You like repairing microwaves.

There's two points that I look at when I think of how much the Star Trek future is driven by people just doing what they enjoy.
The first is when Captain Jellico takes over the Enterprise and everyone gets all grumpy and Riker gets relieved of duty. Things aren't going well and Jellico goes to Riker's quarters to talk, and after asking for permission to speak freely, Riker tells him "You've taken all the joy out of everything." In this ship of hundreds of hyperqualified people working with bleeding edge technology, literally hours away from possibly facing their deaths and the start of a galactic war, Riker is correctly pointing out the the commanding officer isn't letting them have fun anymore. People in Star Trek don't get paid, they do what they do for the love of the game.
The second point is when Eddington goes rogue and Sisko realizes that he was fan of Les Miserables, and that Eddington is essentially cosplaying as Jean Valjean and wants Sisko to be Javert. Sisko points out that Eddington didn't have to become a terrorist or betray his uniform. He could have resigned any time he wanted. But he loved his role play so damn much that he was willing, even eager, to get the most determined man in the quadrant pissed off enough to hunt him down at all costs, and Sisko was able to use the implied script of this role play to capture Eddington. In this case, Eddington was having so much fun with his version of living his best life, he was literally willing to get captured and sent to prison because it was how he wanted to play the game.
People in Star Trek can choose to stay on any number of paradise planets, and quite a lot do, but they will also will face death and worse than death, all in the name of self-actualization, and that's pretty fantastic.
- It reminds me, or vice versa, of the Culture series. It's a universe that's so post scarcity it makes Star Trek look a bit mercantile.
  One of the most coveted and sought after things in The Culture are jobs. Because AI Minds do pretty much all the necessary labor, only jobs that organic brains and bodies are required for still exist and they are seen as prestigious. Everyone has everything they could desire and the only thing left to work for is purpose.
- I think this here is the reason why I, as a young boy watching startrek with my dad back in the 90's, felt like I had to pursue self actualization and other higher leveled Maslow hierarchial needs even though the environment around me was and still is just looking to satisfy base needs,
  Now that I'm thinking about this out loud I guess this could also be applied to 1st world countries as well , their base need being money/food/resources/safety i.e. first level of Maslow's needs. For context as a child I moved from a 1st world country to a 2nd or 3rd world country depending on how you look at it.
- I just watched the episode where he becomes a spy and it was so stressful. The whole time I was wondering why he'd put himself through all that
  
  That's one of my favorite episodes
- Eddington was having so much fun with his version of living his best life, he was literally willing to get captured and sent to prison because it was how he wanted to play the game.
  And Sisko was having so much fun with his version of living his best life, committing was crimes.

But he will be remembered forever for his microwave fixing abilities.

- Three strips of gold-pressed Latinum for Quark, one for Rom....
  
  But that's not fair...
- Emptying and cleaning the biofilter is his favorite part.
  
  I thought that was Mariner and Boimler?

Starfleet doesn't deserve O'brien.
He is, without a doubt, the most important person in starfleet history.
Sorry, zephram, you gotta take second. I think he would be okay with being second. First is too much work.
- O'Brien is certainly one of the most abused, weathered Starfleet officers. He ended up on DS9 fighting an insurgency, and spent 20 years in a mind prison. This description could go on for hours.
  
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God to an ancient people? When?
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Storyteller_(Star_Trek:_Deep_Space_Nine)
  
  Hard disagree on calling him an god because of that episode.

I tried to repair a microwave once. I was unsuccessful.
- Good thing you survived. They are seriously dangerous. The capacitor usually retains enough energy to kill you for days after it was unplugged.
  
  At least it doesn't kill you permanently
  
  Hum... The stuff I'm finding on the internet should keep enough energy to harm a person for an hour or two. Not several days.
  Did microwave design change after it popularized?
  
  That's exactly the part I was changing. The terminals on it were plenty recessed, and I was careful not to stick my finger directly into the socket.
- Did the popcorn button burn your popcorn?
  
  It just stopped heating things up. A bit of research suggested that the most common failure was the capacitor, which was like $10, so I figured why not? I was going to have to take the broken microwave off the wall whether I could fix it or not.
  Didn't work, bought a new microwave.

If there was no such thing as working for pay, what would you do?
- Lifelong learning. I would've stayed in school forever if I could have.
  
  I'd totally be an Archaeologist or Paleontologist
  
  Everyone here saying they would fix microwaves for the love of it. Fascinating.
- I’d devote myself to teaching and storytelling. And my harem.
- I'd do what I'm doing now, but it would be helping out schools and libraries and not companies.
- Open source software development.
- I'd work on my profession, but build actually useful stuff.
- Photograph and study birds, no question.
- What I do now - software developer/DevOps guy
- Road trip, and visit everywhere.
- Wetland or ocean ecologist. If the world is also Star Trek, probably the same honestly, I'd just be en exo-evologist lol
  Tom's ocean planet is my dream
- I would love to just find a house with some good workspace, get a few old lathes and mills and such, and just fiddle around making cool shit.

This is one of the most autistic visions of utopia I can imagine.

Now I'm wondering how many days a week they work and how many hours a normal shift is.
Since they're not depending on the sunlight to mark their days, the "graveyard shift" might not even be a real distinction for them.
- Depends if you're working under Jellico or not.
  
  Just realized the Cerritos runs on a 4-shift rotation. Or they skipped gamma when naming shifts.
  
  Why was everyone opposed to going to 4 shifts from 3 shifts? That's less work per day.

I just collect microwave oven transformers, diodes, and capacitors. Weird, huh?
- You don't like the magnetrons though? They're the closest you can get to handy dandy home particle accelerators ever since we got rid of CRTs.