“Do what you love, “
they say, “and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
Such lies they tell.
Do what you love for work, and then it becomes work, and you do it for money instead of love, and then you realize how little capitalism values what you love, and you start to hate it instead.

What they should say is, “Do
What You Care Enough To Do Well, Even If Underpaid And Underappreciated, And Save What You Truly Love For Yourself. “ You’ll work, though. Still.

I find small joys in my work, and there is a sense of achievement when the job is done well and some people are actually helped. But it is work. I fight through corporate bureaucracy, indifference and gaps in my technical skills to hunt badness and impose cost every day. When I’m not in meetings.

I love birds though. If I had to, could I make money off bird photography? Not a lot, I suspect. My work pays for my bird photography habit. I may get better at it, but it will not pay for itself. And if it did, it would be work.

I loved journalism. I loved it but it did not love me back so much.It paid the bills for years, and made it possible for me to work from home long before others could, but it was work that was never really rewarded with anything other than “you are lucky we don’t lay you off” until they did.

Journalism and my tech skills made me resilient in that I could always freelance and scrape by (even if I had to cash out 401ks to get by for a few months starting up again), but it turns out having both just makes you a freak that publishers like to have around sometimes to help sell things.

But fortunately those tools also translate well to OSINT and analysis and threat hunting and translating telemetry into stories that explain what bad people did with computers and maybe make the bad people’s lives a little less comfortable.

So I work. I can pay for the birding. I put my daughter (with some help ) through college with no student loan debt. I can be sort of middle class.

I don’t hate that.