Why “Follow Your Passions” is Good Advice
It’s time to graduate from a singular view of passion to one that embraces the complexity of our individual humanity.
There’s a mistaken belief that passion is a singular thing, that, like Indiana Jones, you can find it as some great artifact at the end of a long quest. This is a beautiful notion that is well supported by compelling narratives and well groomed social media stories of people who just found their passion and went out and did it and it changed their lives. These narratives, while beautiful and exciting, tend to be misleading: passion is not a singular thing.
The Stoics never talked about passion this way. According to the Stoics, the passions were “disturbances of the soul,” irrational, “contrary to reason and nature.” They were firm believers in reason, and the passions were overtly negative, contrary to nature. In fact, the actions that often followed from the passions were negative. Anger was a passion, and as a result of anger, people mistreated one another. The Stoics viewed most of the passions as negative because acting out of them often resulted in negative consequences.
What the Stoics are really talking about when they talk about the passions are the emotions. Like the Stoics, we are trying to figure out the role of emotion in our lives. For millennia now, through a variety of philosophical and epistemological traditions, humans have been studying the role of emotion in influencing human decision making.
What we’ve come to understand through modern psychology is that the emotions we feel play an important role in helping us understand our place in the world and make decisions. They shouldn’t be suppressed, but embraced, and there has to be a balance between rationality applied to emotion (you shouldn’t lash out in anger) and recognizing what stirs us and compels us to do great things (following your gut).
The reality is that humans are complex beings composed of many variegated threads that when woven together form the tapestry that is a unique composition of each individual. These threads flow from our positive inner essence and are stimulated by our environment and our experience. What we feel I call the stirring of the soul — that feeling when the hairs on the back of your neck stand when you have a great idea or when your heart starts racing because you’ve made breakthrough on a problem — the ultimate expression of which is through our everyday actions.
The stirrings of the soul can be experienced as either positive or negative emotions. For example, when we are engaged in an activity that brings us excitement and leads us to a flow state, the emotions that we feel are positive and our affective actions are positive. When we see something happen that stirs passionate anger inside of us, such as a violation of our sense of justice, then we channel the negative emotion, the anger we feel, into positive action. In this way, both positive and negative emotions become a compass that orients us toward the things in this world that cause our soul to stir.
Work being the place we spend the majority of our time, it’s the most likely place to manifest action. And yet, we spend our lives in the dispassionate pursuit of those occupations that don’t fuel us, but provide us with the societal view of success, all the while feeling that something is amiss. And when the time comes to cash in our chips, we’re left with little more than lost time.
So it behooves us to build a work life around the things that stir our soul, our passions. Building your work around your passions will ensure that you don’t go to your grave having spent a lifetime avoiding the things you truly love.
The work we must do then becomes the inner work of identifying those things that stir your soul. Build a life around the combination of skills, ideas, and activities that get you excited, make you feel good, that are linked from your inner essence to your actions. Every day will not be perfect by any means, and there will be times when you ebb and flow from this state. But you will be better off having done it. To quote Alfred Lord Tennyson: “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
So let’s dispense with the notion that passion is a singular thing which we seek externally and accept that the answers are already inside of us, but that we must mine our souls to know ourselves.
Through the active pursuit of our passions, we can lead a fulfilling life. As we dig deeper into the things that fuel us, we sustain a much more intimate relationship with ourselves and begin to understand our emotions.
We are emotional creatures — that we should not deny — instead we should look to those emotions as a driving force for what we become in the world, rather than being extrinsically motivated by the projections of other who so often seek to use us to their advantage.
So the question is not, “What are you passionate about?” The question becomes: what stirs your soul?
And that is a solid foundation to build a life upon.
