"Do what you love" advice always sounds great, but it hits differently when you're also worried about rent
1. People who use "do what you love" to mean "love what you do," as though you can force yourself to enjoy anything. This is only true for people who lie to themselves and compromise regularly against their own interests.
2. The Lucky Ones™ who happened to accidentally align an enjoyable hobby with a career and think because they "did it," anyone can, without acknowledging that they were simply in the right place at the right time with the right skills, or that the stars don't exactly align the same way for the rest of us.
I've been asked "okay, but what do you _like_ to do?" which just puts me in a position to have to explain that I have a passion for learning new things and experimentation, but nobody is going to pay me to read books and play around in a workshop all day, since those jobs are few and definitely already filled.
So, it's a hobby, instead.
Doesn't that go for most things though?
Designer, across all fields exists; game designer, creative technologist, research scientist. Just because you can't land that job right out of the gate is no reason not to try, and to become an insurance adjuster instead (unless you do want to be an insurance adjuster). In team sports everyone wants to be the star, but even if you're not, if you just love the game, you can always find some way to be involved, even if it's selling t-shirt outside the stadium.
To be fair, advice doesn't have to be applicable to everyone in order to be useful to someone.
Extremely few people get to become astronauts, but that doesn't go to say there isn't relevant career advice for those who do aspire to become one.
Chalking outcomes up to luck is also not a very useful attitude. Life undeniably has a huge random element, but it's more akin to the randomness of the stock market than a pure dice roll. You don't have control of every outcome, but your choices and decisions can massively tilt the scales in favor of getting "lucky".
For me it took understanding how things are connected and that doing the superficially unfun things are a necessary precondition for the superfun things to happen.
Learning to appreciate what you have instead of hate what you're missing is also a very fundamental mental health principle.
This is of course much easier said than done.
It’s just a reminder to find time for what you love even if you have other things that demand your time. And, if you can, to always leave enough space for yourself. For far too many of us, there is only work, more work, with the silly hope to one day find the time to dream again. You won’t.
Very few people get to take the thing they would do completely for free and make money off of it. At the same time, very few people have a job where every single aspect of the work is miserable toil that brings them no joy.
Work is complex and there is a continuum of jobs that have more or less aspects that resonate with you. I think better advice is to seek jobs that let you bring more of your joys to bear while acknowledging that no job will be paid fun. And when in a specific job, try to find the aspects of it that you love and make the most of those to the degree that you're able.
We have a much richer ability to navigate our careers than simply treating any job as all bad or all good.