The Trouble with Passion

“FOLLOW YOUR PASSION” IS TERRIBLE ADVICE “I think it misconstrues the nature of finding a satisfying career and satisfying job, where the biggest predictor of job satisfaction is mentally engaging work. It’s the nature of the job itself. It’s not got that much to do with you…. It’s whether the job provides a lot of variety, gives you good feedback,

There have been no studies of happiness and competence when we professionally self-objectify, when we think “I am my job.” But common sense tells us that this is a tyranny every bit as nasty as physical self-objectification. We become Marx’s heartless work overlord to ourselves, cracking the whip mercilessly, seeing ourselves as nothing more than H

The tension between the near impossibility of working in a particular calling or vocation across the course of a lifetime and the ideology that finding one’s particular calling is central to achieving salvation (or even this-worldly happiness) is mitigated in two ways: first, an increased emphasis on working on the self, and second, the ideal that

people make career decisions based on their passions, then it’s easy to attribute wage disparities to individual choices rather than acknowledge the reality of structural injustice. This type of “choice washing” perpetuates the idea that income inequality can be overcome just by working hard rather than through systemic reform.