But is that the way we want the world to work, or just something we&#x27;ve resigned ourselves to because we think it&#x27;s inevitable?<p>I&#x27;m pursuing a CS PhD; in my free time, I&#x27;m working on a science fiction novel. In some ways, I think a PhD is the perfect vehicle for this since I&#x27;m free to &quot;explore&quot; intellectually, as long I still publish in my field. And I make things work: I squirrel away bits of time for writing, and still have enough left over to get my work done.<p>But I look at the industry (especially in Silicon Valley), and I&#x27;m not sure I can expect to keep going on my side projects. Work weeks of 50, 60, or more hours are common at companies in the area, and even more so at startups. I did a lot of interviews for internships and such in undergrad and early grad school, and I would ask interviewers whether they worked on any open source projects during their free time. The answer was almost always no. I found it perplexing at the time, but looking back I think it&#x27;s a relatively straightforward consequence of the environment people are working in. Most people aren&#x27;t in a position to take up serious hobbies, and a big part of that is work culture and the sorts of hours employers expect.<p>I think Coppola is very lucky if he has a job where he can do this balancing act. Perhaps I&#x27;ll be lucky too, I don&#x27;t know. But I hope we&#x27;re not driving our society towards a situation where you need to have some sort of exceptionally flexible day job in order to make progress on your other pursuits. And while I wouldn&#x27;t want to be a professional artist myself (I love CS too much for that), I do hope that it&#x27;ll be possible to be paid to do art in the next 100 years.