Ya, I can agree with that. It is my personal choice to pursue the path I am. However, the government just isn't funding theoretical research anymore (or at least its declining substantially). I fear that this will lead to people not being able to study nature just for the pure interest of doing so. There was a great TED talk I watched where a professor was interested in why a certain jellyfish adapted bioluminescence. As a result of her research she learned how bacterial quorum sensing worked and developed methods to better attack bacterial diseases in humans. She obviously hadn't planned on discovering this. And if the government had rejected her proposal to study jellyfish bioluminescence because "who cares about jellyfish bioluminescence" we never would have known.