I think the “problem” here is that there are so many useful things you can do with math that we spend all of our time in school learning the useful things first

I think the “problem” here is that there are so many useful things you can do with math that we spend all of our time in school learning the useful things first, with much less emphasis on the enjoyment aspect. It’s a shame, too. As an undergraduate I had a very small amount of exposure to some papers in theoretical computer science. I presume they were fairly typical for the world of mathematics - trying to establish boundaries on how small something can be. And not much application in the real world. But I remember having my mind blown at the way the authors could take one problem, convert it to some completely different domain, and use previous work in that domain to prove things about the original problem. It was very beautiful, and I think even that very limited exposure has changed the way I see the world. Then the real world came knocking and I haven’t been back since.