Don't Follow Your Dreams

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

• Steve Jobs

The above quote is something I, and likely many people, connect with. It is a well put summation of what many of us are told from our youth. The classic phrase of, “do what you love and you will never work another day in your life” is another example of this. At first glance this makes a lot of sense. Doing something you are truly passionate about is a feeling that is hard to replicate. I know when I get going on something that resonates with me, time seems to fall away entirely. I get so drawn into the present moment that nothing else can break in. Of course, the logical next step from discovering this experience is to make a living off anything that can do this for you, but I would argue, for the most part, that hobbies are better left as hobbies and the pursuit of the “dream job” is not all it is cut out to be.

The current ideology:

So much of the “American Dream” is to pursue the thing you love as your career. There is a belief that whatever you as an individual want to pursue is the thing most worth pursuit for you. “The cultural valuation of individualism and self-expression has grown dramatically since the 1950s and along with it,” the demands for self-expressive freedoms have grown into just about every aspect of American life, including choice of occupation (Erin Cech). This ideology has permeated so deeply into our culture that among students interviewed across three separate universities “over three quarters explained that passion should be a central factor in career-decision making” (Erin Cech). The pursuit of knowledge of any kind that inspires you has always felt of value to me. A person being able to take four years or more gaining depth and immersion in the subject(s) that drive them seems like a tremendous experience, but the reality is that according “to a study conducted by the New York Federal Reserve Bank, only 27% of people use their degrees” (Jason Wise). This means that only about one in four graduates were actually rewarded with a job in that field. If we assume that the majority of those graduates were passionate about their field of study we can already begin to see that passion is not particularly rewarded.

People do not get to choose the jobs available on the market. It is very likely for someone’s passion may not have immediate career relevance, or they find that they have too many passions to choose a single one as their career. For a lot of people trying to live off your passion means needing to carve out a new space in the market and growing it from scratch. To have the time, energy, and wealth to take that leap is more than a lot of people have. 

Getting Paid for What you Love:

Let us imagine for a minute the life of a person that does have the wealth, the time, and energy to begin the pursuit of something they are passionate about. It could really be anything! Maybe they love fashion and designing clothes, American history and understanding the now through the events leading up to it, or even traveling and exploring the world. There is certainly some route a person could take to be able to live off these pursuits. What happens once this person succeeds? What happens once this person has to continue to do this given pursuit in order to sustain themselves?

The reality is that once a person begins receiving some compensation for a task they performed originally for the sake of fulfillment things begin to change. In fact, it has been found that “people who are paid to perform a task which they did previously for its own sake (i.e. they are intrinsically motivated) reduce their effort” (Frey, Bruno S.; Götte, Lorenz). If we look at something like volunteering, which tends to be a pursuit of passion, it was confirmed in a study to see how compensation of volunteer efforts impacts work that “the mere fact that they receive a payment significantly reduces their work efforts by approximately four hours” (Frey, Bruno S.; Götte, Lorenz). Somehow, receiving compensation for the things we love changes how we feel about them. For that reason it could be valuable to keep intrinsic motivation as the only reason for following through on what we care about.

An Alternative:

I certainly do not want to put a damper on anyone’s dreams. I firmly believe that having grand aspirations brings a lot of hope to a person. However, I do think we need to begin shifting away from the narrative that our dreams should be our jobs. Instead of going into every new position with the notion of finding our dream job we can begin to ask ourselves if this job will give us the time and resources to pursue our passions. Our day job does not have to be our entire source of fulfillment. I think having a tolerable job that allows for comfort and time is very rewarding in itself. Removing the pressure we seem to put on being able to monetize everything we love actually provided me a lot of room to find the “magic” of my passions again. Hobbies are not a waste of time, and they can provide a person loads of fulfillment, community, and happiness. It is perfectly okay to keep hobbies as hobbies, and it is perfectly okay for the fulfillment your job provides to be giving you time for your hobbies. It may work out for some, but the pursuit of the “dream job” is really not all that it is cut out to be.

Sources:

Title: The Trouble with Passion

Author: Erin Cech

Source: Book - The Trouble with Passion

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Title: How Many People Use Their Degrees in 2022?

Author: Jason Wise

Source: https://earthweb.com/how-many-people-use-their-degrees/

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Title: Does pay motivate volunteers?

Authors: Frey, Bruno S.; Götte, Lorenz

Source: https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/handle/20.500.11850/146550/eth-25512-01.pdf