“Your life is your career,” is the advice sometimes offered by Oak Thorne as he conducts regional interviews of Yale applicants. Your priority should be your life rather than your career. According to our focus piece, then, a problem arises when one’s passion becomes conflated with the latter over the former (click: The Trouble With Passion).
Such an orientation probably starts with the perennial question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” to which the child eventually applies the cultural spin and the “be” morphs into “do.” The passion principle suggests that culture elevates self-expression and fulfillment to become the central factors in career decision-making – two-thirds rank passion in importance above other considerations like good salary and job security.
At the societal level, if passion-seeking itself becomes a component of the compensation package, what does that mean within a capitalist structure as it relates to the possible monetary “exploitation” of passion? In one cited experiment, employers preferred job applicants who expressed passion for their work, in part because they believed those applicants would be willing to put more uncompensated work into their jobs. Other employers were perhaps more subtle about their appetite for this passion discount…
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