I can't really answer your questions- I *always* wanted to be a pilot. Perhaps the helicopter side of it was planted when I was ten, and an Army H-19 (S-55) landed in my grandmothers' pasture in Iowa. If that wasn't sufficient exposure to the bug, the "Green Machine" put a UH-1B down by the side of the road in my home town. Hooked. High school, flight school and Viet Nam...
Your second question- after Viet Nam, I wanted to be a, quote- normal person- unquote. Did the home every night thing for 11 years, and was absolutely miserable. Couldn't drink enough, go through sufficient jobs, or anything else enough, to fill the void. Couldn't begin to tell you how many positions I took in those years, and left. The record was two and a half days.
In '82, I had sufficient cash to return to flying. I'm with my third employer, happily married, asleep by 2200 and largely abstinent, except as appropriate.
Why is this job worthwhile??? It's always challenging. If you don't learn something, today, flying, quit. You're dead and don't know it. When it's unthinking routine, next you'll have stopped thinking, and next, it's loss of license or fatal mishap.
I work outside. I'm not an inside person, and the view is occsionally the best in the world.
It's technical, and as technical as you'd like- from "Redline- stop now" to "I'll be able to lift 'X' at 'Y' altitude and 'Z' temperature in this machine because it's showing 'A' now- but to be in the book, I'll have to 'B'....
It's creative, in a way- of performance art. I'm my own severest critic- I know *exactly* what I was trying to do, where it went wrong, and I'll do it better next time.
Someday, I'll quit. Someday, something will catch my interest for more than 6 months. It happened when I was ten. It could happen again.