“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life,” goes a popular adage under which many of the younger generations have grown up. The message is certainly inspiring. Who wouldn’t want to pursue their passion and spend those 8 or 10 hours a day in a state of creative ecstasy?
However, reality often has other plans. 77% of people feel deeply dissatisfied with their jobs or simply don’t like what they do. And it’s not that they’ve made the wrong choice, it’s that work can go from passion to crushing in the blink of an eye.
The scam of passion, neither so clear nor so permanent
Finding what we are passionate about often takes time, which we often don’t have when the clock starts ticking and “forces” us to choose a career. Determining what we like is not as simple as going to the supermarket and choosing what we feel like having for dinner that night. It is a journey of discovery, both within ourselves and of the world around us. And it is not always quick.
On the other hand, we all change throughout our lives. As we gain experience, our tastes, values, dreams and goals change. Therefore, it is difficult for what drove us at 20 to continue being as exciting and motivating at 40 or 50. Even great passions can fade away to make way for new interests, a completely normal phenomenon when we want to explore different facets of ourselves or challenge ourselves.
From utilitarian work to aspirational employment
The desire to have a job that we are passionate about is a modern and bourgeois phenomenon. Many of our great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers plowed the land or worked in the mines, and they did it not because they were passionate about the trade but because it was the most viable option to support themselves and feed their families.
This created a more pragmatic view of work, which has been lost as it has become a source of personal fulfillment. Work ceases to be a mere source of subsistence and becomes an aspirational goal.
For many companies, this paradigm shift is the perfect opportunity to give some jobs a veneer of desirability, so that many people are willing to tolerate different forms of exploitation for the mere “honor” of being able to perform that job and achieve success through that activity.
As a result, journalist Anne Helen Petersen warns that the rhetoric of “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is a burnout trap. When we clothe work in the language of “passion,” we risk becoming so career-focused that we fail to realize there are many other avenues for fulfillment in life.
“When what we like becomes our job, we run the risk of our job becoming what we like,” Petersen said. This lack of boundaries between paid and unpaid time, between profession and personal fulfillment, pushes us to devote ourselves body and soul to work, trusting that this will bring us the happiness we so desire. The problem is that when work takes up almost everything, our life becomes unbalanced and happiness disappears.
There are many ways to achieve fulfillment
Choosing a job that we like is great, but we must not lose sight of the drawbacks that come with any paid activity, even one based on intrinsic motivation and great passion.
And as soon as we cross the barrier that separates amateur from professional, pressure appears, which manifests itself in a thousand different ways, whether in the form of strict schedules and tight deadlines or unbearable bosses, technical failures and an infinite number of setbacks that disturb that kind of work nirvana that we were trying to achieve.
Monetizing a passion is also extremely difficult because most markets today are very competitive, so in the end you’re likely to find yourself with an endless to-do list and too tired to do anything else you enjoy.
Working or setting up a business on something we are passionate about is a wonderful life plan. There is no doubt about it. But it is essential that we do not forget the more utilitarian or even prosaic part that implies that we must make a living from it. That means taking care of aspects that we do not like and being prepared to deal with an endless number of less glamorous tasks. It also means being aware that there are many ways to achieve fulfillment and be happy. It does not necessarily have to be through work.
Source:
Petersen, A. H. (2021) No puedo más. Cómo se convirtieron los millennials en la generación quemada. Madrid: Capitan Swing.
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