The mundane is a part of every job, and you could reduce every job to it, if you really wanted to. Do you want to chop vegetables for the rest of your life? Well that's what being a cook is. True only if you focus on it because that's what you hate.

The thinking is interesting, and I agree that the question "what to do with my life" is a modern phenomenon. But on the other hand, if you know how difficult and challenging something is, you will never do it. There are parallels to analysis paralysis here.

So yes, be prepared and think things through, but if I have learned one thing in life, it's that the problems you will run into are not the ones you imagined in the beginning. Instead you will get some you never thought of, and the ones you did will not happen or will not be a big deal. How many people here worked on software changes, and had to estimate and got it all wrong?