The fashion for passion

> OTOH diving head-first into your passion and ignoring everything else, including such things as the need to earn a subsistence, is also a recipe for disaster in all but very few exceptional cases.

I think this presents a false dichotomy and isn't really what I tend to see in my generation in my country.

What I personally see is a generation of people who were brought up on "do what you love", "follow your passion", who then went on to study degrees in things they enjoyed (photographic art, english lit., contemporary dance, illustration, to name a few).

After 4 years of racking up tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt they all now work in call centres, warehouses, office administration. I.E, dead-end jobs that provide no passion. A number of them are being medically treated for anxiety & depression.

I think instead if of "Do / study / follow your passion" we taught the matra of "be practical, find a career that pays well, has room for learning new skills, challenges you in interesting ways but it might not be the thing you love dearest" would have lead my generation to study degrees or enter trades that provided a pathway for a rewarding career, both fiscally and mentally.

I'm passionate about computer science, but my real passion isn't writing middleware services for B2B customers. I do it because there's still interesting challenges, it's an outlet for my skillset and it pays well.

Everyone works for money. That's the deal. People rent their time in exchange for a salary. If it was actually enjoyable, it would be called a hobby not a job and people would be the one paying to do it.

I fail to see the link between that, the awfuly named "trend" of "quiet quiting" - doing what you are paid for is not quiting, it's just doing your job - and collective bargaining.

Seems to me that most people just want to do their job well without having to swallow gallons of company kool-aid while doing so, be allowed to take pride in what they do, be afforded an amount of trust and consideration befitting an adult and provided appropriate working conditions rather than being treated like cattle.

So basically go back to the seventies before the "modern" world decided to follow Reagan and Thatcher in their madness and self sabotage.

I know that in my line of work I can get passionate about plenty of ideas, but there's no real correlation between what keeps me going, and what clicks with a mass audience. One of the things that clicks with the mass audience is that I'm there seeking out really quirky, specialized things that might possibly result in something amazing.

In that sense the mass audience is more interested in me being passionate, than in every specific thing I'm being passionate about. Bit like a zoo. Watch the tiger code widgets! If the tiger codes an amazing, saleable widget, that's a real marketing story, but people will still be curious and watch even if the widgets don't suit them. If the tiger thinks every widget is gonna be a hit, he's going to burn out and quit in despair.