Maybe I'm in the same atypical group as Carmack (a sentence I never thought I'd utter) but during a normal work week, my idea of relaxing is things like studying statistics, product development, numerical methods to solve differential equations, history, etc.

This is stuff most people would call "work" because it does take effort, it makes me a better developer and much of it ties somewhat directly into problems I'm facing at work. But for me it's winding down after work, and recharging for the next day.

Sometimes I have so much to do at work that I need to just read fiction or play around in the darkroom to relax. But this is not the norm -- it's happened twice in the last decade, and lasted for about a month.

So for the question of how many days I can do it? On average 1795.

Out of curiosity, how would you rate on a scale of 1%-100% the extent to which your professional work aligns with what you want to do professionally later in your career?

Great question. Considering all possible lines of work, maybe 99.5 %? But that's a little like saying I share 98 % of my DNA with chimpanzees -- maybe those last 2 % are the parts of interest.

Considering just the general area of IT, maybe 80 %? I get to do product development which is my interest, but there are also many things which I would like to be different, like purpose of product, organisational size, leadership philosophies, etc.

Now -- why do you ask?

I'm curious to hear about people who have found themselves in such a great place professionally.

I can work all waking hours on passion projects (including the boring grind - not just the infatuation and ideation phase) as long as it's self directed. Finding work opportunities that aren't orthogonal to long term areas of interest and don't feel like accumulating useless experience and constructing a parallel career is hard.

>Sometimes I have so much to do at work that I need to just read fiction or play around in the darkroom to relax. But this is not the norm -- it's happened twice in the last decade, and lasted for about a month.

Ok but you're literally describing a burnout cycle. Some people would prefer to just skip that part and have a completely sustainable working pace.

No. Having so much to do at work for a brief period that I choose not to take on extra work is not burnout. Calling it that would insult every person suffering from actual burnout.