There's a great deal of your milage may vary with this topic. I can totally see how other people can live happy and fulfilling careers with a your advice, but I know that's not enough for me. The part of life that is work is so grand, the time invested is so large, that I find it absolutely essential to know to the best of my ability why I'm doing what I'm doing. A motivation that fits on a post-it seems woefully inadequate for something which will dominate the next years or decades of my life. So I quite like the level of depth this reaches - in my mind it's a topic that deserves to be taken apart carefully and inspected thorougly. Maybe it's also a factor that my options are rather large; I am naturally drawn to learning new tools and putting myself in new situations or dynamics, so I am competent at an unusually large set of things. I could adapt to work in an architecture firm, a department of transportation, as an academic or a database engineer if I'd put my mind to it. There's no logical job for me that follows from my previous work, so I have to do a lot more work to create or find something for myself that I enjoy doing.