The Trouble With Passion

“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.

From the individual’s point of view, the threshold question comes down to one’s desired relationship to paid work, that which is needed beyond the paycheck e.g. predictable hours, enjoyable colleagues, benefits, respectful boss. That effort, in turn, may raise additional questions about one’s attachments and the related MM 12/6/21 Ego Is The Enemy. Then, of course, is the fact that the economic playing field is far from even given differences in outside financial support, crushing student debt (a topic on its own), and the social safety net.

Yet meaningful work might best be evaluated as but one element of a life worth living, part of one’s “meaning-making portfolio,” e.g. time devoted to reviving hobbies, engaging in community service, and otherwise nurturing the senses of identity and fulfillment. Easier said than done, of course, when soft sentiments bump up against marketplace realities.

The “trouble with passion,” in a different context, was the subject years ago as we contemplated the prevailing cultural notion of “big love” and – Nietzsche being Nietzsche – his Ten Tips For A Great Marriage including his counsel to avoid the promise of everlasting love given “love is a feeling; feelings are involuntary and a promise cannot be made on something one has no control over . . . “

The overall point, then, whether it be the choice of career or life partner, the element of passion must be seen in the context of a much broader life perspective.