Remarks on Articles About Finding Your Passion

Or, solving for X on the other side of an equation

I’m not convinced anyone wants to find their passion.

No, really.

What people want to find is something — anything — that quells even a little bit of the overwhelming boredom they’ve come to find in their everyday life.

Sorry, not sorry.

Exhibit A is myself, and I’ve been rolling around this one for a few years now, in endless search of “my passion” through quizzes and articles and books. I moved houses, I left my corporate job to do entrepreneur / freelance life, I followed everything to a T and while I had no disillusions of some easy formula “this + this = passion” I’ve come to realize that the word itself is bogus, this passion, and should be thought of differently.

My fight isn’t for passion. It’s against boredom.

The theory is, of course, that if I could figure one out then maybe it would fight the other on my behalf. I’d be so wrapped up in this newfound zeal for life that it would help stave off the latter permanently.

Because in the end my problem is that I couldn’t seem to fight it by myself.

So this external coup de tête is just what I needed — just what we need.

Find your passion; find happiness.

It sounds so silly when you write it out like that, but how many of us have suffered through a Tony Robbins book in hopes that it’ll somehow unlock that very same logic in us.

It’s a code word. It’s just more palatable to write ‘passion’ in the title of your Medium advice articles than ‘happiness’ — a concept we already know to be ethereal and hard to find / teach / acquire / spread.

But I suspect it’s not all for nought.

I suspect that avoiding boredom is perhaps exactly useful for figuring these things out, even a little bit.

What makes you curious?

This is a hard one for me — I wrote PHD in Curiosity once a week for a year and it only begun to scratch the very surface of the things I find fascinating.

So it’s those sorts of things. Perhaps my passion isn’t “write an email newsletter about random topics” but it is fairly effective at keeping my occupied and deeply invested for a few hours a week. Perhaps we can follow through with those sorts of activities and arrive at some sort of pseudo-passion down the road; not one specific thing, but a collection of activities that solve for boredom.

I think we call these “hobbies”.

This is a side thought (and complete conjecture), but I was considering it the other day: people don’t really have hobbies anymore.

I mean, maybe they never did, I’m too young to know what the 80’s were about, or anything earlier, but you don’t really meet people who have both a job and some unrelated hobby — not many folks you meet who make fine furniture and it’s just an intentionally useless side thing. They’re a urologist maybe, but they make wooden chairs to unwind.

Like, we have this seemingly rampant burden of boredom and idleness and passion-less life and then you break down people’s days and the answer is usually something to the tune of “I work, and then I watch TV, and then I sleep” and it repeats every day.

No wonder!

So, maybe there’s something to that.

It sounds dumb but maybe the answer to boredom is to mix things up a bit, in a deeper way than just “I also go to two concerts a year”

When we answer boredom I don’t think passion really matters so much.

If you’re looking for something to ignite your life and drive your actions, maybe the backwards version is just doing things until you find the ones that keep your nose up even a little bit, and then experimenting in that space until you learn to magnify the parts you really do enjoy.

And if you do that for a while, wouldn’t someone on the outside look at that and call it a passion?

It’s not a Sears catalogue. I can’t tell you what sort of weird things you might be into. People have stamp collections and that’s somehow their thing — maybe it’s your thing too and you don’t even realize. You look at it and make judgements before you try and then you end up doing nothing, but shockingly still complain about being bored and passionless.

Anyway. Just a thought. Maybe we’re approaching passion all wrong.