I think it is a similar kind of excitement people have when learning Haskell and functional programming: pleasure to experience the aesthetics of pure forms, di

I think it is a similar kind of excitement people have when learning Haskell and functional programming: pleasure to experience the aesthetics of pure forms, distilled mathematical concepts, that contrast with impurity and mess of real world coding. I see some practical benefits from studying Category Theory and Pure Mathematics in general: mental patterns, some limited applications in general, interesting application in specific problems, but it requires huge investment of time, and, frankly, there are much more practical applied areas in maths that can bring food on the table: optimizations, probability, linear algebra, fluid dynamics, Fourier transforms. One usually does not ask questions about applicability when decides to study Pure Maths, it is a passion driven adventure: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician's_Apology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematician's_Apology