Comment by KolibriFly
7 months ago
"Do what you love" advice always sounds great, but it hits differently when you're also worried about rent
7 months ago
"Do what you love" advice always sounds great, but it hits differently when you're also worried about rent
Agreed, and I've always hated that phrase since it seems like it has two different meanings, depending on who is uttering it;
1. People who use "do what you love" to mean "love what you do," as though you can force yourself to enjoy anything. This is only true for people who lie to themselves and compromise regularly against their own interests.
2. The Lucky Ones™ who happened to accidentally align an enjoyable hobby with a career and think because they "did it," anyone can, without acknowledging that they were simply in the right place at the right time with the right skills, or that the stars don't exactly align the same way for the rest of us.
> 2. The Lucky Ones™ who happened to accidentally align an enjoyable hobby with a career and think because they "did it," anyone can, without acknowledging that they were simply in the right place at the right time with the right skills, or that the stars don't exactly align the same way for the rest of us.
To be fair, advice doesn't have to be applicable to everyone in order to be useful to someone.
Extremely few people get to become astronauts, but that doesn't go to say there isn't relevant career advice for those who do aspire to become one.
Chalking outcomes up to luck is also not a very useful attitude. Life undeniably has a huge random element, but it's more akin to the randomness of the stock market than a pure dice roll. You don't have control of every outcome, but your choices and decisions can massively tilt the scales in favor of getting "lucky".
3. You are in a career because you mistakenly thought you’d like it, or because your parents told you to do it, or because it’s the only thing that you’ve ever known, but it turns out that you absolutely hate it. You’ve reached a local maximum and you need someone to tell you to try something else before you reach 50 and have major regrets.
To add to that: people like some messed up things, or truly inaccessible things. And while you can try to focus on "some good stuff" that you like, you can't really pick the things you like the most! If you could, wouldn't the world be a much easier place (just like the things that make the most money, or are the most accessible, in other words, the things offering the best cost-benefit... but of course no one can really do that... no one would ever suffer heartbreak - just like the person who likes you, and if they change their mind, just stop liking them and like someone else! Such genius!)?!
I get what you're saying. It's difficult to convey this to some people. I've been through a lot of jobs in quite a few different fields over the decades and have the appearance of being restless if I am not careful about how I craft my resume.
I've been asked "okay, but what do you _like_ to do?" which just puts me in a position to have to explain that I have a passion for learning new things and experimentation, but nobody is going to pay me to read books and play around in a workshop all day, since those jobs are few and definitely already filled.
So, it's a hobby, instead.
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I've learned to love things I used to hate.
For me it took understanding how things are connected and that doing the superficially unfun things are a necessary precondition for the superfun things to happen.
Learning to appreciate what you have instead of hate what you're missing is also a very fundamental mental health principle.
This is of course much easier said than done.
And to expand on #2, we not only get our hobby coinciding with our career, but that work can pay exceptionally well.
My advice is not "Do what you love" but "Love what you do". Find pride in yourself and your journey, and no fall will follow.
Tell that to my landlord, please. I do love what I do. People somehow stopped bothering to pay me for it, though.
“Do what you love” doesn’t mean “only do what you love and who cares about bills.”
It’s just a reminder to find time for what you love even if you have other things that demand your time. And, if you can, to always leave enough space for yourself. For far too many of us, there is only work, more work, with the silly hope to one day find the time to dream again. You won’t.
I think this advice works a lot better if you interpret with finer granularity than either "job is my ideal passion" or "job is soul-crushing suffering purely for economic gain".
Very few people get to take the thing they would do completely for free and make money off of it. At the same time, very few people have a job where every single aspect of the work is miserable toil that brings them no joy.
Work is complex and there is a continuum of jobs that have more or less aspects that resonate with you. I think better advice is to seek jobs that let you bring more of your joys to bear while acknowledging that no job will be paid fun. And when in a specific job, try to find the aspects of it that you love and make the most of those to the degree that you're able.
We have a much richer ability to navigate our careers than simply treating any job as all bad or all good.