Not everybody's passions are monetizable and produce items or services desired by a market. One cannot make a living making esoteric GIF art. No amount of staying up late and working hard makes this true.
It's not like I choose to watch TV at night instead of building some dream lifestyle business.
How would you propose I monetize creating my own free open-source programming language? "Just don't play WoW" doesn't make sense in these scenarios. Contrast that with the passion of "publishing books". Starting a publishing company would be an obvious choice.
I think you define passion too narrowly. It's hard to monetize your passion if the only thing you enjoy is drawing pumpkins with charcoal on the walls of 18th century buildings.
But flexibility helps. You could, for example, make a living working on V8 or SpiderMonkey, and work on your programming language as a hobby.
It's not like I choose to watch TV at night instead of building some dream lifestyle business.
How would you propose I monetize creating my own free open-source programming language? "Just don't play WoW" doesn't make sense in these scenarios. Contrast that with the passion of "publishing books". Starting a publishing company would be an obvious choice.