Why you should work for satisfaction, not passion
An alternative way of thinking about work.
This guest post is written by my friend Nick Moore. Nick is a technical writer who started freelancing full-time around the same time I did. We bounce ideas off each other all the time, and I value his perspective and his writing skills.
You can learn more about Nick on his website.
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life,” is one of the most popular pieces of career advice I encountered as a young adult. According to an article by Quote Investigator, its origins are murky, and people often attribute it to Confuscious, Ben Franklin, and Mark Twain.
This murkiness feels fitting, though, because this aphorism is the water in which we swim and the water in which I grew up. As far as I’m concerned, the quote might as well have come from my parents, who repeated it to me often when I was a teenager who was always worrying two steps ahead.
My relationship to work has changed dramatically across my decade in the workforce, and this quote has resurfaced numerous times over that span.
Sometimes, it felt like a beacon: “If I only go to grad school, then I’ll be able to get into the industry that allows work to not feel like work.” Other times, it felt like a warning light: “You’re working hard, you’re burning out, and you’re not having fun. You’ve chosen the wrong line of work.”
Two years ago, I was laid off from a full-time content marketing position at a tech startup, and I chose to become a freelance writer.
That decision ended up culminating a thought I’d had simmering for years: The framework underlying this aphorism relies on a false binary. You don’t have to choose between work that provides passion (and maybe a paycheck) or work that subjects you to drudgery (and pays to make the pain go down easier). There’s a third way.
The case for passion
The false binary goes like this: You’re either doing a job you love and work that makes you feel passionate about doing it, or you’re weathering drudgery for the sake of a big paycheck. For young millennials like me, the false binary came pre-solved: Drudgery sucks, so find work that doesn’t feel like work — at any cost.
Generationally, we paid that cost. The student debt our generation has taken on is enormous, and the burden seems never-ending. At the time, it all seemed worth it because we were taking on debt to live a life free from work.
We found out too late, though, that the price was steeper and more nefarious than we (or our parents) anticipated. As Anne Helen Peterson writes (in an essay on burnout that went super-viral in 2019),
“When we talk about millennial student debt, we’re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American ‘institutions’ like home ownership or purchasing diamonds. It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be ‘worth it’ — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t.”
For me, this debt, this betrayal, came due not when the banks demanded my first student loan payment but when I realized passion would neither pay the bills nor free me from drudgery.
Work, it turns out, is work, and even great jobs include a lot of unfun labor surrounding the good stuff. To this day, I occasionally meet people who’ve fulfilled the dream, people who really have one of those one-in-a-million jobs, or people who happen to fit perfectly into a field that really suits them.
For most people, however, I think this is a mirage that’s more likely to hurt you than save you. Mirages only work when they look beautiful, and when we have to start from the desert, looking for an escape.
In her book Work Won't Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe writes, “Without a society, with the lines between the family and the workplace blurring, with little time for a personal life anyway, we are even more likely to try to make work more pleasurable, even to seek in it a replacement for the love we lack elsewhere.”
The idea of work as a site of passion and love exists because and in relation to the fact that third spaces have been destroyed, communities have been broken apart, and free time has been consumed by anxiety, screens, and, cyclically, work.
When companies become “family,” as so many bosses would have us believe, love is turned against us. As Jaffe writes, “If we fail to love our work, it becomes another form of individual shame. Love, after all, is supposed to be an unlimited resource that lives within us: If the workplace is a family, shouldn’t we naturally love it?”
I fell out of love with this form of love fairly early. I thought I would work in the book publishing industry, but I didn’t have the familial wealth to suffer a move to New York City and an unknown number of “dues paid” via unpaid internships. A class I nearly didn’t take covered content marketing, and I thought there might be something for me there. Something less than passion, perhaps, but something that made the looming student loans survivable.
Still, I graduated with nearly six-figure debt, and though I started work earning more than the big fat zero an internship would have offered me, I still worried about the other path in the binary: Maybe I should have accepted drudgery from the start instead of taking the long route.
The case for drudgery
The other side of the false binary goes like this: Work sucks, so you might as well get paid as much as you can (in money, status, etc.) while you do it. The prototypical career options for this path are always doctor and lawyer. Midway through my college experience, another position rose up: Software engineer.
My first office job post-school was at a tech media company, where I frequently interviewed engineers, IT professionals, and other technical experts. The complexity of their work was dizzying, and my job was to explain work I didn’t understand to people who knew more about it than I did. The fact that everyone I wrote about made more money than I did made sense. I had some envy but no resentment.
In the following years, I worked for tech companies but never as a tech worker. Like a crab on the ocean floor, I fed on the detritus of dollars sinking down to me, the frothing waves of VC dollars flowing in and out of startups that surged, crashed, and fell apart.
All the while, my envy deepened. I met tech workers who loved their jobs, self-described code monkeys who relished the bananas piled their way, but I met many who took the work on as highly paid drudgery.
At first, my passion-work instincts were disgusted. Who could do something they hated? Just for money? It seemed like a poison pill. But then I saw the paychecks, cold brew on tap, work-from-home Fridays, and flexible, relaxed environments. I saw people getting paid like doctors and lawyers without having any lives on the line. And the poison pill looked pretty delicious.
I lacked the instincts to learn coding well, however, and I lacked the gumption to flip my life over in a way that would have allowed me the space and effort to switch tracks and choose the other prong. Instead, I stayed nearby but outside, and watched.
This position meant I saw the rise, but I also saw the fall. According to Gergely Orosz, “2023 was, indeed, historic as the first year since Y2K when the number of software engineering jobs shrank. Growth has resumed this year, but it’s at least possible that a long-term flattening of the growth curve is emerging.”
With the end of ZIRP, we may be seeing the end of the software engineer as a safe, easy bet to invest your time in, even if you find the work tedious. And it’s only gotten worse. Now, with the rise of AI-based coding tools, the gold rush seems over.
The problem, really, is that you don’t get to pick a point on that graph. As a worker, you’re gambling on your industry and hoping for the best – that you’re a developer in 2010 and not a developer in 2023 (or whatever might come next).
Of course, the tech industry will remain, as will engineering jobs (this essay is not the place for AGI predictions), but the rush, specifically, is over.
Engineering is returning to the kind of state most industries are in: The work sucks, but they pay you to do it, and hey, if you don’t mind the work, it might not feel quite as bad to do all week.
If I had kids, even teenagers on the cusp of entering college, I don’t think I would urge them to choose engineering. I wouldn’t steer them away, but unlike many parents of the students in my cohort, I wouldn’t tell them this line of work, or any other one, will be a golden ticket.
For me, this rise and fall of the tech gold rush shows there’s no dependable path to wealth, no easy-to-call tradeoff that pays you handsomely for a little drudgery. If anything, the “safe” path has come to feel risky. I worry about the people who invested years of work in a field they loathe, only to find that the money has dried up and they have skills they no longer care to possess.
The case for satisfaction
I love writing. The first ambition I ever had was when I set a blue-colored pencil to a page and wrote a Captain Underpants rip-off, and decided, when I was eight, that I had what it took to become a published author.
College showed me that novelist, as a career path, was perhaps a little too much passion and not enough paycheck. I went to grad school to work in publishing, intending to work with writers but not as one, but the scales were still too imbalanced against paycheck (especially given the debt I took on to find this out).
When I graduated, I started working in content marketing. First, I worked in tech media; then, I worked for a content marketing agency; then I worked as a full-time content marketer for a tech startup; then, as many were, I was laid off. When that happened, I faced a dilemma I had only been half-facing throughout my career: Did I really want to twist my passion into work?
I love writing, but I didn’t love what I was writing about. I merely liked it. But was that enough? Was I burning writing hours writing blog posts that I should have been saving for off-hours side work?
Freelancing allowed me to complete the answer I had been drafting: Work can provide satisfaction, a level of pleasure that isn’t passion or love but is much better than drudgery and tedium. And if I only ask for satisfaction, then I can do work that pays better than work meant to fill my soul.
Nowadays, I spend almost every day researching, writing, and occasionally interviewing (to support further research and writing). I’m rarely excited to start the workday, but once I’m focused, I routinely find myself delaying the end of the day because I’m in the groove and I’m “stuck in.”
I think of this feeling as the kind of satisfaction you can get from solving a puzzle. When you do a puzzle, you know what the result of the work will be (it’s right on the box!), but you do it anyway because the tactile sensation of clicking pieces together and the intellectual sensation of testing, thinking, and progressing is satisfying.
Nowadays, that’s all I expect of work, and because I’ve made my expectations realistic, work has the chance to surpass my expectations occasionally. Work still feels like work, but I don’t demand that it feel like anything else, which gives it the chance to give me the more mundane satisfaction of solving a mundane problem.
The false binary doesn’t just hide a third path. It distorts the way you think about work by magnifying the role work must play in your life.
Zoom in that far, and the choice makes sense; you'd better work for happiness or money, or you’re getting nothing at all. Zoom out, though, and there are many more things to consider – chief among them, the question the binary begs: What role will work have in your life?
If I were advising a teenager now, I would ask the same kinds of questions that sociology professor Erin A. Cech asks his students:
Now I encourage students, and anyone else at the crossroads of important career decisions, to marshal a more holistic set of considerations in their decision-making. I start with the question, What do you want your relationship to paid work to be? What do you need from your work in addition to a paycheck? Predictable hours? Enjoyable colleagues? Benefits? A respectful boss?
Your workplace is not your family, but work is a part of life. Putting work in the context of your life gives you more variables to think about, more dials to twist, more options to consider. You’re not stuck in the false binary of passion or drudgery.
You must work, yes, but you can figure out ways to find satisfaction in the day-to-day, maximize money and flexibility along the way, and fill the rest of your time with life rather than squeezing your life into work.
Putting work in its place
Work is greedy, and if you let it, work can consume you. As Petersen writes, “When all hours can be theoretically converted to more work, the hours when you're not working feel like a lost opportunity, or just an abject failure.”
Accepting that work is about passion through labor or profit through drudgery requires making work a central focal point in your life. Once that happens, as Petersen writes, every non-working hour becomes a betrayal of the chance to feel passionate or to earn profit.
In reality, the “third way” I’ve proposed here isn’t a third option in a list of three, but a different framework entirely. It’s not the only one, but it’s mine, and I think it’s a good way to jostle people out of the false binary many of us inherited.
If you love this newsletter and look forward to reading it every week, please consider forwarding it to a friend or becoming a subscriber.
Have a work story you’d like to share? Please reach out using this form. I can retell your story while protecting your identity, share a guest post, or conduct an interview.