I see. So anyone flipping burgers at McDonald's must have a passionate interest in and life goal to be flipping burgers. Otherwise, why would they spend so much time on it?
If I understand your argument correctly, you're saying that if someone in practice spends their time doing X and not Y, then they cannot actually be more interested in Y. I believe this flies in the face of human experience.
If you love software, there are a limited number of careers that involve writing software. If you do not have the privilege of a large trust fund, you're looking at industry or academia. Neither tends to involve just sitting in a room and coding all day. (Those situations that do probably won't satisfy a post-teenaged love of software.) Especially if you have a more academic love of software, academia is not a stupid option, even though you realize that your time is going to be filled with a lot of non-programming duties. Yes, you would probably spend more of your time programming if you got a corporate programming job, but loving software does not mean automatically loving any situation where you are typing code into an editor.
