throwaway88p's comments

I actually have thought about it, but I'm not sure if I could stand starting at the bottom of those fields, plus the salaries cap much lower.

Honestly, I've always enjoyed chasing the "rabbit hole" that came with solving problems. I'm generally poor at putting my thoughts into concrete descriptions, but I'll attempt. It used to be something like this:

I have some sort of problem, ideally one that intrigues me, because it's not obvious. I would dive into it, and it would lead down to a rabbit whole of other issues and subjects I would research and would come out with a solution, having been engaged the whole time.

Nowadays, problems I encounter are either incredibly shallow, being caused because of some carelessness by myself or someone else and often solved with a 5 minute search, or the complete opposite, too complex for me to even get started with, as people much smarter than me.

Interestingly, I've never been a fan of video tutorials in the past, but have tried using them in the past weeks. There are some aspects of it I like. It's easier to keep attention with a video than a large wall of text these days (though it used to be the opposite). Unfortunately, it's not so easy to skip around content in a video, for example to avoid useless filler content or to return to a small chunk of content to review.

Never went to school, i did have an brief experience with competitive programming back in HS, but didn't do very well.

Passionate? not really much anymore. There are a number of things I'll take fleeting interest in after reading / watching some stuff, ranging from different technical subjects, to scientific subject, etc. Nothing ever seems to stick, though.

I don't think I'm stupid, but I do believe that most people have a sort of "ceiling" in regards to their capabilities, intellectual or otherwise. I'm mostly curious about what to do when those something they're interested in's fall outside of your capability.

> find a problem/task that interests you or is worth solving - and work on it until it's solved, regardless of how difficult

I guess part of the problem is that those problems tend to be rare. The way I feel, is that if I have a problem, it's likely already been solved (in which case I'll just use that solution), or people much more intelligent than me are already working on it.

Another issue seems be be is that as time goes on, the problems I take interest in seem to become much more difficult to solve. This may be because they are technically complex, but can be for other reasons too. Often I don't even know what I need to be learning / researching to solve a problem, and that basically halts me.