Complaining about jobs I don't have is my passion
When we made "passion" a white collar job prerequisite, we created a lot of problems.
Welcome back. In case you missed it, last week I rambled about how pervasive alcohol is in our culture, and before that I tried to frame big crises in optimistic terms. As suggested by the extremely vague title of this newsletter, I’m just here to write out thoughts about whatever’s on my mind this week. Always open to thoughts, you can reply straight to this email if you are a subscriber.
I think next week I’m going to do a year-in-content sort of post where I share and briefly discuss some of the books/articles/podcasts I’ve enjoyed this year. I would also love recommendations to add to my to-read list.
Special thanks for this newsletter goes to my friend and valued LinkedIn connection Nimi for helping edit this and make sure that I, as a person who has never worked fully full-time, did not say anything too far detached from reality. Check out her human-centered design blog human& on Medium and Instagram!
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The idea of “finding your passion” and making that your job is an absolute scam. It screws over the people who do manage to find some semblance of a passion, as well as those who don’t. The clearest example for people who do have a passion being screwed over can be seen in artist jobs, whether video game designers or illustrators. Companies know that people who enter these fields are doing it out of love, and they exploit that by overworking and underpaying and by hiring people as freelancers so they lack the safety and benefits of a full-time job. If you’ve ever tried to monetize a hobby (AKA “side hustle” which deserves its own newsletter), you may also know how this feels. This comic by @lauralannes sums it up very well and is heartbreaking to read.
If you can’t find a passion, or your passion doesn’t fit into an employable profession, you’re just left feeling bad that you’re missing out on this aspirational thing. I felt growing up like it was assumed that if you haven’t found your passion, you just haven’t found it yet. Like the job equivalent of “don’t worry honey, you just haven’t met the right guy yet.” Ideally, you don’t want to hate your job, but fixating on passion is a privileged problem of the knowledge worker / white collar worker economy, and it also centers work in our identities in a way that is great for productivity and the economy, but ultimately damaging to our ideas of selfhood and identity. We don’t really expect minimum wage workers to be ~passionate~ about their work (nobody is asking their local garbage collection person if they are passionate and find meaning in their work, although they could!) yet somehow we’ve gotten to a point where we pretty consistently expect that from people working office jobs.
The “find your passion” narrative feels similar to the true love narrative in a couple ways. It creates a false dichotomy (passion/no passion, no love/perfect love), creates expectations that can only lead to disappointment, and women are extra screwed because sexism is deeply ingrained in our society.
Passion is not a binary variable. You can be passionate about a subject area, or a certain type of work, or a specific cause, but that doesn’t mean you’re set, and doesn’t mean it doesn’t change. Drawing a line from passion to job is not too easy for most people as well, and even if you go into a field you’re passionate about, the entry-level job is unlikely to involve doing exactly what you’re passionate about. The idea that you can find this unwavering passion for anything ignores all the reflection it takes and the inevitable trade-offs that exist. You can have a passion and still have doubts. You can be passionate about something and still not find fulfillment in a job. Also, what you’re good at and what you’re passionate can easily not align, and then what? It’s like how rom-coms and fairy tales end with the marriage and don’t show all the work that goes into maintaining a relationship.
Most children want jobs like teacher, doctor, lawyer, astronaut, ballerina, probably partially because our parents are trying to subliminally foist ideas on us (one of my younger brothers loved trains as a kid; my mom worked so hard to tie that idea to becoming an engineer). Another reason, I think, is because those are all careers that seem relatively clear in terms of what they do. As a kid, you have encountered teachers and doctors, so you have a sense of what they do. You read/watch TV about astronauts and ballerinas, and maybe lawyers depending on how strange your childhood was (I watched a lot of Boston Legal with my mom). Obviously as kids we don’t have the most accurate conceptions of these jobs, but you at least get the main parts down, whereas I’m sure no kid can tell me what a Project Manager does. Most people spend their lives working and most people are not in these “classic” jobs. Even in the professions I listed above, I think most of us have a terrible sense of what day-to-day actually is.
“So… what does a _________ ACTUALLY do?”
Even now, at 22, I have a very limited idea of what potential careers exist outside the traditional paths. I spent most of college watching my peers learn (and often become disillusioned by) what engineers, consultants, and investment bankers actually do for a living. I watched people enchanted by the idea of becoming a doctor take all their pre-medical requirements and do their shadowing hours and take their MCATs only to pivot at the last minute. Our schools and career counselors offer flimsy and inaccurate heuristics. I heard a variant of “I’m good at math and science so I’m going to be / should be an engineer,” so many times. I have heard so many explanations for why someone wants to be a doctor that insinuate that there are not other careers that directly help people. Somehow the world had already felt narrowed by the time we were in college and declaring majors, partially attributable to the pre-professionalization of college and how we are all about “useful majors” and “useful classes” that will lead to feasible jobs.
For the most part, I feel like I and the people around me learned about the true nature of jobs rather late, in summer internships and first jobs postgrad, sitting in overly air-conditioned offices or 7.5 hours deep into staring into the Zoom abyss, thinking to ourselves, “So… it’s just… going to be like this? For the next forty years or so?” At this point, forty might be optimistic because older people are going to take all the Social Security. I can’t even fully describe what I think we were expecting, but it wasn’t this. We are part of a generation that has been raised self-optimizing and being ferried to countless extracurriculars, working hard to get into overpriced colleges with good names, staring blankly at a future that was already tenuous considering climate change and politics, now further upended by graduating in the middle of a pandemic. Up until the pandemic part, we don’t sound that different from my Gen Z understanding of Millennials, and the Millennials aren’t doing too great. I wonder if staring down the future would feel at least a little less daunting and depressing if we had not had high expectations about bright futures and jobs we’re passionate about. Many jobs also increasingly involve seemingly meaningless tasks and words that mean essentially nothing (“Great, I’ll go ahead and parallel-path that and route it back to you”).
Andre Spicer published an essay in the Guardian a few years ago that really zoomed out and put pointless work into context for me.
At the very point when work seemed to be withering away, we all became obsessed with it. To be a good citizen, you need to be a productive citizen. There is only one problem, of course: there is less than ever that actually needs to be produced. As Graeber pointed out, the answer has come in the form of what he calls “bullshit jobs”. These are jobs in which people experience their work as “utterly meaningless, contributing nothing to the world”. In a YouGov poll conducted in 2015, 37% of respondents in the UK said their job made no meaningful contribution to the world. But people working in bullshit jobs need to do something. And that something is usually the production, distribution and consumption of bullshit. According to a 2014 survey by the polling agency Harris, the average US employee now spends 45% of their working day doing their real job. The other 55% is spent doing things such as wading through endless emails or attending pointless meetings. Many employees have extended their working day so they can stay late to do their “real work”.
Some passions are worth more than other passions in this economy
To some extent, I think expecting to be doing work you’re passionate about and getting very few additional details is guaranteed to lead to disappointment. Even people who are passionate about their jobs and feel fulfilled still have to deal with everyday drudgery and bureaucracy and inconveniences. A lot of jobs day-to-day don’t even seem that different (clicking on spreadsheets), but the end goal that you’re contributing can vary pretty widely, and that may be where many people derive a sense of purpose. I think many companies have learned how to market themselves in an aspirational tone about changing the world and making a difference, but that doesn’t translate perfectly into fulfillment for employees.
Women, in particular, face some pretty impossible standards in our third wave feminist, career-focused, still sexist society. Probably most obviously, motherhood. Wanting to have children really does not fit well into pushing for your career, commitment-wise or timeline-wise. Hence our egg freezing spike. The connection to my issue with passion is that working mothers are perceived by employers as less committed to their jobs, a bias that I just learned is called maternal wall bias. This is unfair both because having children does not preclude one from being passionate about and committed to their job, and because I’m not sure that we should be judging employees so much on their commitment to a job.
I don’t think the employee of the year is going to not be passionate about their job, but I also think that demanding passion from your employees without doing your very best to mitigate burnout is how you cancel out all the value you’re getting from all that passion. Caring deeply about your job is great, but that’s also how you burn out when you can’t have the impact you want, when you face miles of red tape, when your self-worth and identity are tightly wound up in your job and job achievements. Also, when we live in a society where your job is not only your livelihood in terms of affording housing and food, but also being able to access healthcare, it is pretty unfair to demand that people are passionate about it too. We all just want to live.
Additionally, it’s not like we reward passion for jobs equally across careers. Like I mentioned at the start, art is criminally undervalued. So is care, which is a predominately female task and often not even work that is paid or noticed. Care as in childcare, caregiving for the sick and elderly, caring for your family. It’s easy to see how one might be passionate about caring for others, but we don’t think that’s worth a livable wage the way that being passionate about computer science is. The Brookings Institute reported the median wage in health care support, service, and direct care jobs was $13.48/hour in 2019. Home health and personal care workers earned a median wage of $11.57/hour. For reference, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual wage for software developers was $107,510 in May 2019. Assuming 2 weeks of vacation (so 50 workweeks, thank you America), and 40 hours of work per week, that’d be $53.75/hour.
It’ll Look Good On Your Resume, It’s Only a Few Years
I’m not entirely sure I'm even convinced on this next thought, but I will put it out there and as always note that I am open to opinions! Part of me thinks that in this internal clamoring to find passion in our work and the inevitable disappointment, we go for inadequate proxy variables. You want your job to make you feel good. The variables I’m thinking of are prestige and challenge, and the resulting career path I am thinking of is management consulting. I have many consultant or ex-consultant friends, some of whom are reading this, and I am not here to attack the consulting industry. Enough people have done that, and I will link some of the pieces that have stuck with me about that at the end of this. It is not inherently wrong to choose a job that is considered prestigious, and definitely not wrong to choose a job that you believe will challenge you, but I have seen secondhand how it doesn’t really add up for a lot of consultants. Prestige for prestige’s sake and a job that is challenging with relatively limited/unfulfilling results from overcoming challenges don’t seem to work out on the job satisfaction front for most people. This essay I stumbled upon on what the author calls “the prestige trap,” sums up the appeal of prestige like this:
“Why do top students fall for this trap and chase prestige? Because it so closely resembles the game they've already been playing for eighteen years: optimizing to get into the best college possible. As children, they were told to attend the best university to make something of themselves. Many of my peers talked about how they had dreamed of attending an Ivy League from a young age—long before teenagers sit down to think critically about which school is the best fit for them. Getting that prestigious job is a game most elite students are well-equipped for.”
In a way, consulting fits into the natural progression of how our school system shaped us, and it also offers clearer milestones than most jobs in terms of “up or out” at 2 years, clearly demarcated promotion / evaluation points, etc. You can see how in a way it’s a comfortable continuation. Another interesting point is that consulting mimics the intended structure of undergraduate in giving you a chance to be a generalist and then specialize, with interests and also exit options in mind. Part of the sell for consulting is also that you get to try lots of different things and change projects, and maybe then eventually you can find that passion of yours. The other comfortable but sometimes backfiring career path I can think of is people who get PhDs after undergrad to hide from real life and do more school rather than because they really grasp what graduate student life is like and what you should expect when you come out the other end. Obviously both consulting and grad school are appropriate choices for some people, I’m just skeptical they are the right choices for everyone doing them.
Simmering in crisis… not optimal
As always, I love choosing to write about things we don’t have great solutions for, but I have a couple thoughts to float here. To start, the culture of pre-professionalism and the view of education as a sort of pipeline is toxic because it makes learning a side project compared to the end goal of achievement. It stresses us out from a young age and makes us less well-rounded. Not everything you learn has to have direct use in the corporate or “real world.” I think almost everyone I know feels they lost some amount of their love for learning over the course of their educational journey, and that’s really sad and is pretty damning for our education system. Also, consulting and finance start recruiting so early and dominantly on campus and promotes recruiting season panic that doesn’t give people a chance to find out about and explore other areas. Smaller organizations don’t have the budget or manpower to recruit this way and there’s not a straightforward path for potentially interested students to find them. Reversing this culture requires structural and also cultural change, and obviously nobody can do it on their own, but it’s worth introspecting on how we each help encourage it or buy into it, whether it’s judging or looking down on people who major in the humanities, viewing education as a credential and networking opportunity rather than an education, and how we talk about our jobs and careers with others. Also, consulting (also medicine) has a really nicely laid out path and schedule for you, where many other careers don’t. We want plans and to know what our lives are going to look like, but we can’t! I want it too, so badly, but alas. It’s hard to accept uncertainty, but you shouldn’t prioritize certainty over other considerations all the time. Plus people with crazy job pivots have the best stories.
Adults (I guess I’m referring to parents, professors, and career offices) often dole out advice with some lack of perspective on what it’s like to be looking for a job and stability in a world that’s pretty constantly in crisis, with economic downturn and the student loan debt crisis particularly relevant. Applying to jobs is stressful and tedious. It’s crushing to face dozens of rejections (or more commonly, just get ghosted). The career office at my school told me that if I didn’t want a PhD then my only option would be consulting since they’d take any major. Many of my professors were way too gung-ho about PhDs without acknowledging the insane academic job market. And as I mentioned earlier, the salary hierarchy of jobs does not reflect their societal value, and maybe it shouldn’t do exactly that either, but people deserve to be able to afford to live, with housing, food, water, opportunity, and healthcare, and we need to stop devaluing the work that women do.
One of the most unsettling aspects of this whole thing for me is that “finding your passion” has already been discussed and dismissed by many. I’m sure the people reading this already feel that “finding your passion” is an overrated and misleading narrative tied to our obsession with work and unrealistic exceptionalism. But even knowing that, I still tend to think about passion as a key variable, and I still read job descriptions that specifically mention demanding unyielding passion. It’s hard to shake this, because the idealism is pretty inviting, even if it makes us unhappy in the end.
Thanks for making it to the end! If you thought this was interesting, I’d be honored if you subscribed for more of me thinking about other third things and/or shared this post with friends. :)
I’m linking here for you a few pieces I really appreciate about this topic. Work, passion, burnout, etc. is a big topic as you can see by how much I left out, so I’m including a lot.
From Inboxing to Thought Showers: How Business Bullshit Took Over - I’m a big fan of this piece as it take you through a brief history of how this sort of aspirational language made it into large corporations.
Why do corporations speak the way they do? also goes into the bizarre language of useless corporate jargon. Obviously some phrases are just silly and do not actively impede communication, but it gets to be comical at a certain point.
Job Lock and the Debt Plot - I am a big Anne Helen Petersen fan, and in this piece for her excellent newsletter, she talks about how people are trapped in their jobs due to debt and the need for health insurance and what the consequences are.
How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation - More Anne Helen Petersen, on how millennials are burnt out and getting criticized for laziness and entitledness when really they are trying their best.
The class of 2020 was full of hope. Then the pandemic hit. - reporting on how the pandemic has affected the Class of 2020 and the job hunt.
The consulting attacks you were promised (very focused on McKinsey, one can only imagine what happens elsewhere):
How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class
McKinsey Proposed Paying Pharmacy Companies Rebates for OxyContin Overdoses
This might go off the tangent but this made me think:
I often think about job and by job i mean my source of income (why couldnt I when it took so much of my waking time every day) and I often daydream about the things I could be doing instead. Something that I'm truly passionate about.
But as you say, and many artists do I follow online, making art as your career could inevitably harm you and your creative spirit. It's doubly hard when it's the very thing that comforts you, give you strength, and make you happy. So this, somehow prevents me with actually pursuing a career. But at the same time, I still want it. How could I when making your passion as your career is the best way to have the time when work consumes so much of it, get some resources coz job could provide you with that esp with increasing amount of subscription-based services and their fees, and make connections with others who may have appreciation for this. People that you could share vision
And this lead me to thinking how it would be nice if we just could get more time to ourselves, to dedicate for hobbies and other passions that don't need to justify its existence by the material and monetary value they could provide us. That I hope that we collectively could revise our definition of work and livelihood as one and the same, when doing household chores is a work, taking care of your family, building relationships, community, doing hobbies, they are all a work.
That we have other means to secure our basic needs through community where we could share resources together, eliminating the need to continuously consume things when we could utilize what we have.
That its sad we live in very capitalistic society that wants infinite growth when everything else is finite. That we should appreciate our lives more, and do the things that make living life for. Perhaps then it will be easier for us to do things, try things, and not neccessarily because we're passionate about it.