do what you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life?
I know: the title is pretentious as hell.
The most likely outcome is that working with what you love simply turns what you love into just another form of work.
But that doesn’t mean we stop trying to do something that brings pleasure and meaning to life.
I say this because, during this month away from the blog, another major turning point happened in my life. In my last post, I wrote that I had left my full-time job as a software developer to study for civil service exams—more specifically, for a technician position at Petrobras.
The truth is, that goal changed again.
Now I’m going to try to follow the path of a PhD and an academic career.
Reading that sentence from the outside, it sounds like something a madman would say. Maybe it is, at least a little.
I already have a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, and I also have a published scientific paper—with its 167 views and 7 citations, some of them from the leading specialist in this very niche sub-subfield. Not that this is some huge achievement, but it’s not exactly nothing either.
The practical result of this decision is that, if everything goes well, I’ll spend the next four years living on a scholarship of 3,100 reais a month. That’s much less than what I was making as a developer, but still enough to buy a home through a government housing program under the best possible bracket. Apparently, everything has an upside.
I haven’t officially entered the PhD program yet, but I’m already working with my advisor, building an interface for the software we used during my master’s research.
And this is where things get hard to explain without sounding like cheap self-help.
The feeling of working on something that is genuinely enjoyable—and at the same time feels useful to the world—is very different.
It’s not just about making money. It’s not just about completing tasks. It’s not just about trading hours for a salary.
It’s the feeling that your effort is moving toward something that actually makes sense.
Maybe it won’t last. Maybe in a few months I’ll be complaining about bureaucracy, the scholarship, the pressure, academic life, and all the small forms of violence that every professional path carries.
I probably will.
But for now, something rare is happening:
I wake up wanting to work on the problem.
And that’s worth something.
Life is too short to trade all of our time for money that, very often, only serves to impress people we don’t even like.
Of course money matters.
It matters a lot.
But I also don’t want to pretend that money alone solves the feeling of spending your life in the wrong place.
In the end, maybe working with what you love doesn’t mean you’ll never work again.
Maybe it means working hard, earning less, getting frustrated often—and still feeling that there is some coherence between what you do and what you believe is worth doing.
Life is beautiful.
And time is far too short.