It makes for a nice aspirational graduation speech, but as many PhDs will attest passion doesn’t matter much if society doesn’t value your passion and you need to put food on the table.
If one finds their likes early, become really good at it and if that skill pay really well... your are top 0.1% in your field.... for the rest... build a skill that lands you a job then experiment with different hobbies... when you find a hobby you really like hopefully by age 30-35... turn that hobby in to passion, you still have 30-40+ year of average lifetime remaining....
They will start like things because admired adult claims to like them, they will start to hate food because adult or other kids said it is disgusting. If you praise kid during activity, they are significantly more likely to seek that activity later and if you yell at them they will hate the activity itself. Adults are much better at sorting these influences out.
You can easily manipulate pre schoolers to dislike things and while it is a bit harder to make them like things, it is still relatively easy.
I think it's a social expectation based on selection bias. i.e. I dont think many people are capable of developing passion. That's not to say the average person doesn't have interests or are uninteresting, but few people go out of their way to focus on something that is internally constructive (autodidact, hobbies, art ) as opposed to externally constructive (e.g. tv, video games, internet). Another way to put it, an artist's distraction is their art.
Im speaking from an armchair, and as someone who discovered my passion at a young age (10). Throughout the following 18 years, I rarely met people who are >= mildly obsessed over something internally constructive (granted, I didnt go to college).
I don't mean that in a cynical sense. If you view business and making money as a "necessary evil", a taint on the face of your pure artistry, then you're probably going to be miserable trying to make a living. I prefer to think about it as finding a way to create value for others through what you like to do.
He's created value, of course. But what he does isn't art, its mass production of kitsch on an industrial scale.
What people need to do is think like responsibly put limits on their adventures. These are grown ass men and women. They are responsible for themselves and if they choose to risk it all on a passion, they have nobody to blame, especially when the money is constantly telling to do something else.
These people are responsible for themselves, and they want to follow a passion, to pursue it, despite there not being very much money in it. The money is constantly telling them to do something else, you are correct. But do we really want a society structured around what money tells people to do? Doesn't that seem even a little dystopian? I heard the phrase a while ago: "a dystopia without a despot".
You say that they have nobody to blame - but that's exactly what's wrong. Why should they have to blame themselves for following their scientific, artistic, philosophical or religious passions? Should they have to "choose to risk it all"? These are the questions that need answering, because I'm not convinced that people need to be considering artistic passions as a risk at all.
I don't think there's a solution to this problem so long as the market decides whether your passion is worthy of you being allowed to survive or not.
A person can eschew the pursuit of money but aside from basic support I don't think society needs to reward them for expressly disavowing its desires.
Investors have a hard enough time guessing which ideas will work out, why would people with no skin in the game know any better?
You seem to be using the phrase "no skin in the game" to mean "no exposure to financial risk". I would argue for a more expansive definition. A planner, as a member of society, does have skin in the game, as they have in interest in the overall proper functioning of that society and the happiness of its members.
And by "work out" you seem to mean "generate a desired level of financial return". I'm sure you can see how once you free yourself from that definition, the range of things it might seem worthwhile taking a punt on grows much larger. If Johnny wants to spend his life building pasta looms for preparing elaborate lasagnes, the potential upside is probably not very apparent, but the downside is small too and can be justified as an investment in making the society a more interesting place where people can pursue their niche interests.
It is more akin to applying for a grant or residency as an artist or for research funding as a scientist. You still have to argue why there is some upside to the work you intend to undertake, but the upside may not be in the form of profit for the investor.
Natural abilities and genetics can accelerate the learning process, yes, but accelerated mastery is really only an advantage if you're trying to master as many things as possible within your lifespan, or you're working under some other deadline.
What I'm saying here is that artists can probably develop software just as well as anyone else here if they're willing to put in the time and resources.
The scorn of traditional art from conceptual art even spawned a reactionary traditionalist movement, the Stuckists.
This is in contrast to the idea that there is something out there that you'll love doing all the time. That's a terrible idea, because you'll always hit rough spots and have to do a lot of things you hate, leading to frustration.
Passionate people were essentially forced to work for the snake oil salesmen whose only passions in life are money and self-aggrandizement.
Sounds sub-optimal, a pain point, like something ripe for disruption.
The coding problems I solve while coding feels similar (wrestling file formats and external frameworks, optimizing bottlenecks, automating routine processes, recording various data about users and what they do in the system, and debugging hairy multithreaded procedures exists in both industries), and overtime is much less common.
But even though what I work on now gets used by major corporations and assist hundreds of thousands of people, it's hard for me to feel passionate about complex Insurance Policy objects or setting up phone systems so people can get annoyed when a robotic voice is programmed to ignore them as they jab the 0 key or say "customer service" sixteen times because they want to skip the automated process and talk to a human.
And corporate development has its own share of problems, things that are completely out of your control often times, because the directives come down from on high.
And despite there being hundreds of different industries I could work for as a software developer, I imagine I'll still encounter a lot of the same frustrations, just with the veneer of a new problem domain. Past experience shows that learning that new problem domain will carry me and keep me interested in the job for the first year, but after that starts to fade. I suppose I could hop from job to job, but I'm getting older and getting more tied down (i.e. I just bought a house, planning a wedding right now, etc.)
So what do you do when you get burned out by your exit plan?