Scarcity and the relentless competitive zero-sum slugfest of living makes everything a cost-benefit calculation: I have a limited number of waking hours and most of them are dedicated to battling it out for resources so I and my family can live. You can put your time into Enterprise, Entertainment, or Enlightenment, but anyone who does anything other than 100% Enterprise is losing out to those who do.

I would love to choose to be an artisan, a craftsman, a changer of the world, a multi-discipline Renaissance Man, (or just an over-entertained couch potato) but I need to make my mortgage payment next month.

Jay Z had a section in decoded where he talked about how his needs as a young man getting into drug dealing quickly and seamlessly switched from food to new clothes to a Lexus - how what started as something he needed to do because they needed money for food became a pursuit of wealth and status almost without him noticing. I don't know your financial or family situation, so don't take this as a critique of you personally, but I think that happens to a lot of people - we don't recognize when the things we're treating as our material needs have moved well beyond where we'd consider trading off for things like meaningful work or a life aligned with our personal values.

I agree, and I didn't mean to make it seem like it was easy. The system is purposefully stacked against us such that the amount of creative, highly-agentic minds are kept to a minimum in order to maintain the status quo.

For the most part, our station in life is something we constantly wage war against from the moment of birth. Coming from a very poor and abusive background, I was homeless by 16 and left with a choice of fully committing to boring technical work, or taking advantage of already being at rock bottom and surgically improving my skills over years until I've become as well-rounded as I would like. It's a lifelong journey, though.

I do wish you luck and I hope you do find time to accomplish some of your desires. You will definitely have to create time and space for it though, free time likely won't magically appear within your current routine.