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Some people do not need to worry about material possessions as much as some others because of the random birth wealth lottery. Then they can pursue interests in less goal driven ways than it would otherwise seem wise

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In many European counties it's easily feasible to just study all your life while working ~20 hours / week. I won no lottery but had no issue spending a decade of my life pursuing interests at universities while working 20-30 / hours a week in a comfortable software dev job.

If I'm paying for "free" education with my tax euros, I might as well use it.

There are lots of stipends etc. If you don't plan to have kids, and you don't care about luxuries, you will have healthy food and a roof and not be thinking about money. Probably the decision is to forgo luxuries and child raising, and hope you don't need to help a sick relative etc. if you want do to this forever. But it is not impossible in STEM.

That works as long as you don’t expect to graduate: in many EU nations, higher education students are required to complete at least 60 ECTS credits per year, or lose their study right / enrollment.

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