How many times have you been told to find your passion and follow it? How many friends have breathlessly pronounced their latest start-up idea as their undying dream? How many blogs, articles and talk shows urge you to pursue your passion with no regard for the cost of doing so? And what if you’re skeptical about all this mania and prefer to lead a passionless and even-keeled life instead?

All-Consuming

Ahalya: We’re expected to live, breathe, and sleep consulting. Our careers are supposed to be our all-consuming passion. We must think about it in the shower, on the weekends, and last thing before we go to sleep. My boss claims that he regularly startles himself awake at 3 am with particularly brilliant project ideas.

There was a time when you could find meaning by building model train sets in the basement, or knitting adorable wool mittens for your friends. Our parents seemed to be absolutely content with reliable and interesting careers. Nowadays, however, we’re expected to be entirely consumed by passion for our jobs, or we risk opportunities for promotion.

Sara Robinson at Alternet has linked the move away from the 40 hour work week to the rise of Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Companies started to follow Silicon Valley with a work ethic that rewards “passionate” workers: “40-hour weeks [are] old-fashioned and boring. In the new workplace, people would find their ultimate meaning and happiness in the sheer unrivaled joy of work. They wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

River: When I was at business school, I felt like I had to make up a passion and go through the motions of exploring it, even when I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted to do. And anyone who was doing a full time start-up (even if it was something with zero real social value such as the millionth iPhone fashion app or they just wanted to get rich quick) was seen as “passionate.”

Ahalya: To me, this is just sad. While it’s obviously a good thing to be engaged in your career, it doesn’t need to be taken to such an extreme. I would prefer to be a well-rounded individual, with time for play, dedicated to hobbies that give me pleasure, as well as for work. It doesn’t matter if my personal interests don’t have social value. What’s more important is to live a happy, fulfilled life.

A Hierarchy of Passions

Not all passions are created equal. As Anne Marie Slaughter noted in Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, a boss will laud the discipline of a marathon-running employee but never regard a working parent, who is just as disciplined and exhausted, in the same light.

If your passion is a hobby that’s obviously meant for leisure or enjoyment, it will never be regarded as more than a minor pleasure. Because the passion seems too easy. You don’t have to work for it because you already love it. And that’s not passion, because passion is about love through hard work.

Ahalya: In the corporate world, there’s real disdain for less socially accepted types of passions. If you play a team sport, are part of a band or organize events for charity, you’re universally admired and respected. But if you do something more offbeat and introverted, you get a “that’s nice, dear,” and a change of subject! It really pisses me off…

More points are awarded for public passions.  You’re passionate about parenting? Tough, that’s a bloody duty. The same goes for being a mentor, taking care of elderly relatives, and generally being an exceptionally nice and caring person. No kudos for you.

Now if your passion is to start your own business, slog through shoestring budgets, and battle setbacks in the hope of achieving a glorious acquisition, then it’s a different story. You’ll be highly regarded and celebrated, even if you’re an asshole. Vision mitigates assholeness in the passion ranking process.

Self Marketing

One way to up the status of your passion is to market the hell out of it.

Tweet, share, blog, podcast… whatever it takes. If you’re messing around with recipes in your kitchen for fun alone, you’re just “relaxing.” If you’re blogging away and pursuing a book deal about said cooking then you’re “passionate,” regardless of your ultimate success.

So keep it simple and focused. People will want to understand your passion in 30 seconds at a cocktail party. “I love taking care of children” is way too broad. “I create hand-drawn napkins with messages of empowerment for disadvantaged kids at inner city schools” is specific, socially driven, and obscure enough to sound like it could be the next big thing.

River: Passion needs to be easily articulated and summed up. It’s like life as an elevator pitch! I get more respect if I claim my passion is “healthcare innovation” or “healthcare reform.”  But I get blank stares when I explain that I care very little about what industry I’m in; rather, I love helping underdogs achieve their potential and work goals.

Suffering and Reward

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “passion” comes from the Latin passionem, meaning “suffering, enduring” and pati “to suffer, endure.” Its earliest usage in English was likely in the religious realm, as in “Passion of Christ.” Given this root, perhaps our respect for any given “passion” is based on how much suffering is intermingled with pleasure. Things done purely for fun are not worthy of this illustrious title.

Persephone: I’m frequently torn between wanting things enough to be willing to do anything to get them (within moral bounds), and being more sensible and risk-averse. In the arts, you’re frequently told it’ll happen eventually if you want it enough. There are endless stories of how every artist only ate bread and water for 10, 20 years and was broke and on the verge of suicide. And then, voila, they became an “overnight” sensation.

Jia Jia: But how long does the sensation last and what are the consequences? Sometimes, the price of passion is a high one. See this Guardian op-ed on the deaths of Paul Bhattacharjee and Glee star Cory Monteith.

Living Passion-less

Jia Jia: “Passion” is a strong word. If I’m passionate about something, it consumes my heart and soul. It’s a bit scary to think of work doing that. Particularly if it’s in a profession with a ton of slog for little return besides material gain and social status, which is why I can’t comprehend when friends tell me they are passionate about corporate law or finance.

It’s come to the point where confessing that you have no single burning passion is a guilty admission, a social taboo, or a way to lose out on advancement at work.

But, why should living a life devoid of passion be so bad? It doesn’t equate to a dull, boring, unambitious, uninspired existence. Nor does it mean that you aren’t making the most of life or that you’re an inefficient employee. In fact, it could make you a more interesting, better-balanced, well-rounded individual, better able to function in the work place, since your personal interests haven’t been stifled for professional gain.

A passionless life could be about having a broad portfolio of interests, feeling satisfied, and enjoying learning and exploration. It could be about new opportunities and leaving options open.

It could also be about a trade-off between financial independence and personal interests. Being able to pick harpist as a career is not a choice that all of us can afford to make. Financial stability isn’t sexy, but it certainly buys you health insurance.

Serena: I find that I’m investing just the right amount of energy and effort to live comfortably and satisfy my needs in a diversified manner. I am neither putting in too much to cause me to have unrealistic expectations or excessive hope, nor too little so as to be dissatisfied or anxious about the future. Instead of pursuing greatness or being a lazy slug, I follow the wisps of curiosity that engage my mind just enough. As a result, hitting this “optimal” point makes me a-okay. Neither good nor bad.

Persephone: I’m actually ashamed how often I want to be comfortable, but then I’m not sure we were put on this earth to spend our one life being comfortable. As an artist, I swing towards all-out devotion, and then I backtrack to being sensible and comfortable. But then I get really sick of being sensible and swing again.

Ahalya: Just because someone has chosen a more traditional career doesn’t mean they’ve sold out. One of the benefits of having financial stability is the flexibility to keep up interests on the side. For example, I regularly play music with a partner at my firm. So choosing one path in life doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve shut out others, although of course you will only be able to dedicate a limited time to outside interests. That’s a balance that everyone has to work out for themselves.

Persephone: Sometimes, we may want to choose to be passionless because we want stability and financial independence that we didn’t have growing up. Sometimes, it’s the other way around, such as actors who were penniless growing up (e.g., Chaplin) but thought, “hey, I’ve got nothing to lose.” Often, it’s actually much riskier for well-off elites to choose to follow their passions because they might “lower” themselves if they don’t eventually make it in some way. All those posh actors who’ve become famous—if they ended up being penniless actors for their whole lives, they would be considered to have “gone down a level” by their former social peers.

It’s not that passion in itself is bad, but that the social pressure and current ideology of passions are unhelpful. You don’t have to be the next Steve Jobs to live a worthy life. Both the passionate and the passionless amongst us are capable of amazing things.

Jia Jia: And by the way, this obsession with passion seems more prevalent in the U.S., where, after all, the pursuit of happiness is a founding principle. When I lived in France, I didn’t hear any talk of passion. My classmates weren’t unambitious— they were elite and wanted the top jobs. Their passion was simply what I’d call “being French”—taking a moment to enjoy leisure time instead of filling it with passion projects. They had less existential angst as a result and seemed to derive meaning less from expressing themselves through some form of passionate initiative or a demonic devotion to work and more from life’s little pleasures and major milestones.

That sounds kind of nice, doesn’t it?

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By Ahalya, Jia Jia, Persephone, River, and Serena
Photograph by Scenic Reflections