> crank out even more hours of work to have an outlet for your creative/professional ideas... or don't, enjoy life, but fall behind and feel appropriately guilty for abandoning your creative impulses.

Hopefully following your creative impulses is enjoyable...? And doesn't feel like work...?

That's wishful thinking if your job requires you to do the same physical activity as your hobby (typing, reading a backlit monitor). There are real physical limitations to our human bodies. Plus we require a range of experiences - more "creativity time" may conflict with family or rest or fitness - there are always opportunity costs.

Maybe this is the story of an embarrassment of material wealth. The idea that we should find our job as our main source of identity and fulfillment might be culturally whats wrong, rather than the system of work.

In the past, most people weren’t dilettantes chasing creative pursuits that also paid the bills, yet I’m assuming they managed to have fulfilling, meaningful lives.

How is this different from any other profession? I am sure garbage collectors go home and indulge in other fun things. Yes corporations are loosing out as they are unable to utilize your creativity but let us face it, corporations (and wall st) cares more about mitigating risk no?

I go home and write code for fun (and intense challenges), play sport, play music etc. If I had to pick work that gave me these id have to take a massive pay cut. Yep it is "sad" but I think the bigger loss is for the CO than it is for you. Id even say (if I was being selfish) that work is so damn boring and unchallenging that it actually fills me with energy that I get to take home :). Being broke may not do that for me !

I assume you're not being facetious. This is obviously different from e.g. garbage collection because garbage collectors are not actively involved in designing and optimizing their own schedule.

No I was not. I would have thought it would have been worse for GCs as they had tighter and fixed schedules? At least with software engineer we (ignoring all this rto nonsense) have flexibility. My point was that work pays you mostly because you are working on someone else's dreams (unless you get very lucky) so there is less chance of disappointment if you prepare and plan around this?