Are we too focused on Personal Career Development VS Genuine Learning/Intellectual Growth?

What I mean by my title is that I realized people who tend to go into finance (and other business professions) tend to be obsessed with getting a "career edges". The high achieving college kid spends most of his free time researching which bank offers best "exit opps", how to get an interview at goldman, and how to nail the interviews. Then, the kid learns Financial Modelling, not out of genuine interest and curiosity, but knowing that it will get you a job in Goldman TMT which after 2 years, will open the doors to PE. All the while, the kid does not develop a genuine interest in Finance, but simply riding the promise of a high-flying career.

I feel like that I'm becoming that kid. I'm an incoming college freshman and believe it or not, a few years ago I gained a genuine passion/interest in finance stemming from understanding how companies work, the stock market, etc. For example, books from George Soros, Graham, and books like the Greatest Trade Ever really piqued my interest. Reading about leveraged buyout deals and activist investor battles were really fascinating. I'd pride myself in how I could at age 14 understand how bond prices related to interest rates..... But I feel like as I turn my passion into a career, I'm spending more time learning about "how to develop a career" than genuine learning about investing, valuing companies, and all the other finance goodies. In short, we're not finance monkeys, we're career monkeys.

I say this on WSO because so many of us are like that. Whether we had a genuine interest in finance/business in the first place or not, we gradually become stuck up about how to best maneuver our personal careers. IMO, it's largely driven by the fact that exit-opps are very structured in the traditional finance industry (for example: 3 year IB analyst --> PE). We are pretty much given a roadmap and we are spending our lives trying to figure this map out and deciding the next best step.

I feel like I'm losing my true passion and interest in finance day by day as I begin to focus on my career. But this is not the case in other industries. For example, in Silicon Valley, exit opps are much less structured and so people doing their jobs are spending much more time developing their genuine interest/knowledge in software engineering or whatever RATHER than focusing on exit-opps. Then, they are given the opportunity to apply their intellectual capacity to their job. Meanwhile, monkeys are grinding through repetitive excel sheets and pitchbooks hoping to god your analyst/associate stint is over with soon.

Ik some of you think I'm insane for being so career-obsessed at a young age (just graduated HS). And maybe you're right. Going forward in the next couple of months, my hope is to spend less time on planning my career and on back to actually growing my interest in finance (reading through articles, investing books, etc.). I don't want to end up being a guy who doesn't go beyond "how to perform the job" - how to do DCFs and make nice powerpoint slides just to grind through it and get my next exit-opp. I want to dedicate my life to learning something interesting and making money off of it (even if the job itself maybe temporarily boring/limited)