You’ve heard it, probably many times, and if you’re like me, you’re tired of hearing the platitude that if you find your passion, you’ll never work a day in your life.

I like writing. I like reading and thinking, but after a bike ride, dealing with kids, and a bunch of other stuff, I’d much rather lie on the couch with my wife and simply hang out doing nothing. So even though I make some money from writing, it’s still hard. Anything worth doing is hard.

I also didn’t particularly enjoy the 3-hour bike ride I went on today. The last hour was especially hard as I pushed a tired body to continue to hit the same power numbers I was hitting at the beginning of the ride.

When it comes to your job, creativity is weaponized to convince you that something is wrong if you don’t love your work. Society has turned working all the time into a religion¹. You conform to the religion pushed by rich owners that want workers to work weekends and outside the 9-5 because it allows them to capture more value without needing to give more of that value to the workers.

Now I’m not saying that everything needs to be “balanced” all the time. In the winter I read more and ride less. In the nicer weather, especially the summer, I ride more and barely read at all. I don’t live a balanced life week in, week out, but over the course of the year I do spend appropriate amounts of time with my family and on my bike and reading/writing.

I think the most insidious part of the “passion for work” idea is that it gets you to equate loving your job with life happiness. Maybe your job pays the bills and instead of being enmeshed with work², you find fulfilment outside of your work. You define your happiness by your relationships and activities outside the office. You devote your time to those activities instead of doing one more late night for a job that really doesn’t care about you.

1. The Good Enough Job Pg 34 ↩︎
2. The Good Enough Job Pg 66, 67 ↩︎