[jstelly]

I think I would give this advice to just about anyone who is trying to follow their interests and build a career at the same time:

It just sounds like you enjoy learning. That is great, but it sounds like you also want a career.

If you want to find similar happiness in a career as you do with learning you'll need to decide to enjoy making things that are valuable to others. It may be that you already enjoy this; otherwise you'll have to train yourself to be happy when others find your work valuable. If you can do that you shouldn't have much trouble building a career given the skills you already have. Learning to work with other people will dramatically increase the number of potentially valuable things you can create so you should also pursue that (as you've already surmised).