Curiosity > Passion
A case for being less passionate about what you do
I found my love for writing in the second grade.
My brother, who went to a different school, had Friday off and was throwing a basketball-themed birthday party. Pops was willing to let me play hooky for the day. I refused.
It wasn’t that I didn’t love my brother or basketball. But every Friday afternoon, Mrs. Wright’s second-grade class had a period I wasn’t willing to miss: Writer’s Workshop.
For 45 minutes, I was left to imagine buses that turned into dinosaurs and second graders that could fly between skyscrapers. My pencil raced my mind. I only paused for wrist cramps.
But in the 20 years since Mrs. Wright’s class, I’ve tried to come up with every excuse under the sun for why I wasn’t a writer. “Writers don’t make money,” I told myself at 20 as I declared a major in Economics. “Writing isn’t a stable career,” I told myself at 24, as I told a media exec that I wanted to work on the business side of the publication. Even now that writing words helps pay my bills, I’m still not convinced I deserve to call myself a writer.
But I write. Not always. Not three pages before my morning coffee. Sometimes not for months on end. But I can reliably be caught tinkering with email subject lines and tapping out long comments on online forums. Occasionally, I’m compelled to write even when I don’t have to. And that, for me, is enough.
I’ve often wondered whether writing is my job, career, hobby, or vocation. Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame brilliantly makes the case that a job is the only thing you need to uphold the contract of being an adult in this world. “Out of the list of hobby, job, career, and vocation, the only thing you need is a job. You have to pay the bills. We live in a material world!” she says.
But somewhere between the fetishization of “follow your passion” and “10,000 hours,” having a hobby that you may or may not be trying to get better at fell out of favor. Unless it’s a career or a side grind, I feel somehow unworthy of the writer patch on my vest.
For many, busyness is a badge worn proudly — a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness. “In the new work culture, enduring or even merely liking one’s job is not enough,” writes Erin Griffith in a recent New York Times article describing the hustle culture pervasive among young professionals. “Workers should love what they do, and then promote that love on social media, thus fusing their identities to that of their employers.”
In an age where “what do you do?” doubles as an existential provocation, decoupling work from passion seems almost blasphemous. Online, tags travel with us. Dating apps make us pick interests from a drop-down menu. Twitter asks for 280-character bios. It’s as if the internet is a great aunt that still thinks of you as “my little magician” because you did a card trick for her in the 4th grade.
There’s real harm in thinking every activity we choose to do must also be a reflection of who we are. It’s okay to be someone who likes to bake and not be “a baker.” But in today’s world, it seems every verb needs its correlate noun.
If I were to give advice to my younger self, I’d say follow your curiosity, not your passion. Passion feels like a possession — something you have to go out and find. Whereas curiosity is a friend who visits more often.
We all have curiosities. What fills the cracks of your day? What do you read about? What do you like doing that others don’t seem to find fun?
Maybe you create statistical models to prepare for your fantasy football drafts. Maybe you stay up late looking for inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles or pore over cupcake recipes for hours every time you’re invited to a potluck.
Whatever it is, know it alone doesn’t have to define you or make you any money. You don’t have to hide it either! Even if — especially if — that activity isn’t part of your job, admit that it’s part of you. In a world that makes us distill our interests into common denominators, it’s okay to just be someone who likes to write.
