Work ruins everything. I helped a friend set up a dance studio and it ruined dancing for me for a little bit. Some career advisors say "If your hobby is your job you'll never work a day in your life". Bad advice IMO.

Now if you could figure out how to do it without either customers or bosses...

Best advice I ever got: Do what you like, not what you love.

If you do what you love, what you love becomes work.

Is you do what you like, then you like your work, go home, and have energy for the things you love.

I am a non native English speaker. Whats the difference b/w like and love ? Both seem synonymous to me. If i love a person or thing i definitely like them.

Usually a difference in intensity. Love is what one feels towards their dog. Like is how they feel about their brand of dog food.

In this case, I would say they mean take a job doing something you enjoy but aren't so invested in that you will resent doing it the way your boss wants it done or feel like you lost something when you get home and don't want to do more of it for fun.

Some programmers write code at work and then do side projects on top of that. Other people enjoy knowing a little code, but would find it burdensome to write production quality code everyday. For them, programming is a hobby. Other people are content to program for their job and then leave it at the office and stop there.

People who have a hobby they love sometimes find their enjoyment is completely ruined if they try to turn it into a business. Loving something on weekends and evenings doesn't necessarily translate to being able to do it happily all day, everyday for work when other people are calling the shots and telling you how to do it.

I am a native English speaker. I would I agree with you that loving something does mean that you like it as well. "Loving" is a subset of "liking".

I would say that, in this context, liking something means it is satisfying to you beyond the average activity. While loving something means that it is something you consider a part of your life - something that you feel you couldn't do without.

So working at a job which involves something you love can sap the joy out of it, because you end up doing that thing not for you, but for other people.

Generally, the strength of the affection, with "love" being stronger than "like". There are other differences between "love" and "like", but this is the main (and relevant to this thread) one.

Having something you love removed would cause emotional pain, having something you like removed would be like meh.

This is great, thanks for sharing.

I think it is not that work necessarily ruins everything. The problem is turning your hobby into a job means turning your hobby into a business, which is were in my opinion most of the friction comes in.

For programming the difference between what I like to do and what I can easily get paid to do is not that big, so it makes sense to combine as a career advice. But for hobbies like music or painting, unless you get extremely lucky, it is whole lot harder, takes much longer and requires to make much more compromises to get to the point where it is really fulfilling.

I only ever tried the latter semi-professionally. And it was already a soul crushing experience at times.

Exactly. "Start a highly competitive small business and bet your entire livelihood on it, but the product is something you love" is pretty different than just getting to do what you love all day.

For it to make sense, at a minimum you have to also like and be pretty good at running a small business in addition to the thing that you love.

I’ve gone with “someone who turned a hobby into a career now needs a new hobby”

My best jobs have been at places where I simply did not care about the thing we were selling - in one case I was very far outside the target market, in another, just not something I use or think about much without a reason like income.

Several theories, probably something to each of them. The one I think explains the most is that if nobody is "passionate" about whatever you're doing, then you can approach things analytically, instead of having a layer of emotional investment gumming things up.

I've seen a few takes on this mindset.

Personally, jobs that I thought the concepts/industry were interesting to me, but the work was far enough removed that it didn't sour me to the industry have worked out well. e.x. If you're a car guy, working on the software for an inspection company isn't too bad, you still come out liking cars, and wind up with some interesting stories.

OTOH, I've spoken with colleagues that have a bit more nuanced mindset: If they don't care about the product, that's fine, but they won't work for a company that sells a product they know they don't like, they won't do it.

I think having more than one thing in your life is important. I mean, I like what I am doing at my job. There's not many things (maybe except "being a multi-billionaire"?) I'd do instead as work. But there are other things in my life that I like to do off work. Won't want to do them as work, but definitely good as something other than work. Being able to switch and rest is the key, I think.

If you make your hobby to your job, then you have no hobby anymore, it's your job.

Programming was my hobby when I was 11yo. 38 years later, I still can't believe they pay me to do this shit, it's awesome. Also, I have new hobbies now.

Thank god I work in fintech. I guess nobody does that shit as a hobby.

Robert Fripp: "The concern of the musician is music. The concern of the professional musician is business."

So true. My father tells the story of when he was a kid and got a job loading bubble gum machines with bubble gum. Apparently they told him he could eat as much bubble gum as he wanted which blew his mind. Of course then after the first week he couldn't stand the stuff.

I had to make very tricky ad which required synchronization of flash "videos" in multiple browser windows, before js frameworks really started. To this day I hate "Hit the road jack" song.

Doesn't ruin gamedev though.