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ChristianKl comments on "Follow your dreams" as a case study in incorrect thinking - Less Wrong Discussion
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If someone's dream is to become a sport star you might ask them whether they think the world is improved by having another sport star that performs slightly better than the existing ones. That dream is often shallow and selfish. Having a selfish dream basically means that nobody really cares about helping to make your dream come true.
If your dream on the other hand is to win a Nobel prize for curing AIDS, go and do a PHD in biology or a related subject and work hard on your dream. You likely won't win a nobel prize either, but at you get payed a living wage because society likes that people work on curing AIDS.
The folks who go into music or art won't agree that their dreams are selfish. Though they probably are, in a way.
Those folks usually have never asked themselves the question on a deeper level. A musician who is really out to make the world a better place through his music and can articulate his vision is going to succeed against a musician who plays an instrument slightly better.
A lot of people spend to little time into actually exploring their dream. That means that they can't draw as much motivation from it and they can't convince other people to support them in their dream.
You can go into the music business trying to play a zero sum game where you work hard to be slightly better than the competition. You could also go to communicate certain cultural values that you find lacking in todays music. Then you aren't playing a zero sum game and you also aren't in direct competition with a lot of people who just try to work hard to be a little bit better.
I don't think you understand how screwed up the academic job market is. PhDs students are funded because they provide cheap(ish) labor for a professor's lab, and it's in professors' interest to take on a lot more students than can have a long-term career in science. Science is a popular enough career to have its own "following your dreams" problem.
Science PHDs usually get useful skills that make them employable outside academia that someone who fails at being a sport star or musician doesn't get.
Furthermore I think that our society benefits from investing more resources into solving biology while it doesn't benefit from more people wanting to become sport stars.