs.

So I guess if we're talking about a utopia where all our food and clean drinking water and maintenance and every other essential service is perfectly automated with no need for human intervention, then sure. Pursue whatever you want. As it is, it makes more sense for people to pay for stuff that they find is generating some value. If your passion is producing something really good and people want it, they'll pay you. But that's not the case for most people.

[Apocryphon]

> A person who is full-time writing bad poetry that nobody wants to read

The only difference between that and our own industry is that there are plenty of people full-time writing bad code that no one wants to use, except there are procurement departments, execs, and the like who ring up million-dollar contracts for that software, leading to long-term vendor lock-in.

[hbn]

Hey, it ain't a perfect system but that's a lot of people working jobs that keep them housed and fed. I don't see how that could work if all those people just did their hobbies all day.

[Apocryphon]

The larger point is that industrial civilization (or post-industrial) is probably at a point where you can feed, clothe, and shelter every human being on the planet, but our moribund systems do not permit it to. Hence the rise of critiques such as Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, and the rise of alternate proposals such as UBI, federal job guarantees, even revival in interest in land value tax. As William Gibson said, "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

We probably could support a system where we have a creative class of people doing hobbies all day- after all, we did in past-industrial epochs with wealthy aristocratic patrons and so forth. But we don't because there's not sufficient incentive to build that world, yet. In the meantime we get a lot of corporate make-work and capital being thrown away at enterprises that probably don't actually create lasting value.

So what I'm getting at that what you deride as profitless passion is low value because of entirely arbitrary reasons. There's a ton of bad enterprise software out there, to pick one thing that's monetarily highly-valued, yet they don't seem to provide humanity with lasting value.