I think you may be overestimating what a "creative job" actually entails. My girlfriend is an artist (teaches fine art 50% of the time, does commissioned work

I think you may be overestimating what a "creative job" actually entails. My girlfriend is an artist (teaches fine art 50% of the time, does commissioned work 50% of the time). I think a lot of people would agree that this falls within "creative work". And yet she also does a lot of tedious things, like applying several layers of varnish to a finished piece, repeating a certain pattern hundreds of times (eg. feathers on a bird), etc (and this doesn't include stuff like generating invoices with clients, scheduling times to talk with them, etc.). What's the ultimate "creative job" to you? I think that a developer's job (unless you're in something ~extremely~ repetitive) is highly creative- just that highly creative jobs still have a lot of tediousness. I was in research for a while, which I'd consider "creative", but I spent a lot of my time doing things like reviewing paper drafts for typos, figuring out why some code wouldn't compile, etc. Even in the most creative job ever, 90% of your work will likely be "daily grind".