incentive fatigue
Everybody knows that the quickest way to kill a hobby is to turn it into a profession, i.e., to get paid to do it.
A hobby is an activity performed for its own sake. The reward is the pleasure derived from performing the activity itself, generally accompanied by some progression of technical or artistic skill over time. Whether it's collecting movie memorabilia, or wood turning, or sailing, hobbies are intrinsically rewarding. Hobbies are different from passive consumption; all hobbies contain some combination of skill, creativity, and play.
Modern science as we know it began as an aristocratic hobby. The curiosity that drove the most foundational scientific discoveries over the last three hundred years was essential to the development of entire fields of knowledge. In other words, without being driven by some innate sense of "I wonder what causes..." our revered pioneers never would have bothered to investigate.
The sidelining of the innate incentive to discover in favor of more material gratification in almost all avenues of contemporary existence has had a tremendously deleterious effect on our ability to innovate, which always, by definition, happens by accident. It is not a coincidence that our culture, our movies, our music, even our food, have all become more homogenized, more formulaic, more predictable over the last half century. This is the direct result of what I call incentive fatigue - the drowning out of the innate satisfaction of creative problem-solving by more immediate, material concerns.
If necessity is the mother of invention, the father is the creative spirit - disciplined, focused, directed toward unlocking the secrets of the universe.