Thanks so much for this Tyler and Erin and Anne. As a sociology professor, I'm also guilty of telling students to pursue their passion and let the rest take care of itself, like there's some incredible magic that happens to sort it all out. Which, in retrospect, is very naive. But it sometimes makes me uneasy given that for a lot of my majors, 'pursuing their passion' means going into fields like social work, which are so important, but also will burn them out in a matter of years all while they're being severely underpaid.
This interview also makes me think about the collapse of civic and community life in the United States. If we're being told that all our passion goes into work, then of course we don't have time or energy to volunteer or hang out or, you know, join a bowling league. We don't have time to make friends. We don't have time to talk to our neighbors. Another important piece of the how-capitalism-screws-us puzzle. It's not, for some of us, that we're being forced to work longer hours and put more of our energy into our work. It's that we WANT to, because we believe that's what a good life is supposed to be.
I love this comment, especially the second paragraph. I have been wrestling for years with the idea that modern work occupies so much time and mental effort that it leaves little to no room in people's lives for building community. What I hadn't considered is the fact that the "passion principle" drives people to prioritize work over all else not because they need to in order to survive, but because they've constructed their identities around it.
Part of me suspects that the system was designed to do this--get people so invested in overworking to enrich their employers that their bosses don't have to demand it of them...which kind of makes me feel like a conspiracy theorist. But how else did the passion principle get this warped?
Agreed, Kaydee. I think the system is exactly designed to get people invested in overworking. But there doesn't have to be an actual conspiracy for the systems to work this way. This is one of the big insights of sociology that's hard to grasp sometimes. When people's interests align (as in employers and corporations and universities), you get a system that looks like it's the result of an intentional conspiracy but is really just people with a lot of power making small and big decisions over and over that are in their best interests. This is how culture and norms and society get created and maintained. Those in power pursue their interests and their decisions create systems that benefit them.
Why do we cooperate in that system? Because, as with the passion principle, the culture convinces us that it's in our best interests. Like Marx said, "In every epoch, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas." Capitalism works by convincing us that a lot of things are true that are not in our best interest. Hard work is virtuous. Poor people are lazy. Capitalism is the only system that will work for human society, even though it's a relatively recent phenomenon. And on and on.
A few years ago I tried to get my peers to do our performance calibration without commenting on how many hours their salaried employees worked. It was incredible. Pretty much every highly rated employee had comments in their review about working long hours, working weekends, rescheduling personal obligations around work, or being available during off hours. Low rated employees often had notes like "punches out right at 4pm" or "not responsive to business needs" which is just code for "wouldn't work the weekend" or "doesn't answer emails on vacation".
Even managers who preached work-life balance and *benevolently* send their teams home at noon the Friday of a holiday weekend, could not separate the hours invested from the quality of the work. To the point that the people putting in a lot of extra hours become the minimum standard for expected output in a way that's unattainable on a 40-hr workweek.
So... I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's particularly painful if you *don't* have the passion, but are still expected to put in the hours like it's your great love.
That sucks, Abigayle. Especially that putting in all those extra hours isn't seen as "exceptional," but just the baseline expectation against which everyone else is judged. Like working MORE than you're supposed to is just normal. Which reminds me of the statistic that 46% of American workers don't use all the paid time off that's available to them.
I think the solutions are both legislative and cultural. In Denmark, the official working week is 37 hours. We could do that here. But also, Danes actually work just 34 hours a week on average because there's a culture there that respects work-life balance. And with all their holidays and paid time off, Danes only work an average of 18.5 days a month. Not surprising that they're consistently one of the happiest countries in the world.
I think the 'quiet quitting' movement is a small collective push-back against American workplace culture and rules. And there's more discussion of 4-day work weeks. I have some hope, but, also, I'm not in the corporate world.
4-day work-weeks will merely compress the same amount of overwork into fewer days. It will change the heat in the kitchen into a 5-alarm fire.
What drives this is the need for exponential financial growth at the top, and the way they achieve that is selling more X while paying less to produce X. There is no "balance" in the system -- it has to grow exponentially. Top managers and CEOs who don't achieve that get replaced.
The only way to balance the system is through government constraints on business. Businesses themselves have no mechanism, and no power, to do this themselves.
You second paragraph reminds me of something my aunt once said to me. Her husband was an executive VP at (I believe) General Mills. The subject of the company IBM came up, and she commented that IBM stood for "I've Been Moved." One of the corporate strategies of the 50's and 60's was aggressive relocation of personnel, particularly management, officially to send their "best people" where they were "needed." But there's another aspect of it, which was to prevent their "best people" from becoming "locals" with binding social ties to the communities they lived in, so that they could be easily uprooted.
That's so interesting and seems so counter-intuitive to me. Like isn't a workplace better when people know each other and trust each other and get along? How do you create that when people are always moving around?
I think you misunderstand the purpose of a corporation. Its sole purpose is to make money for its ownership class with a minimum of effort on the part of the ownership class. "We gave you money, now go make us back that much, and more." Every decade or so, a new management fad comes out, to try to squeeze more juice out of the corporate orange. The year I graduated high school, the book, "The Mythical Man-Month" came out, criticizing the typical corporate expectation of the 1960's, which was mocked (quite accurately) by the idea that if a woman can have a baby in nine months, then nine women should be able to have a baby in one month.
Through the 70's and 80's, we went through about a dozen management fads, the names of which I no longer remember. Companies adopted them, trained their employees in the novel process, and then the programs died quietly because (shock!) they didn't work at all.
The idea of the corporate mobility fad (it was before my time, so I didn't experience it) was to emotionally bond the employee to the company, rather than to people or communities. It's a concept that goes back to the earliest forms of slavery, and carries through into modern brainwashing methods. Companies at that time (50's-60's) saw technology opening new markets in places there had never been markets, and they needed a working class that could forget everything they knew about X, and quickly master Y, move into the market, and capture it. Recall that most workers of that time were former soldiers from WWII and Korea, and were already accustomed to being "GI's" (General Issue, like boots and jackets) -- interchangeable parts in a machine.
Like the Mythical Man Month, it was a fad, and quietly died.
People really misconstrue the nature and purpose of a corporation. It has only one: make exponential profit for its owners. The corporation really (really) doesn't care about its employees. This always puts managers in a terrible bind, because many of them (not all) actually do care about their employees. They have to make cruel decisions -- or lose their jobs, of course.
"The Mythical Man-Month"!?!? I am laughing and horrified at the same time.
Great insights into how corporations work and how it doesn't really matter what individuals want or don't. The institution has its own imperatives. Have you ever seen the documentary, aptly called The Corporation--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film)
They compare corporations to sharks--they have to keep moving in order to survive. Always thought that was a good metaphor. The whole point of the documentary is that if corporations were people (which they are legally under the 14th amendment) they would meet all the diagnostic criteria for a sociopath.
Could be some people don't like their neighbors (or family) so they work all the time to avoid them. When you can't find meaning or joy anywhere else, I imagine you might try to find it in your work.
Haha, this hits close to home. I was never working more hours than I was when my marriage was breaking up. I didn't want to be at home, so I found SO MANY PROJECTS that needed my attention at work. Doom loop for the relationship really. I also put a lot of pressure on myself to compensate for my failure at marriage with great professional success.
Yes to all this. I appreciate your observation about civic society. I’ve been thinking about how that continues to be eroded along with opportunities for basic community engagement. Today I had to explain to someone younger than me about how people used to stop random strangers to ask for the time. I feel like we have to collectively deprioritize work and reclaim ourselves and our communities in basic, almost primal ways that don’t involve production or capitalism.
You know, every now and then, someone in the small town where I live asks me for the time. Which is interesting. More often, we exchange pleasantries about the Midwestern weather, because there's always something to say about the weather. This is one of my favorite forms of basic community engagement. It's especially likely with older folks and, I don't know, it makes me happy to just say, "Gonna be a hot one!"
This doesn't work if I have headphones in, though, so I try to walk without them as often as I can.
Well that blew my mind. As someone who works in an industry (vet med) where passion is regularly exploited and weaponized against us especially when we want to be compensated for the expertise we bring...I absolutely see how I have been groomed and fashioned in this passion trap. How I have organized my life to do work that I feel passionately about...and how I perpetuate this mindset. Whoof. A lot to think about.
I'm a surgical resident and this comes up a lot in discussions about working conditions for residents/physicians and healthcare workers in general, especially in light of a sort-of-recent push to unionize. I struggle sometimes with the extremes of the argument: on the one hand, some say, "you chose this", we must always put patients first, we have it "so much easier" than residents in the past did, as excuses for dismissing very valid complaints about our workloads and lifestyles. Obviously none of these are justifications for the things some of us endure that would or should never be acceptable in any workplace.
On the other hand, some say it's just a job like any other, and that we do not owe any more to our work than anyone else does. That is also something I struggle with, as someone who genuinely does feel passionate about my work and feels that our positions come with a responsibility towards our patients that is both a burden and a privilege. I don't think that contradicts or is mutually exclusive to the idea that no matter how passionate we are about our work, we still must protect and enrich our lives beyond it, both for our own well-being and for our ability to continue to do our meaningful jobs to the best of our ability.
I got a chance to talk to some college juniors last year, and I talked about following your passion. I said I doubted anyone in our building’s “passion” was to work on financial data. I did say that something in your job should make you go “Huh!” so you were interested.
Yes! There are all kinds of problems worth solving — sometimes you get paid for them, sometimes you don't.
One of the most interesting insights in my (so far just 50 person!) qual study on how to have a healthy relationship with work was finding that the healthiest people I spoke to were not passionate about their profession, they were passioante about life. They constantly sought out interesting problems to solve and devoted themselves to it.
One of the women I spoke to had this fascinating way of charging for her time — the more she was interested in something, the less she charged to do the work. There's actually research that bears this out — when you introduce an extrinsic reward like money or status, you actually become less intrinsically motivated to do it.
It seems counter-intuitive, especially in the context of exploited passion, but she was balancing her books on joy more than money and it was working for her.
Another funny thing I found — the healthiest people had the hardest time explaining what they do for a living, most often because they did so many different things according to their interests. Life as a great big buffet of interesting problems worth solving.
I love this approach. I've recently been writing freelance, but I don't write (for publication) for free and I don't write about things I don't want to write about. I'm not trying make my living writing --if I was trying to make a living, I would probably go back to manual labor of some sort even though I'm in my mid-40s now. But I like the idea of a sliding scale based on interest.
Yeah, I agree with this. My aunt says you should always be learning in your job otherwise you're just languishing and I think it's a good perspective. Even if it's not your primary passion, you can still be learning and growing.
This framing resonates with me. I work at a membership association (IYKYK), which is an industry I didn't even know existed until I started working in it. But the thing I like (and sometimes hate) about my job is that there's constantly something new to learn. We're small (ahem, understaffed), so there's a lot of flexibility and some "we're doing this new thing, just figure it out" but overall it keeps things interesting. But I know that's the kind of work environment that would be absolute torture for others.
I teach at a large public university, and the students likely to have ‘passion’ language and aspirations are a significant minority, marked by high SES and cultural capital, like this interview notes. Many of our students instead frame their choices about majors and careers through a sort of blunt or simplistic pragmatism that I think has its own problems for longterm happiness or success. Students tell me they are majoring in “general business” because they want to “get a good job”—but when I ask what types of jobs or fields they’re interested in, they don’t know. Parents won’t allow them to major in the humanities or social sciences, because “those aren’t jobs”—and when I point out that many careers rely on a wide-ranging skill set rather than a single degree program, I get blank looks (or contemptuous smiles).
I’m conscious of the damage incurred in the ‘do what you love’ mentoring. On the other hand, I have observed many students who seemed to be slouching through college, bored with their business degree and unsure of what they were doing next…who were excited to develop public presentations about campus history, or to study film and pop culture, or design educational programs for local middle schoolers. But they take our classes as a one-off, and can’t make the connection to how those skills might translate to the rest of their lives…or how sticking with their sources of interest and enthusiasm might mean better grades across their college career, more enthusiastic and detailed letters of rec from professors, more opportunities for internships and referrals, and so on. Many of the ones pursuing this seemingly pragmatic path are, I think, being poorly mentored and advised in their own way, just as much as the DWYL ones are.
I work myself into knots about this. When I taught at large public universities I was absolutely the teacher trying to tell kids "major in [my humanity!], go to grad school, convince your parents you're learning life skills!" And philosophically I believe it: that what we learn in a liberal arts education equips us to think, which then equips us to do so many types of work. What I've learned since leaving academia is just how difficult it is, particularly without robust internship experience, to convince employers with very specific job descriptions that you can, in fact, do that job. Plus: mountains of student loan debt, far more than even most of us took on to attend school (private or public). I hate the idea of ROI [return on investment] when it comes to a degree but our current system has forced that logic.
Absolutely--and I understand the ROI thinking, but I suppose I'm concerned that many of the ones who seem to be adopting it aren't, actually, taking the steps that will help them get those jobs with very specific skill sets. A mediocre GPA with a degree in Gen Business, poorly written application materials (shouldn't Business at least be teaching them how to write a resume? I have graduating seniors come to me without knowing what a resume is, or how to shape one towards a specific job or internship)...these don't seem like things that are likely to set them up for lucrative careers. It seems like many of them are being pushed towards this model by well-intentioned middle-class or lower middle class parents who think it's the practical choice, but it seems likely to replicate the same class divisions mentioned in the interview. Those students who *are* able to use this model to launch careers are those who already have family connections in a field or who use Greek life and other social factors to network their way into jobs.
(Editing to add: I definitely don't give any of them the 'go to grad school' advice! Hahahasob. I have an anti-pep-talk for those who come to ask me about it.)
I think there's a big issue with students having exposure to what types of jobs exist and what type of education supports them. My company hires 'high potential' students and rotates them through a few months each of design, operations and sales, because basically they have no idea what any job is like, therefore, no idea if they would like that job.
I'm grateful that I did internships during my summers at college, because it taught me a lot about the types of jobs I did *not* want. But without that experience I have no idea how I would've known what to look for. And I studied engineering which is a pretty straightforward education/job relationship!
Love that you company does that — it's basically like a low-stakes training/sorting program, too, that allows people to end up in the areas that suit them/interest them. SO FEW PLACES DO THIS, THOUGH — just like so few places (outside of trades) are now are willing to do on-the-job training, which used to be very much the norm.
Yeah, don't give them too much credit - this is a pretty exclusive program with strings attached - there's a requirement that participants relocate for part of the assignment, and they don't have a ton of control over where they're assigned or who they will work with. Also, you have to be recruited into it (current employees can't apply into the program). Finally, they only recruit from a pretty narrow set of majors.
BUT STILL! For those who have access to it it's quite a good way to learn about various aspects of the business. Kind of like a series of internships, but you're a full time employee with benefits while you do it.
I agree. Having interest in a field of study or a topic isn’t always connected with what a job in that field is comprised of. You might be interested in science but life in a lab is not for everyone. As someone who has hired a lot of people in my career, the fact is that most people learn on the job. They bring their attitude and abilities to it and they perform at some level. You either like it or you don’t. You like detail or you don’t. You can plan time or you just want to take orders. You can’t stop working when you’re on task or you’re watching the clock. The hard part is knowing yourself AND identifying the careers that have roles in synch with tour temperament. This is incredibly difficult and a bit of trial and error. I think the underlying message of follow your passion is that the ideal is to find the right job situation so that you’re not miserable and your day is over before you know it. With all of the neurodiversity and variation in temperament and humanity, there is a good job match for everyone.
I used to teacher Career Ed and one of my most-said lines was, “Finding out what you hate is as valuable as finding out what you love,” for exactly these reasons.
I really appreciated this comment, as someone who also teaches at a large public university (an HSI, with a lot of low-income and / or first generation college students). Like you, I get that "do what you love" is complicated (to say the least). But I also think that that equation between what you study and what your job ends up being is much more complicated than a lot of students realize -- they think they'll get a business degree and become an entrepreneur, or they'll get a history degree, and the only thing they can do is teach history. And with that in mind, I think there really IS a value to studying something that interests you because university education is four (or more -- my university doesn't have a great four-year graduation rate) years of your life, and those years of your life do matter.
The university where I teach tends to push STEM-centered vocationalism as a solution (/the only solution) to its low-income / minoritized / first-gen student body, with concomitant neglect of "softer" / more humanistic skills ("passion" stuff). But I think that perpetuates further inequality -- where not-explicitly-vocational training / education is exclusively the preserve of wealthier folks (and, weirdly, knowing how to write a clear and / or convincing sentence is not part of getting a job...?).
Wow, there’s so much to digest here! Looking back over my life I do wonder what it would’ve been like to just have a stable job that paid well and had a good benefits and found my meaning in things that are actually meaningful like relationships instead of trying to find my meaning in my work.
My sister-in-law’s sister and husband both worked for Boeing right out of high school driving delivery trucks. They worked 40 hour weeks and not one minute over and had regular schedules and job stability. They retired at 50 with full benefits and pensions and I was like why did I not do this?! Instead, I pursued passion jobs that were very unstable and had no benefits or pensions or anything like that and that were insanely stressful and bled into my free time. Of course I don’t even know if jobs like the Boeing job even exist anymore but I do think there’s something to be said for just having a job that stable and pays the bills if you can find one.
Because you probably would have hated all 40 hours a week you spent driving that truck! It is easy to look back now and ask why didn't I take that job when they are at the end and retiring at 50! My cousin had a very similar job and hated every minute of it and hating your job for 30 years is not a way to live
i actually don't think i would have hated it. in college i worked for an auto parts delivery service and i loved driving around by myself, listening to music etc. I think i would have been unhappy b/c my ego needed the approval of a more "impressive" job but that's a problem. Of course I did it the way I had to given the tools i had. but me today would take a job like that and use the free time for my passions. Ironically in following my passion i had no free time for anything else and in the end i realized it wasn't even my passion oops!
This is a great and courageous interview, thank you. My father was a physicist who loved poetry, and he firmly believed that you should learn a thing that is NOT your passion, because you'll always do your passion. He'd point out that many scientists are also artists. Of course I rebelled, majored in art, and have (a) struggled financially most of my life, and (b) never really committed to the art, because I was always exhausted by jobs that were not what I wanted to be doing but needed the money - yet never reached a serious professional level with any of them because they were, ahem, not my thing. Lots of reasons I made bad choices and couldn't commit to one thing or the other, always had a foot out the door, but I wish I'd listened to my dad. He would have loved seeing this point of view and agreed with it. Now the inequality part - that is truly groundbreaking for me, as all my friends seem to think I'm just not trying hard enough to "market myself" as an artist.
This was such an affirming interview to read. I work in publishing and people are ABSOLUTELY and EXPLICITLY exploited by their love of books in exchange for bad pay & extreme hours. I enjoy my job but have drawn some firm lines in the sand regarding what I’ll do for it. I like to tell people that my goal is for work to be the smallest slice in the pie of my life. I think younger generations than me (a millennial) are catching onto this, and thank god they are.
Agreed! I worked in publishing for 22 years and the amount of unpaid overtime I did was wild. I am thankful that younger generations are pushing back and also that I'm out of the industry now. I am no longer following my passion but getting out has allowed me to rediscover reading for pleasure again. Too much of a good thing can be, well, too much.
When I was in college, I discovered Cal Newport’s books and he also makes a case against “follow your passion.” From what I remember, his framing was more of an appeal to emotion (“pathos”) and wasn’t through a socioeconomic/capitalist lens (which I appreciate about this interview!) and his advice for a career was to pick something you don’t mind spending a few decades getting better at (i.e., honing a craft). It seemed radically practical at a time in my life when the dogma was relentlessly “pursue your passion!” But when I would bring it up with my classmates, they would get upset! They had fully bought in to the passion model and would insist I just needed to double down. So I’m glad that this topic is now becoming more widely discussed. Normalizing alternative decision-making models for what you’ll do for paid work is important, especially for young adults entering the workforce.
The book on which Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown, is working now has the subject 'Lifestyle-centric career planning.' He looks at deciding first how you want to live, where you want to live, how much you also want to pursue other interests in your life, and so forth, and then how to plan your career/job life around that, as a means toward your bigger ideas of how to live.
Lots of what he discusses in his body of work about planning is focused on other kinds of things, like the nitty gritty of productivity for people like him, which I know doesn't interest me, but I think his bigger-picture work is very interesting. His latest book is called Slow Productivity, abut how we can avoid rat-trace styles of work to good advantage..
This is public radio to a T. When I switched from newspapers to a public radio project in 2010, I had to hire a staff. I was shocked at how low the salaries were. I was also shocked at how long people stayed in their jobs. Many of them had been at it for decades. The excuse then was that they were passionate about audio and there was no where else that they could do it. We all know what has happened since then: podcasts got much bigger, major news organizations jumped into the field, and the money got better. That’s why you saw so many people flee NPR and the stations - there was someplace else to go.
1. For how these forces have played out in the higher ed workforce (both academic and non-academic employees), Kevin McClure developed a great body of work starting during the pandemic. Highly recommend reading his articles and LinkedIn posts (after the bird site declined) which are backed by research and interviews.
2. For young adults forging paths after high school, Jeff Selingo and others are communicating to as many families and school counselors as possible about building skills in addition to choosing a school and major, and techniques for choosing a path that doesn't involve taking on major student loan debt. See also Ryan Craig on apprenticeships, and Brandon Busted on having employers pay for gaining your degree or credentials.
I wonder when exactly the follow your passion became such a driving force. I'm GenX raised by Silent Generation parents who had blue collar roots though had moved to white collar middle class jobs (though were never very economically stable). The need to go to college (and get a scholarship to do so) was drilled into my head starting in kindergarten. The closest thing I ever heard regarding passion was my dad telling me to find a job I love or one that would pay me enough to enjoy my time outside of work. But then again, they also sent me to a fancy private college (see scholarship) where discussing job propects just did happen and the only expected path was grad school. And I majored in something with little obvious job prospects, so I guess I absorbed some of the passion stuff even if it wasn't so clearly articulated.
There's been some good work on this — Miya Tokumitsu's DO WHAT YOU LOVE was my go-to when writing Can't Even — and it really became dominant in the late '90s/early 2000s (there's this crucial Steve Jobs speech at Stanford whose thesis is basically DO WHAT YOU LOVE OR ELSE IT'S ALL MEANINGLESS!)
I inherently bristle when I read about this topic, but it has taken me a while to determine why. I think the answer is nuanced. First, and perhaps most importantly to me, I don’t know how to separate promotion of the Passion Principle from what Anne Helen wrote about a month ago as the Dark Heart of Individualism. I think the former perpetuates the latter and puts self over community. Second, the concept of the Passion Principle is loaded. We celebrate those that have a passion for something to such a degree that if a person doesn’t have a passion for something they are somehow sad, lacking, or unfulfilled. Kids are pushed at an early age to start developing their passions to leverage into resumes and essays that will get them into elite institutions. Good for those kids who really are passionate about something; but no judgment should be passed on those who aren’t. Third, following passion will not necessarily result in happiness in employment. What will? That’s up to the individual - it is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. I very much enjoyed my political science major. I now am a government lawyer. The politics drives me nuts! But what is fulfilling about my job is the sense of satisfaction I derive from serving the public and being a voice of reason in a time of unrest. That was not in my top 5 desired job characteristics when I applied. Why not?
From what I've read, the most consistent and reliable source of personal happiness is a good social life. Not drunken Friday Afternoon Clubs, but connections with a network of people you know and care about. It doesn't have to be living in each others' laps. It's the sense that if your house burned down, there would be people around you who would help you get your life back together.
Quite some years ago, my wife and I lived in Fort Collins, CO. We got invited to a party by a couple we knew only casually, through a large, loose social network. It was a grand party on a warm night, and we all took sleeping bags and camped out on their property. He was a tech entrepreneur, and his house was a marvel of passive solar power -- a LOT of power, since he had a lot of computing hardware. He had a small fortune invested in that house.
Some months later, the big fires came through, swept through his property, and took everything except their lives. It was so hot, it reduced a car to a smallish rivulet of metal from the engine block.
My wife and I were saddened and appalled by this, so we went to the bank and opened up a relief fund in their name, then spread the word through their network of friends: send money here. We'd never done that sort of thing before. The response was huge, and it helped them rebuild. But more than that, it let them know they had friends that counted.
I considered myself “successful” in a passion career, fortunate to have made good money at it. But I look back at decades of it ruling way too much of my life. If I could start over I’d be an electrician.
I also think there's an element of doing your passion for money takes the joy out of it. I crochet as a hobby and people often tell me I should sell my wares, but like, if I was crocheting on the clock I think it would just be drudgery.
My kid has been talking about not going to college and instead pursuing a career in the trades. Some of the co-parenting team and *all* of the grandparents are freaking out about this, but I'm like... why not? It's not like he's threatening to become a heroin addict here, he's expressing his interest in a way that will allow him to support himself! If he decides later that he wants a career that requires a degree, college will still be there.
Your kid is hella smart. I used to work with one of the major nationwide apprenticeship programs. Four year program includes 40 hours on the job training working 6 am to 3 pm. School two nights per week, 4 to 9 pm. After 90 days they get health insurance and benefits. The only out of pocket costs is tech manuals and tools.
Two years in, those guys were showing up for class driving brand new trucks, paid in full. At graduation they had their choice of jobs. They could easily make six figures. Not a dime of debt. More than one started his own business before they hit 30. These jobs will never be offshored, never done by AI. Who’s the smart thinker here?
The biggest problem we ran into were the teachers, counselors, and families who told these kids they could only be successful with a college degree. What nonsense. Please encourage your son to go for it!!
"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."
YES. I want to shout this from the rooftops. Thank you for this insightful interview, Tyler and Erin!
Loved this piece; I work in climate policy so definitely see some of this at play. For 'purpose' jobs, I think, resisting the pull to work endless hours is as much about keeping ourselves able to sustainably do the work (which both makes the world a better place - we hope - and puts food on the table) as it is about leaving space in life for other sources of fulfilment.
This is SO true and why I find the crappy organizational ethos at so many profit jobs so enmaddening — do you want to get work done or do you want to burn out your workforce so you have constant churn and little institutional knowledge? But to do that you really need strong guardrails throughout the org and so few places have them.
Totally! I have a strict rule that I don’t read climate books or watch climate documentaries etc at weekends. But I know most of my colleagues don’t (although most of them don’t live alone so they have distractions in situ, which I don’t!)
Thanks for saying this. I'm still settling into a relatively new job at a Big Green, and I know I can't be the only person who deals with climate anxiety and grief. But we don't talk about it! And then, when we're polled about how well we feel we can separate from work, many people say "I cannot" - hmm I wonder why... What if we made space for processing these complex feelings on the clock, which affect the decisions we make on the clock, so that we can both do our jobs better and function more effectively when not working?
I’m always working on this! Looking at including something about wellbeing for sustainability people in our next team away day. In my own little part of the team we make space for anger and frustration too, because it is important to do that!
I’ve kind of *made us* talk about climate anxiety and grief because I know it’s important.
Such an interesting discussion! Knowing I had no family safety net greatly changed my career and life trajectory. At the same time, I watched many peers from stable homes take paths I felt were too risky.
Thanks so much for this Tyler and Erin and Anne. As a sociology professor, I'm also guilty of telling students to pursue their passion and let the rest take care of itself, like there's some incredible magic that happens to sort it all out. Which, in retrospect, is very naive. But it sometimes makes me uneasy given that for a lot of my majors, 'pursuing their passion' means going into fields like social work, which are so important, but also will burn them out in a matter of years all while they're being severely underpaid.
This interview also makes me think about the collapse of civic and community life in the United States. If we're being told that all our passion goes into work, then of course we don't have time or energy to volunteer or hang out or, you know, join a bowling league. We don't have time to make friends. We don't have time to talk to our neighbors. Another important piece of the how-capitalism-screws-us puzzle. It's not, for some of us, that we're being forced to work longer hours and put more of our energy into our work. It's that we WANT to, because we believe that's what a good life is supposed to be.
I love this comment, especially the second paragraph. I have been wrestling for years with the idea that modern work occupies so much time and mental effort that it leaves little to no room in people's lives for building community. What I hadn't considered is the fact that the "passion principle" drives people to prioritize work over all else not because they need to in order to survive, but because they've constructed their identities around it.
Part of me suspects that the system was designed to do this--get people so invested in overworking to enrich their employers that their bosses don't have to demand it of them...which kind of makes me feel like a conspiracy theorist. But how else did the passion principle get this warped?
Agreed, Kaydee. I think the system is exactly designed to get people invested in overworking. But there doesn't have to be an actual conspiracy for the systems to work this way. This is one of the big insights of sociology that's hard to grasp sometimes. When people's interests align (as in employers and corporations and universities), you get a system that looks like it's the result of an intentional conspiracy but is really just people with a lot of power making small and big decisions over and over that are in their best interests. This is how culture and norms and society get created and maintained. Those in power pursue their interests and their decisions create systems that benefit them.
Why do we cooperate in that system? Because, as with the passion principle, the culture convinces us that it's in our best interests. Like Marx said, "In every epoch, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas." Capitalism works by convincing us that a lot of things are true that are not in our best interest. Hard work is virtuous. Poor people are lazy. Capitalism is the only system that will work for human society, even though it's a relatively recent phenomenon. And on and on.
A few years ago I tried to get my peers to do our performance calibration without commenting on how many hours their salaried employees worked. It was incredible. Pretty much every highly rated employee had comments in their review about working long hours, working weekends, rescheduling personal obligations around work, or being available during off hours. Low rated employees often had notes like "punches out right at 4pm" or "not responsive to business needs" which is just code for "wouldn't work the weekend" or "doesn't answer emails on vacation".
Even managers who preached work-life balance and *benevolently* send their teams home at noon the Friday of a holiday weekend, could not separate the hours invested from the quality of the work. To the point that the people putting in a lot of extra hours become the minimum standard for expected output in a way that's unattainable on a 40-hr workweek.
So... I'm not sure what the solution is, but it's particularly painful if you *don't* have the passion, but are still expected to put in the hours like it's your great love.
That sucks, Abigayle. Especially that putting in all those extra hours isn't seen as "exceptional," but just the baseline expectation against which everyone else is judged. Like working MORE than you're supposed to is just normal. Which reminds me of the statistic that 46% of American workers don't use all the paid time off that's available to them.
I think the solutions are both legislative and cultural. In Denmark, the official working week is 37 hours. We could do that here. But also, Danes actually work just 34 hours a week on average because there's a culture there that respects work-life balance. And with all their holidays and paid time off, Danes only work an average of 18.5 days a month. Not surprising that they're consistently one of the happiest countries in the world.
I think the 'quiet quitting' movement is a small collective push-back against American workplace culture and rules. And there's more discussion of 4-day work weeks. I have some hope, but, also, I'm not in the corporate world.
4-day work-weeks will merely compress the same amount of overwork into fewer days. It will change the heat in the kitchen into a 5-alarm fire.
What drives this is the need for exponential financial growth at the top, and the way they achieve that is selling more X while paying less to produce X. There is no "balance" in the system -- it has to grow exponentially. Top managers and CEOs who don't achieve that get replaced.
The only way to balance the system is through government constraints on business. Businesses themselves have no mechanism, and no power, to do this themselves.
This is probably true, Themon.
Ah, to be a Dane <3
You second paragraph reminds me of something my aunt once said to me. Her husband was an executive VP at (I believe) General Mills. The subject of the company IBM came up, and she commented that IBM stood for "I've Been Moved." One of the corporate strategies of the 50's and 60's was aggressive relocation of personnel, particularly management, officially to send their "best people" where they were "needed." But there's another aspect of it, which was to prevent their "best people" from becoming "locals" with binding social ties to the communities they lived in, so that they could be easily uprooted.
That's so interesting and seems so counter-intuitive to me. Like isn't a workplace better when people know each other and trust each other and get along? How do you create that when people are always moving around?
I think you misunderstand the purpose of a corporation. Its sole purpose is to make money for its ownership class with a minimum of effort on the part of the ownership class. "We gave you money, now go make us back that much, and more." Every decade or so, a new management fad comes out, to try to squeeze more juice out of the corporate orange. The year I graduated high school, the book, "The Mythical Man-Month" came out, criticizing the typical corporate expectation of the 1960's, which was mocked (quite accurately) by the idea that if a woman can have a baby in nine months, then nine women should be able to have a baby in one month.
Through the 70's and 80's, we went through about a dozen management fads, the names of which I no longer remember. Companies adopted them, trained their employees in the novel process, and then the programs died quietly because (shock!) they didn't work at all.
The idea of the corporate mobility fad (it was before my time, so I didn't experience it) was to emotionally bond the employee to the company, rather than to people or communities. It's a concept that goes back to the earliest forms of slavery, and carries through into modern brainwashing methods. Companies at that time (50's-60's) saw technology opening new markets in places there had never been markets, and they needed a working class that could forget everything they knew about X, and quickly master Y, move into the market, and capture it. Recall that most workers of that time were former soldiers from WWII and Korea, and were already accustomed to being "GI's" (General Issue, like boots and jackets) -- interchangeable parts in a machine.
Like the Mythical Man Month, it was a fad, and quietly died.
People really misconstrue the nature and purpose of a corporation. It has only one: make exponential profit for its owners. The corporation really (really) doesn't care about its employees. This always puts managers in a terrible bind, because many of them (not all) actually do care about their employees. They have to make cruel decisions -- or lose their jobs, of course.
"The Mythical Man-Month"!?!? I am laughing and horrified at the same time.
Great insights into how corporations work and how it doesn't really matter what individuals want or don't. The institution has its own imperatives. Have you ever seen the documentary, aptly called The Corporation--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film)
They compare corporations to sharks--they have to keep moving in order to survive. Always thought that was a good metaphor. The whole point of the documentary is that if corporations were people (which they are legally under the 14th amendment) they would meet all the diagnostic criteria for a sociopath.
Could be some people don't like their neighbors (or family) so they work all the time to avoid them. When you can't find meaning or joy anywhere else, I imagine you might try to find it in your work.
Haha, this hits close to home. I was never working more hours than I was when my marriage was breaking up. I didn't want to be at home, so I found SO MANY PROJECTS that needed my attention at work. Doom loop for the relationship really. I also put a lot of pressure on myself to compensate for my failure at marriage with great professional success.
Good observation, Ope!
That is absolutely true, Ope. Sometimes home gets so stressful that work becomes a refuge.
Yes to all this. I appreciate your observation about civic society. I’ve been thinking about how that continues to be eroded along with opportunities for basic community engagement. Today I had to explain to someone younger than me about how people used to stop random strangers to ask for the time. I feel like we have to collectively deprioritize work and reclaim ourselves and our communities in basic, almost primal ways that don’t involve production or capitalism.
You know, every now and then, someone in the small town where I live asks me for the time. Which is interesting. More often, we exchange pleasantries about the Midwestern weather, because there's always something to say about the weather. This is one of my favorite forms of basic community engagement. It's especially likely with older folks and, I don't know, it makes me happy to just say, "Gonna be a hot one!"
This doesn't work if I have headphones in, though, so I try to walk without them as often as I can.
Well that blew my mind. As someone who works in an industry (vet med) where passion is regularly exploited and weaponized against us especially when we want to be compensated for the expertise we bring...I absolutely see how I have been groomed and fashioned in this passion trap. How I have organized my life to do work that I feel passionately about...and how I perpetuate this mindset. Whoof. A lot to think about.
I'm a surgical resident and this comes up a lot in discussions about working conditions for residents/physicians and healthcare workers in general, especially in light of a sort-of-recent push to unionize. I struggle sometimes with the extremes of the argument: on the one hand, some say, "you chose this", we must always put patients first, we have it "so much easier" than residents in the past did, as excuses for dismissing very valid complaints about our workloads and lifestyles. Obviously none of these are justifications for the things some of us endure that would or should never be acceptable in any workplace.
On the other hand, some say it's just a job like any other, and that we do not owe any more to our work than anyone else does. That is also something I struggle with, as someone who genuinely does feel passionate about my work and feels that our positions come with a responsibility towards our patients that is both a burden and a privilege. I don't think that contradicts or is mutually exclusive to the idea that no matter how passionate we are about our work, we still must protect and enrich our lives beyond it, both for our own well-being and for our ability to continue to do our meaningful jobs to the best of our ability.
I got a chance to talk to some college juniors last year, and I talked about following your passion. I said I doubted anyone in our building’s “passion” was to work on financial data. I did say that something in your job should make you go “Huh!” so you were interested.
I love that framing. Also just thinking of work as problems you enjoy solving.
Yes! There are all kinds of problems worth solving — sometimes you get paid for them, sometimes you don't.
One of the most interesting insights in my (so far just 50 person!) qual study on how to have a healthy relationship with work was finding that the healthiest people I spoke to were not passionate about their profession, they were passioante about life. They constantly sought out interesting problems to solve and devoted themselves to it.
One of the women I spoke to had this fascinating way of charging for her time — the more she was interested in something, the less she charged to do the work. There's actually research that bears this out — when you introduce an extrinsic reward like money or status, you actually become less intrinsically motivated to do it.
It seems counter-intuitive, especially in the context of exploited passion, but she was balancing her books on joy more than money and it was working for her.
Another funny thing I found — the healthiest people had the hardest time explaining what they do for a living, most often because they did so many different things according to their interests. Life as a great big buffet of interesting problems worth solving.
I love this approach. I've recently been writing freelance, but I don't write (for publication) for free and I don't write about things I don't want to write about. I'm not trying make my living writing --if I was trying to make a living, I would probably go back to manual labor of some sort even though I'm in my mid-40s now. But I like the idea of a sliding scale based on interest.
Yeah, I agree with this. My aunt says you should always be learning in your job otherwise you're just languishing and I think it's a good perspective. Even if it's not your primary passion, you can still be learning and growing.
This framing resonates with me. I work at a membership association (IYKYK), which is an industry I didn't even know existed until I started working in it. But the thing I like (and sometimes hate) about my job is that there's constantly something new to learn. We're small (ahem, understaffed), so there's a lot of flexibility and some "we're doing this new thing, just figure it out" but overall it keeps things interesting. But I know that's the kind of work environment that would be absolute torture for others.
I teach at a large public university, and the students likely to have ‘passion’ language and aspirations are a significant minority, marked by high SES and cultural capital, like this interview notes. Many of our students instead frame their choices about majors and careers through a sort of blunt or simplistic pragmatism that I think has its own problems for longterm happiness or success. Students tell me they are majoring in “general business” because they want to “get a good job”—but when I ask what types of jobs or fields they’re interested in, they don’t know. Parents won’t allow them to major in the humanities or social sciences, because “those aren’t jobs”—and when I point out that many careers rely on a wide-ranging skill set rather than a single degree program, I get blank looks (or contemptuous smiles).
I’m conscious of the damage incurred in the ‘do what you love’ mentoring. On the other hand, I have observed many students who seemed to be slouching through college, bored with their business degree and unsure of what they were doing next…who were excited to develop public presentations about campus history, or to study film and pop culture, or design educational programs for local middle schoolers. But they take our classes as a one-off, and can’t make the connection to how those skills might translate to the rest of their lives…or how sticking with their sources of interest and enthusiasm might mean better grades across their college career, more enthusiastic and detailed letters of rec from professors, more opportunities for internships and referrals, and so on. Many of the ones pursuing this seemingly pragmatic path are, I think, being poorly mentored and advised in their own way, just as much as the DWYL ones are.
I work myself into knots about this. When I taught at large public universities I was absolutely the teacher trying to tell kids "major in [my humanity!], go to grad school, convince your parents you're learning life skills!" And philosophically I believe it: that what we learn in a liberal arts education equips us to think, which then equips us to do so many types of work. What I've learned since leaving academia is just how difficult it is, particularly without robust internship experience, to convince employers with very specific job descriptions that you can, in fact, do that job. Plus: mountains of student loan debt, far more than even most of us took on to attend school (private or public). I hate the idea of ROI [return on investment] when it comes to a degree but our current system has forced that logic.
Absolutely--and I understand the ROI thinking, but I suppose I'm concerned that many of the ones who seem to be adopting it aren't, actually, taking the steps that will help them get those jobs with very specific skill sets. A mediocre GPA with a degree in Gen Business, poorly written application materials (shouldn't Business at least be teaching them how to write a resume? I have graduating seniors come to me without knowing what a resume is, or how to shape one towards a specific job or internship)...these don't seem like things that are likely to set them up for lucrative careers. It seems like many of them are being pushed towards this model by well-intentioned middle-class or lower middle class parents who think it's the practical choice, but it seems likely to replicate the same class divisions mentioned in the interview. Those students who *are* able to use this model to launch careers are those who already have family connections in a field or who use Greek life and other social factors to network their way into jobs.
(Editing to add: I definitely don't give any of them the 'go to grad school' advice! Hahahasob. I have an anti-pep-talk for those who come to ask me about it.)
I think there's a big issue with students having exposure to what types of jobs exist and what type of education supports them. My company hires 'high potential' students and rotates them through a few months each of design, operations and sales, because basically they have no idea what any job is like, therefore, no idea if they would like that job.
I'm grateful that I did internships during my summers at college, because it taught me a lot about the types of jobs I did *not* want. But without that experience I have no idea how I would've known what to look for. And I studied engineering which is a pretty straightforward education/job relationship!
Love that you company does that — it's basically like a low-stakes training/sorting program, too, that allows people to end up in the areas that suit them/interest them. SO FEW PLACES DO THIS, THOUGH — just like so few places (outside of trades) are now are willing to do on-the-job training, which used to be very much the norm.
Yeah, don't give them too much credit - this is a pretty exclusive program with strings attached - there's a requirement that participants relocate for part of the assignment, and they don't have a ton of control over where they're assigned or who they will work with. Also, you have to be recruited into it (current employees can't apply into the program). Finally, they only recruit from a pretty narrow set of majors.
BUT STILL! For those who have access to it it's quite a good way to learn about various aspects of the business. Kind of like a series of internships, but you're a full time employee with benefits while you do it.
I agree. Having interest in a field of study or a topic isn’t always connected with what a job in that field is comprised of. You might be interested in science but life in a lab is not for everyone. As someone who has hired a lot of people in my career, the fact is that most people learn on the job. They bring their attitude and abilities to it and they perform at some level. You either like it or you don’t. You like detail or you don’t. You can plan time or you just want to take orders. You can’t stop working when you’re on task or you’re watching the clock. The hard part is knowing yourself AND identifying the careers that have roles in synch with tour temperament. This is incredibly difficult and a bit of trial and error. I think the underlying message of follow your passion is that the ideal is to find the right job situation so that you’re not miserable and your day is over before you know it. With all of the neurodiversity and variation in temperament and humanity, there is a good job match for everyone.
I used to teacher Career Ed and one of my most-said lines was, “Finding out what you hate is as valuable as finding out what you love,” for exactly these reasons.
I really appreciated this comment, as someone who also teaches at a large public university (an HSI, with a lot of low-income and / or first generation college students). Like you, I get that "do what you love" is complicated (to say the least). But I also think that that equation between what you study and what your job ends up being is much more complicated than a lot of students realize -- they think they'll get a business degree and become an entrepreneur, or they'll get a history degree, and the only thing they can do is teach history. And with that in mind, I think there really IS a value to studying something that interests you because university education is four (or more -- my university doesn't have a great four-year graduation rate) years of your life, and those years of your life do matter.
The university where I teach tends to push STEM-centered vocationalism as a solution (/the only solution) to its low-income / minoritized / first-gen student body, with concomitant neglect of "softer" / more humanistic skills ("passion" stuff). But I think that perpetuates further inequality -- where not-explicitly-vocational training / education is exclusively the preserve of wealthier folks (and, weirdly, knowing how to write a clear and / or convincing sentence is not part of getting a job...?).
Wow, there’s so much to digest here! Looking back over my life I do wonder what it would’ve been like to just have a stable job that paid well and had a good benefits and found my meaning in things that are actually meaningful like relationships instead of trying to find my meaning in my work.
My sister-in-law’s sister and husband both worked for Boeing right out of high school driving delivery trucks. They worked 40 hour weeks and not one minute over and had regular schedules and job stability. They retired at 50 with full benefits and pensions and I was like why did I not do this?! Instead, I pursued passion jobs that were very unstable and had no benefits or pensions or anything like that and that were insanely stressful and bled into my free time. Of course I don’t even know if jobs like the Boeing job even exist anymore but I do think there’s something to be said for just having a job that stable and pays the bills if you can find one.
Because you probably would have hated all 40 hours a week you spent driving that truck! It is easy to look back now and ask why didn't I take that job when they are at the end and retiring at 50! My cousin had a very similar job and hated every minute of it and hating your job for 30 years is not a way to live
i actually don't think i would have hated it. in college i worked for an auto parts delivery service and i loved driving around by myself, listening to music etc. I think i would have been unhappy b/c my ego needed the approval of a more "impressive" job but that's a problem. Of course I did it the way I had to given the tools i had. but me today would take a job like that and use the free time for my passions. Ironically in following my passion i had no free time for anything else and in the end i realized it wasn't even my passion oops!
This is a great and courageous interview, thank you. My father was a physicist who loved poetry, and he firmly believed that you should learn a thing that is NOT your passion, because you'll always do your passion. He'd point out that many scientists are also artists. Of course I rebelled, majored in art, and have (a) struggled financially most of my life, and (b) never really committed to the art, because I was always exhausted by jobs that were not what I wanted to be doing but needed the money - yet never reached a serious professional level with any of them because they were, ahem, not my thing. Lots of reasons I made bad choices and couldn't commit to one thing or the other, always had a foot out the door, but I wish I'd listened to my dad. He would have loved seeing this point of view and agreed with it. Now the inequality part - that is truly groundbreaking for me, as all my friends seem to think I'm just not trying hard enough to "market myself" as an artist.
This was such an affirming interview to read. I work in publishing and people are ABSOLUTELY and EXPLICITLY exploited by their love of books in exchange for bad pay & extreme hours. I enjoy my job but have drawn some firm lines in the sand regarding what I’ll do for it. I like to tell people that my goal is for work to be the smallest slice in the pie of my life. I think younger generations than me (a millennial) are catching onto this, and thank god they are.
Agreed! I worked in publishing for 22 years and the amount of unpaid overtime I did was wild. I am thankful that younger generations are pushing back and also that I'm out of the industry now. I am no longer following my passion but getting out has allowed me to rediscover reading for pleasure again. Too much of a good thing can be, well, too much.
When I was in college, I discovered Cal Newport’s books and he also makes a case against “follow your passion.” From what I remember, his framing was more of an appeal to emotion (“pathos”) and wasn’t through a socioeconomic/capitalist lens (which I appreciate about this interview!) and his advice for a career was to pick something you don’t mind spending a few decades getting better at (i.e., honing a craft). It seemed radically practical at a time in my life when the dogma was relentlessly “pursue your passion!” But when I would bring it up with my classmates, they would get upset! They had fully bought in to the passion model and would insist I just needed to double down. So I’m glad that this topic is now becoming more widely discussed. Normalizing alternative decision-making models for what you’ll do for paid work is important, especially for young adults entering the workforce.
The book on which Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown, is working now has the subject 'Lifestyle-centric career planning.' He looks at deciding first how you want to live, where you want to live, how much you also want to pursue other interests in your life, and so forth, and then how to plan your career/job life around that, as a means toward your bigger ideas of how to live.
Lots of what he discusses in his body of work about planning is focused on other kinds of things, like the nitty gritty of productivity for people like him, which I know doesn't interest me, but I think his bigger-picture work is very interesting. His latest book is called Slow Productivity, abut how we can avoid rat-trace styles of work to good advantage..
Sounds interesting! I’ll have to check out his new work. The one I’m referencing is from 2012, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”
This is public radio to a T. When I switched from newspapers to a public radio project in 2010, I had to hire a staff. I was shocked at how low the salaries were. I was also shocked at how long people stayed in their jobs. Many of them had been at it for decades. The excuse then was that they were passionate about audio and there was no where else that they could do it. We all know what has happened since then: podcasts got much bigger, major news organizations jumped into the field, and the money got better. That’s why you saw so many people flee NPR and the stations - there was someplace else to go.
Two thoughts --
1. For how these forces have played out in the higher ed workforce (both academic and non-academic employees), Kevin McClure developed a great body of work starting during the pandemic. Highly recommend reading his articles and LinkedIn posts (after the bird site declined) which are backed by research and interviews.
2. For young adults forging paths after high school, Jeff Selingo and others are communicating to as many families and school counselors as possible about building skills in addition to choosing a school and major, and techniques for choosing a path that doesn't involve taking on major student loan debt. See also Ryan Craig on apprenticeships, and Brandon Busted on having employers pay for gaining your degree or credentials.
Love Kevin McClure's work so much — we talked often about this very idea
I wonder when exactly the follow your passion became such a driving force. I'm GenX raised by Silent Generation parents who had blue collar roots though had moved to white collar middle class jobs (though were never very economically stable). The need to go to college (and get a scholarship to do so) was drilled into my head starting in kindergarten. The closest thing I ever heard regarding passion was my dad telling me to find a job I love or one that would pay me enough to enjoy my time outside of work. But then again, they also sent me to a fancy private college (see scholarship) where discussing job propects just did happen and the only expected path was grad school. And I majored in something with little obvious job prospects, so I guess I absorbed some of the passion stuff even if it wasn't so clearly articulated.
There's been some good work on this — Miya Tokumitsu's DO WHAT YOU LOVE was my go-to when writing Can't Even — and it really became dominant in the late '90s/early 2000s (there's this crucial Steve Jobs speech at Stanford whose thesis is basically DO WHAT YOU LOVE OR ELSE IT'S ALL MEANINGLESS!)
I inherently bristle when I read about this topic, but it has taken me a while to determine why. I think the answer is nuanced. First, and perhaps most importantly to me, I don’t know how to separate promotion of the Passion Principle from what Anne Helen wrote about a month ago as the Dark Heart of Individualism. I think the former perpetuates the latter and puts self over community. Second, the concept of the Passion Principle is loaded. We celebrate those that have a passion for something to such a degree that if a person doesn’t have a passion for something they are somehow sad, lacking, or unfulfilled. Kids are pushed at an early age to start developing their passions to leverage into resumes and essays that will get them into elite institutions. Good for those kids who really are passionate about something; but no judgment should be passed on those who aren’t. Third, following passion will not necessarily result in happiness in employment. What will? That’s up to the individual - it is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. I very much enjoyed my political science major. I now am a government lawyer. The politics drives me nuts! But what is fulfilling about my job is the sense of satisfaction I derive from serving the public and being a voice of reason in a time of unrest. That was not in my top 5 desired job characteristics when I applied. Why not?
From what I've read, the most consistent and reliable source of personal happiness is a good social life. Not drunken Friday Afternoon Clubs, but connections with a network of people you know and care about. It doesn't have to be living in each others' laps. It's the sense that if your house burned down, there would be people around you who would help you get your life back together.
Quite some years ago, my wife and I lived in Fort Collins, CO. We got invited to a party by a couple we knew only casually, through a large, loose social network. It was a grand party on a warm night, and we all took sleeping bags and camped out on their property. He was a tech entrepreneur, and his house was a marvel of passive solar power -- a LOT of power, since he had a lot of computing hardware. He had a small fortune invested in that house.
Some months later, the big fires came through, swept through his property, and took everything except their lives. It was so hot, it reduced a car to a smallish rivulet of metal from the engine block.
My wife and I were saddened and appalled by this, so we went to the bank and opened up a relief fund in their name, then spread the word through their network of friends: send money here. We'd never done that sort of thing before. The response was huge, and it helped them rebuild. But more than that, it let them know they had friends that counted.
I considered myself “successful” in a passion career, fortunate to have made good money at it. But I look back at decades of it ruling way too much of my life. If I could start over I’d be an electrician.
I also think there's an element of doing your passion for money takes the joy out of it. I crochet as a hobby and people often tell me I should sell my wares, but like, if I was crocheting on the clock I think it would just be drudgery.
Absolutely! We don't need to monetize every hobby!
My brother is currently starting out his career as an electrician and I'm excited for/jealous of him in many ways
My kid has been talking about not going to college and instead pursuing a career in the trades. Some of the co-parenting team and *all* of the grandparents are freaking out about this, but I'm like... why not? It's not like he's threatening to become a heroin addict here, he's expressing his interest in a way that will allow him to support himself! If he decides later that he wants a career that requires a degree, college will still be there.
Your kid is hella smart. I used to work with one of the major nationwide apprenticeship programs. Four year program includes 40 hours on the job training working 6 am to 3 pm. School two nights per week, 4 to 9 pm. After 90 days they get health insurance and benefits. The only out of pocket costs is tech manuals and tools.
Two years in, those guys were showing up for class driving brand new trucks, paid in full. At graduation they had their choice of jobs. They could easily make six figures. Not a dime of debt. More than one started his own business before they hit 30. These jobs will never be offshored, never done by AI. Who’s the smart thinker here?
The biggest problem we ran into were the teachers, counselors, and families who told these kids they could only be successful with a college degree. What nonsense. Please encourage your son to go for it!!
He’s a smart dude. I wish him well.
"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."
YES. I want to shout this from the rooftops. Thank you for this insightful interview, Tyler and Erin!
Thank you for reading!
Loved this piece; I work in climate policy so definitely see some of this at play. For 'purpose' jobs, I think, resisting the pull to work endless hours is as much about keeping ourselves able to sustainably do the work (which both makes the world a better place - we hope - and puts food on the table) as it is about leaving space in life for other sources of fulfilment.
This is SO true and why I find the crappy organizational ethos at so many profit jobs so enmaddening — do you want to get work done or do you want to burn out your workforce so you have constant churn and little institutional knowledge? But to do that you really need strong guardrails throughout the org and so few places have them.
Totally! I have a strict rule that I don’t read climate books or watch climate documentaries etc at weekends. But I know most of my colleagues don’t (although most of them don’t live alone so they have distractions in situ, which I don’t!)
Thanks for saying this. I'm still settling into a relatively new job at a Big Green, and I know I can't be the only person who deals with climate anxiety and grief. But we don't talk about it! And then, when we're polled about how well we feel we can separate from work, many people say "I cannot" - hmm I wonder why... What if we made space for processing these complex feelings on the clock, which affect the decisions we make on the clock, so that we can both do our jobs better and function more effectively when not working?
I’m always working on this! Looking at including something about wellbeing for sustainability people in our next team away day. In my own little part of the team we make space for anger and frustration too, because it is important to do that!
I’ve kind of *made us* talk about climate anxiety and grief because I know it’s important.
Such an interesting discussion! Knowing I had no family safety net greatly changed my career and life trajectory. At the same time, I watched many peers from stable homes take paths I felt were too risky.