Duty and Passion: Enemies or Friends?

A recent NYT op-ed asks a fascinating question: should work be passion, or duty?

The author notes that in the US, public opinion seems to stand firmly on the ‘passion’ side. We’re told to listen to our passions, follow them, and not settle for less.

This message works powerfully on those whose minds are open to possibility — typically younger folks. The millennial generation is known for wanting to make a difference, and letting passion guide our work is considered a primary means of doing that.

As the author points out, this approach can be taken too far. When our work becomes the channel by which our lives gain significance, the pressure is on to find a job that can somehow deliver.

Taking this view might also lead us to avoid tasks that don’t obviously align with our passions. We can become unwilling to do important, even necessary parts of our job.

That’s passion: energizing, promising, and heady, with the potential for making us forget the mundane in our pursuit of the mountaintop.

And then there’s duty. This is seen today as a bit of an old-fashioned virtue. We associate it with an age when more emphasis was put on the group, family, organization, or society, and less on the individual.

When we live according to duty, we act in ways that support the greater good. We are willing to do work we don’t like so long as it supports the family. We vote because we believe it’s the right thing to do. Overall, we tolerate the limits and inconveniences of being a small part of a larger whole. We are confident that the big picture working out is what’s really important.

It’s easy to see how passion and duty could be thought of as opposites. One moves us to act based on what makes us feel alive. The other leads us to forget about that and focus on our obligations.

This is how the op-ed mentioned above puts them in position. Work is passion, or it’s duty. One or the other, but not both.

Here’s a question though: have you ever done ‘the right thing’ and found joy in it? Maybe you threw a surprise birthday party for a friend who needed some appreciation, and it was so much fun. Maybe one morning on the way to work you found yourself singing in the car. Or how about finding a reason to celebrate taking out the trash?

Whenever this has happened, passion and duty were working together. They were supporting one another in a union we might never expect.

So long as we separate life into ‘what I want to do’ and ‘what I have to do,’ we will struggle to enjoy our work. Yet we’ve seen that this is practically the normal way of doing things. Ever notice how we say ‘Happy Friday!’ much more often than ‘Happy Monday!’?

This divide can persist over time. We keep what we enjoy and what we do in separate boxes. There’s our workweek box and our weekend box, and the two don’t mix. There’s our chore box and our fun box, and they don’t touch. They’re already separate, after all, so why try to bring them together?

If this was everything we could say about passion and duty, then all that would be left to do is figure out which side we’re on. Are we passion people or duty people?

But wonderfully, there’s more. There can be more.

Think of the parts of your work you like least. Maybe that’s filling out forms, or waking up early, or being on the road all the time.

Now, let’s assume something — that for now, you are not planning to change jobs. In other words, this part of your work is not so crazy-making that you’re actively trying to leave. That day may come, but as far as you know it won’t be soon.

If that’s the case, then it’s time to start looking at your work through a wide-angle lens. What do you like about your work? Why do you do it? What are the benefits?

There’s a story of a woman telling a friend that there was nothing, absolutely nothing she liked about her job — that it was all bad, from top to bottom. ‘Well,’ her friend asked, ‘do they pay you?’

Remembering what’s good about our work puts it in context. It shows how our work fits into the bigger picture of our life.

Stepping back and taking a wide view is vital, because by seeing things this way, we become able to acknowledge both sides of our work, the passion parts as well as the duty parts. We come to see that they’re part of one whole thing.

Are there moments at work that are wonderful? Yes, and I hope that’s true for all of us. These are times when our hearts leap up in happiness, and our passion is in full-sail. We are doing what we were made to do.

Are there moments at work that are terrible? Also, yes. A project fails, a great boss leaves, funding is cut, or it’s just that, over time, small disappointments, annoyances, and relational problems accumulate and form a heavy burden we carry around with us.

But here’s the thing: all of these moments, both those that are exhilarating and those that are awful, are a part of our work. We can’t separate them!

And yet — thanks to our temperament, background, personality, and so on — each one of us prefers one over the other, and tends to hold that side up over the other. We don’t want the tension involved in ‘both-and.’ We’d rather have the clarity and simplicity of ‘either/or,’ so we pick a side.

Read on to figure out which camp you lean toward, and how we can gain a new appreciation for the balance between passion and duty in our work.

Passion

‘Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.’

‘The only way to do great work is to love what you do.’

‘Make you passion your paycheck.’

These are a few quotes (some from famous people) about work and passion that turned up near the top of a quick search..

How do they strike you? What comes to mind when you read them? Our reaction is a helpful gauge for seeing whether we might prioritize passion over duty at work.

This priority, it’s true, is more often associated with the young. It can get a bad rap as being naive, shortsighted, self-interested.

For those of us naturally inclined toward passion in our work, we already have drive and vision for pursuing work we love to do.

Yet if we expect our work to always feel this way, we will be disappointed.

There’s something we can do to give balance to our perspective: find people we admire for working on projects they’re passionate about, and then go learn more about them. Read a biography, or if there is none, do an up-close study of their life.

When we know other people on what we could call an ‘internet level,’ it’s possible that our perspective of them is skewed. We might think there are folks out there who go from one jaw-dropping experience onto another, with barely enough time to tweet about it in between.

But when we come to know a person better, we see this isn’t the case. Nobody’s life is a non-stop highlight reel.

Getting to know these folks we admire, we might even ask them some questions: what’s your average day like? What do you spend most time doing? How long did it take you to work at this level?

Even the most passionate people out there have mundane work, difficult tasks, and troubling realities to face. They might even have something interesting to say about duty and grinding it out!

Duty

Unlike the naturally passionate folks, those of us tending toward duty may believe that our perspective is borne out by the way the world works.

Perhaps over time, we’ve learned that life is not a movie. We’ve seen boredom and disappointment; our own as well as others’. We’ve seen dreamers flame out, projects fail, and the chaos that results when work dissolves.

At the same time, we may have discovered pleasure within the confines of steady, reliable work. We enjoy doing small jobs well. We like getting into our car for the drive home at the end of the day. We are more drawn to ‘daily life,’ and more skeptical of ‘feeling alive.’

Those of us finding ourselves on the duty side of the issue face an occupational hazard: cynicism.

When we see someone sticking out their neck, we can feel smug. We just know they’re going to regret it. What they’re doing has been tried before, and it doesn’t work. Much better, we think, to keep a low profile and fit into the way things are.

But what can get lost in all this is the heart: the human heart, the heart of the matter. There’s a saying that ‘As long as there’s life, there’s hope,’ and the heart is resilient at this.

When we live by duty, we’re told to give up some good hopes. That’s what the op-ed article describes: a disappointed Roman statesman who is told to forget about these deep hopes and focus on his job.

But so long as we’re breathing, hope can come back. It can start in small, very small ways. Maybe not even at work, but in something at home, in the neighborhood, with the family.

We see something change we thought never would. Someone new comes along and shows us a different way of doing things. We plant a tree and watch it grow.

However it happens, hope comes again. And with it comes passion, since hope is passion’s root.

Whenever we pick a side — that work is about passion or about duty — we cut off a lot of good that we could keep! What if instead we recognize the strengths of both sides, find which one we lean toward, and work to build a better balance?

We may find that, rather than being enemies, duty and passion can actually work together.

Which side of the passion/duty debate would you say comes more naturally to you? How has this inclination helped you, and how has it made things harder?

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