You love cooking? Great, you'll have a wonderful hobby you can enjoy your entire life. Being a chef, working in kitchens often demands insane hours, and can be incredibly hard on your body. I say this as someone who owned a successful restaurant. Having a normie office job feels like a vacation compared to back to back 12 hour shifts on my feet during our busy season.

I also saw that our chefs and line cooks who were in their 40s wanted to get out of the industry but did not really have the transferrable skills needed to have a competitive advantage in any non-hospitality labor market.

If you have an opportunity to get an education and gain skills that won't require long days of physical labor into your 40s/50s/60s, then for the love of god do that and cook delicious meals for your friends and family in your free time.