The Trouble with Passion

Erin A. Cech on "choicewashing," the passionate applicant, and radically reconsidering career advice

AHP Note: Every so often I get a great pitch for a guest interview and hand the Culture Study reins over to someone else (usually a reader who *gets it*) to handle the interview (and get paid for it, of course — your subscriptions made it possible for me to pay significantly above the going industry rate, which is really, really awesome). This week, Tyler Burgese interviews sociology professor Erin A. Cech about her work on *passion jobs* — something anyone who’s read my work knows I’ve been thinking about for years. Enjoy, and if you have a spectacularly good idea for a future Culture Study interview, you know where to find me (aka, my email: annehelenpetersen at gmail dot com)

---

Now, here’s Tyler:

---

If you do what you love, the saying goes, you’ll never work a day in your life. 

…I’ll admit that I had a hard time typing that with a straight face. Was it ever that simple?! In reality, tying something you love doing directly to your financial stability is logistically and emotionally fraught, to say the least. 

We Culture Study readers are in near-constant dialogue about the role of work in our lives, from LARPing your job to vocational awe, from quiet quitting to loud quitting, and what makes a job secure, or even just good. For this reason and many others, I’m delighted to introduce this week’s interview that will surely add even more texture to these ongoing conversations.

Dr. Erin A. Cech is an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s departments of Sociology and Mechanical Engineering (by courtesy) and has published widely on social inequality in and out of the workplace, particularly along the lines of class, gender, and sexuality. She visited my sociology department last fall to give talks on her two (!!) recently published books, The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality, which we’ll focus on today, and Misconceiving Merit: Paradoxes of Excellence and Devotion in Academic Science and Engineering, coauthored with sociologist Mary Blair-Loy. As soon as I got home from campus that day, I emailed Anne Helen suggesting Erin for an upcoming Culture Study interview.

In The Trouble with Passion, Erin demonstrates how the commodification of passion in the contemporary workplace perpetuates class inequality in college and beyond. While passion may seem, on the surface, to be highly individualistic, she details the many ways that it is actually rooted in structural positions and identities. Her methods are robust and aspirational: 170 interviews with career aspirants and counselors, four surveys of US workers, a hiring experiment, and a review of career-based self-help literature.

I was surprised and delighted to be invited back to the Culture Study stage to conduct this interview myself! Our conversation spans the mechanisms of workplace inequality, finding meaning outside of paid employment, and why we should probably stop asking kids what they want to be when they grow up. 

You can buy The Trouble with Passion here and find out more about Erin’s work here.

---

To help orient us in the world of this brilliant book, I present a short question with broad implications: why should we pay attention to whether or not people are passionate about their work?

In the United States, and in many other postindustrial countries, who we are, and how others see us, is entwined with what we do for our paid employment. When children are asked that perennial question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” they are supposed to answer it with some kind of occupation, rather than a personal quality or a family or community goal.

In turn, the “best work” is work that is fulfilling and self-expressive—work that feels like an extension of us.

With all its popularity across education level, class, race, and gender, I argue that this cultural priority of “following your passion” turns out to be an important mechanisms perpetuating socioeconomic inequality among college-goers, the college educated, and beyond.  

Let’s do some table-setting. Can you tell us about the book’s central animating concept, the passion principle?

The passion principle is a cultural schema that elevates self-expression and fulfillment as the central factor in good career decision-making. It entails the prioritization of personally fulfilling work—sometimes even at the expense of job security or a decent salary. I find that over 70% of college-educated workers in the US highly praise passion-related considerations in their notions of good career decision-making, and almost two thirds rank its importance above considerations like good salaries and job security. Adherence to the passion principle is surprisingly consistent across gender, race, and class background.

Why is the passion principle compelling to so many people? Passion isn’t just seen as a path to a good job, but as key to a good life. White-collar workers in the postindustrial labor force encounter a tension between demands on them to be devoted, overworking employees and desires to align with ubiquitous cultural expectations for self-expression. Passion-seeking seems to mitigate this tension: it allows workers to incorporate their paid employment into their overarching narrative of the self, while promising to reduce the potential drudgery of long hours and work overload.

Although passion-seeking is a goal for many workers regardless of class background or education, there are wide discrepancies in who is ultimately able to parlay their passion into stable, well-paid jobs. Globalization forces like automation and outsourcing have meant that US workers without a college degree are much less likely to have access to jobs with tasks that they might conceivably be passionate about.

But even with a college degree, working-class and first-generation college graduates are more likely than their wealthier peers to end up in low-paying unskilled jobs when they pursue their passion. By contrast, well-off career aspirants are more likely to have access to financial “safety nets”—the freedom to wait it out until a job in their passion comes along without worrying about defaulting on student loans, or to volunteer or take an unpaid internship to get their foot in the door and trust that their family can help them make ends meet. Economically advantaged career aspirants also have better access to cultural and social capital “springboards,” such as the use of parents’ social networks to help them find jobs. Because they lack these same safety nets and springboards, first-generation and working class passion-seekers, regardless of the type of training they have received, are more likely than similarly trained peers to end up in precarious employment far outside of their passion.

I also investigate whether employers prefer, benefit from, and maybe even exploit the passion of job applicants and employees. In one experiment, I found that college-educated workers, even those who have hiring authority in their own jobs, prefer job applicants who express passion for the work, in part because they believe those applicants will be willing to put more uncompensated work into their jobs.

In these and other ways, I argue, the cultural priority of passion seeking contributes to several dynamics of labor force inequality.

The Trouble with Passion also raises more existential questions about the prioritization of passion among career decision-makers. What does it mean to center paid employment in one’s self-reflexive project? How does it perpetuate a culture of overwork and close off other meaning-making opportunities? And in what ways might the popularity of the passion principle perpetuate exploitation – not only of workers’ time, effort, and emotional labor, but of workers’ very senses of self?

You write about the ways that the passion principle has operated throughout your own career—including the belief that it caused you to leave behind a career in engineering to pursue your passion for sociology. Your research, however, seems to have demystified the passion principle for you, revealing that passionate work is not a one-size-fits-all ticket to fulfillment in life. Can you tell us about how you confronted the biases you held about passion as the findings for this project presented themselves to you?

Conducting research for The Trouble with Passion raised sobering questions for me about standard approaches to mentoring and career advising in academia—approaches that I had fully embraced. Before this book, I often told my students to prioritize their passion above other considerations, and saw passion-based commitment to my discipline as the purest form of commitment. The more I uncovered, the more it became apparent that the goal of finding passion-based work is presented as ideal for everyone but is feasible for only a privileged few.

Additionally, before this research, I implicitly agreed with the idea that employers should prioritize passionate employees and applicants. And I had my own share of service industry experience! (In high school and college, I worked as a telemarketer, a pizza server, and a clothing store cashier, and handed out samples at Costco.) Yet, the cultural value of passion-based service runs deep. Although my research focused on college-going and college educated workers, my broader investigation revealed that even workers who are in jobs they aren’t passionate about may still be expected to pretend that they are. A sandwich board I saw recently in front of a Starbucks read, “Our PASSION is to serve YOU.” Casual perusal of help wanted ads for service jobs like front desk clerks shows that many workers are expected by employers to engage in their jobs as if they were passionate about them.

The potential for passion to be exploited—either the passion of workers who have it, or by expecting workers to perform it—was a deep-cutting finding that led to my own reckoning with my perspectives about work. It forced me to think critically about how my passion for my own work might have been a blinder to processes of inequality in higher education. I also had to come to terms with my own overwork. I couldn’t recommend that others rethink the amount of time they let work occupy their time on days off without considering my own tendency to work nights and weekends. Even more than that, the research demanded that I ask myself, “who would I be, what is my identity, outside my line of work?”

You point out the significant ways that the passion principle fosters and justifies inequality and segregation in the workplace by shifting the focus of a structural phenomenon to individual-level decisions and preferences, a process you call “choicewashing.”

What are some of the ways that you suggest educational institutions and their employees (or any institutions, for that matter) can help to decenter passion and mitigate the inequality that it can enable?

By promoting passion-seeking as the most morally valuable way to make career decisions, without addressing skyrocketing education costs, differential access to employment opportunities, and unequal social and cultural capital for garnering the skills and experiences necessary to succeed on the job market, academic institutions and the instructors and advisors therein simply perpetuate the socioeconomic inequalities that students entered college with. College instructors notoriously promote the idea that students should follow their passion and “figure out the employment stuff later.” In my interviews with career counselors and coaches, I found that the majority promoted passion-seeking when advising students, and some even explicitly discouraged students from prioritizing pragmatic factors like salary and job security over meaningful work. Anecdotally, college admissions essays seem to also implicitly or explicitly ask students to explain their academic major choices through the lens of passion.

Furthermore, this choicewashing often means that patterns of gender, race, and class segregation in higher education and beyond are brushed off as the benign outcome of individuals choosing to follow paths they are passionate about. This helps scaffold beliefs like the meritocratic ideology and undermines the perceived need for institutional change.

Educators, parents, and employers need to expand the options young adults and career aspirants see for the role of work in their lives. Passion-seeking should not be a moralized expectation.

Second, we need to champion collective solutions to the problems of paid work. The passion principle is ultimately an individual-level solution—it helps individual workers navigate the constraints of the labor force and avoid the potential drudgery of paid work. But it does nothing to address the factors that make paid work feel like drudgery in the first place. Collective solutions—championing better work hours and working conditions, stronger benefits, and less overwork—would not only make paid work more manageable for passion-seekers but also make work better for workers who labor in jobs that hold little potential for the expression of passion.

Third, the reason the passion principle is such a powerful force of inequality reproduction is because passion-seeking is so risky for many. At the institutional level, expanding the social safety nets for workers and reducing the crushing burden of student loan debt would go a long way to make passion-seeking less risky.

Even people who do work they are passionate about must still do so within a capitalist framework that exploits their labor for profit. This brought to mind the well-trod idea (at least among a certain corner of progressives) that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. To extend this idea a bit, do you think that there can be passionate production under capitalism?

This is a great question. The passion principle is understood as a good career decision-making guide because people believe it will help them avoid the drudgery of decades of work in a job they feel no connection to. To achieve this, passion-seekers and passionate workers invest much of their own sense of identity in their paid employment.

Unsurprisingly, this is a boon for employers. In the job application experiment I ran, passionate applicants were preferred over applicants who were interested in applying for other reasons (e.g., they respected the company, they liked the job’s location) and potential employers preferred passionate applicants *because* they believed passionate applicants would work harder in the job without expecting an increase in pay. In other words, employers may knowingly exploit the passion of the people who work for them. 

So the question becomes: Can there be passionate production within capitalist employment that isn’t exploitative? Exploitation doesn’t just exist at the individual level, where individual workers feel exploited in their own jobs. People who are passionate about their work may genuinely not feel exploited. Yet, exploitation in the broader sense is about the reward workers in an employment system receive compared to the value the owners and stakeholders of their owners receive for their labor. If employers benefit (and profit) from labor that workers put in because they are passionate about their work, without compensating that labor, that is part of the exploitation of passion. If that production is compensated with proportional rewards, then passionate production becomes less exploitative.

You write in the book’s preface that you are “uneasy” telling students interested in sociology to follow their passion and “figure out the employment stuff later,” which many academics tend to do. As a sociology student myself, I’m grateful that you are resisting giving advice that may no longer be practical! How do you approach these conversations instead and what do you tell students who come to you asking for career advice, in sociology or beyond?

I didn’t start out intending to study passion. I was a “follow your passion” enthusiast before this project and encouraged many students to “do what you love” (especially if that meant pursuing sociology).

My research for The Trouble with Passion raised jarring questions about my typical approaches to career advising and mentoring. The passion principle was almost tailor-made for wealthy and upper-middle-class young adults. The presumption that all students should and will sacrifice financial stability to pursue their passion is borne out of the privilege of academics (including myself) who were rewarded for, and secured gainful employment in, their passion. Many students, especially first generation and working class students, may not be so lucky.

Now I encourage students, and anyone else at the crossroads of important career decisions, to marshal a more holistic set of considerations in their decision-making. I start with the question, What do you want your relationship to paid work to be? What do you need from your work in addition to a paycheck? Predictable hours? Enjoyable colleagues? Benefits? A respectful boss?

Second, if decision-makers are set on following their passion, I encourage them to demand the worth of their passion-inspired work. Are you being fairly compensated for the additional passion-fueled efforts you put into your job? We contribute to our own and others’ exploitation if we buy into the idea that passion is its own form of compensation.

Educators, mentors, parents, and career counselors need to be sources of counter-perspectives for career aspirants making critical decisions. It is vital that we offer more critical viewpoints on this long-venerated decision-making priority.

Your research participants saw meaningful work as more than just a measure of professional success—it also formed the bedrock of what they saw to be a life worth living. One potential antidote you present to conflating one’s identity with the work they do is what you refer to as “diversifying your meaning-making portfolio.” I think most people feel that they could be devoting more time to their hobbies and communities (and anything else outside of paid employment), but it can be hard to know how and where to begin this work. What did this diversification process look like for you as you came to understand its necessity?

By “diversify your meaning-making portfolio,” I mean finding places outside of school and work to center our self-reflexive projects. It can look like starting or reviving hobbies, engaging in community service, joining a civic theatre, taking language lessons, and otherwise nurturing senses of identity and fulfillment that exist fully outside the realm of one’s paid employment. In my own case, I started painting (poorly) and dusted off a violin I played in high school. My partner is actively involved in the local improvisational comedy scene in our city.

Of course, making room for non-employment passions takes work—it can involve negotiating with employers, partners, and friends to value and make room for these passion pursuits. We may need to be militant with ourselves at first to keep feelings of guilt and perfectionism at bay. The more anchors to sources of fulfillment and identity we have outside of paid employment, the more protected we are from the existential threat of putting all of our meaning-making eggs in the capitalist employment basket.

We should be asking: How can we shrink the footprint of paid employment in our lives? Work that can be neatly contained into predictable hours, that provides freedom to engage in meaningful activities outside of work, and that allows time for friends, family, and volunteer work may be equally if not more desirable goals than passion-seeking.

Passion-seeking not only means giving our time and energy to our employers, but also a central part of ourselves. To put it bluntly, the capitalist labor force was not designed to support us in our personal growth and sense of fulfillment; it was designed to increase profit and value for the owners and stakeholders of the places we work. By understanding the power of the passion principle, we can be better equipped to envision alternatives to it—for our organizations, for our institutions, and for ourselves. ●

You can buy The Trouble with Passion here and find out more about Erin’s work here.

---

About the Interviewer: Tyler Burgese is a sociology PhD student who thinks and writes about sexuality and social media. He lives in Philadelphia with his cat, Judy, and a large pile of books that he'll definitely get to this year. His essay Queering Sex Ed was featured in Culture Study in 2022 alongside an interview with local sex educator Al Vernacchio. You can keep up with Tyler on Instagram at @tjburgese and in the comments of most CS comment threads.

---