Having an interest

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I've been thinking a lot about the similarities and differences between doing something as work (being employed) and outside work.

Many of us have interests that we focus on a lot.
I have singing as one of my big interests.
This is an interest that actually takes a lot of energy to be engaged in.
I think we could say that I am studying singing even if it is outside a music school.

I hear a lot about people who can't work or study but who engages for a long time in an interests.

How come people can have energy and ability for that but still cannot study or work?

I find that with an interest like that you can probably engage in it in the way you want unless you try to be social with it. The pace might not have to be as fast. I mean, you might not have to do as much in a short time that you do at work, I think.

But I guess even such an interest can give us a burnout (or whatever we should call it)

What can you say about this?

I think you've gone a long way towards answering your own question - the world of work and education take a lot of the control out of our hands, so we can't set the pace, the syllabus, the nature of the task, or the working conditions. With our own interests, we can tailor our activities to what we sense we can cope with.

When I used to have to go to lectures, I often ended up feeling completely worn out by the end of a session, even though I hadn't really done anything except sit there failing to keep up. I guess that shows that tiredness can be very much in the mind, a result of perceived stress and frustration. And I perceived an awful lot of stress and frustration in workplaces and educational establishments.