What can you do early in your career if you find yourself with diverging interests and wanting to pursue conflicting paths - is it possible to manage it all?

Talk about a "meaning of life" question!  Pretty difficult. However, I do a lot of career and job search counseling for younger students and professionals, so I will take a crack at it. The first question is just what you envision under "financial services" Are you going to try to get into the fire-breathing Wall Street environment? That won't work if you are not absolutely fully committed to the job. Do you imagine being a wealth advisor for people with large net worths? Here the job itself is a bit quieter and perhaps more life-friendly than working on Wall Street. However, the question that will come up immediately is: Why would those people trust you with their millions?  If you are only sort of half there and also lack the top-tier Wall Street style experience, I doubt that you would be very credible. Perhaps you imagine working at the local branch of a small regional bank doing bread-and-butter counseling for normal consumers?  That might work as a sort of quiet 9-to-5 job. Of course, the compensation will be correspondingly lower. The next question is related to the first: Is anyone else financially dependent on you? Once you are married with small children, your options (or lack thereof) change dramatically. Let's assume for the moment that you are not yet married with small children and otherwise have no-one counting on you for financial support. In this case, I would recommend that you wrap up any training programs you are working on, collect the certificates, get everything filed away somewhere and quit your job. Pivot towards writing, psychology, or whatever. Dive in. Give it everything you've got. Be tenacious. Go bankrupt. The important thing here is that you either succeed or get it out of your system. Don't do anything half way. You can always come back and find another financial services job later. If you do have small children or others dependent on you, you may just sort of muddle along and see what happens.  However, there is usually a better option and that is to take a close look at the working environment and see if there is an adjacent role that you can shift into that you would find more enjoyable and compelling. Perhaps rather than doing the CFA work yourself, you might enjoy working for a company that educates CFAs?  They would be a logical step towards becoming a writer. What I don't recommend is drifting along half-heartedly, doing a half-baked job and dreaming about doing something else. No matter how hard you try to be polite, the organization will sense it. You will get mediocre performance reviews. When that layoff comes up, you will be first in line to be pushed out the door. Another problem is that a truly successful career has to be built on a foundation of intense engagement in your 20s. Read "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell. 10,000 hours of practice to master just about anything. Practically speaking, this requirement means working late into the evening during your 20s before family and children show up. If you are the one showing up a few minutes late, taking a long lunch, and watching the clock an hour before quitting time, chances are poor that you will excel in your career. Work on the problem. Find a way to get in a position such that you are enthusiastic enough about your work to "live and breath" it. You will be much happier in the long run.

Politics, psychology and cognitive science - I remember that is really just called economics. Your interest and your speciality can make you a good economist. Ever consider pursuing the more traditional hard core economics in policy making and socioeconomic?

You are human. A creative one at that. And every human being deserves to have a multitude of interests, curiosities and desires. What you can do early in your career is utilize the strategy of Trial & Error. Check things off one step at a time. Don't try to manage them all, that is not good for your health. Take it slow, and explore each one fully. You will realize which ones you want to stick to, and which ones you want to discard. In terms of your question about pursuing a career that you don't want to live and breathe, basically the majority of society is in your same boat. We have to take certain jobs that pay us a living so we can survive off this system.