Remember back when you were a kid? You would just do things. You never thought to yourself, “What are the relative merits of learning cricket vs football?” You just ran around the playground and played cricket and football. You built sand castles and asked silly questions and looked for fucking bugs and dug up grass and pretended you were a animal or a monster.
Nobody told you to do it, you just fucking did it. You were led merely by your curiosity and excitement.
And the beautiful thing was, if you hated cricket or football, you just stopped playing it. There was no guilt involved. There was no arguing or debate. You either liked it, or you fucking didn’t.
And if you loved looking for bugs, you just did that. There was no fucking second-level analysis of, “Well, is looking for bugs really what I should be doing with my time as a child? Nobody else wants to look for bugs, does that mean there’s something wrong with me? How will looking for bugs affect my future prospects?” I mean WTF?
There was no bullshit. If you liked something, you just did it.
I just happen to listen to people telling me that they don’t know what to do with their life. And one of person asked me if I had any ideas of what they could do, where they could start, where to “find their passion".And of course, I didn’t respond. Why? Because I have no fucking clue. If you don’t have any idea what to do with yourself, what makes you think some jackass with a website would?
But more importantly, what I want to say to these people is this: that’s the whole point — “not knowing” is the whole fucking point. Life is all about not knowing, and then doing something anyway. All of life is like this. All of it. And it’s not going to get any easier just because you found out you love your job cleaning septic tanks or creating dumb fuck games.
The common thing among a lot of these people is that they need to ‘find their passion.’ I call bullshit. You already found your passion, you’re just ignoring it. Seriously, you’re awake 16 hours a day, what the fuck do you do with your time? You’re doing something, obviously. You’re talking about something. There’s some topic or activity or idea that dominates a significant amount of your free time, your conversations, your web browsing, and it dominates them without you consciously pursuing it or looking for it.
It’s right there in front of you, you’re just avoiding it. For whatever reason, you’re godamn avoiding it. You’re telling yourself, “Oh well, yeah, I love comic books but that doesn’t count. You can’t make money with comic books.”
Fuck you, have you even tried?
The problem is not a lack of passion for something. The problem is productivity. The problem is perception. The problem is acceptance. The problem is the, “Oh, well that’s just not a realistic option,” or “Mom and Dad would kill me if I tried to do that, they say I should be a doctor” or “That’s crazy, you can’t buy a BMW with the money you make doing that.”
The problem isn’t passion. It’s never passion.
It’s priorities.
And even then, who says you need to make money doing what you love? Since when does everyone feel entitled to love every fucking second of their job? Really, what is so wrong with working an OK normal job with some cool people you like, pursuing your passion? Has the world turned upside-down?
Look, here’s another slap on the face: every job sucks sometimes. There’s no such thing as some passionate activity that you will never get tired of, never get stressed over, never complain about. It doesn’t exist. I am living my Life (which is happening in its own flow , by the way. I never in a million years planned on this happening; like a kid on a playground I just went and tried it), and I still hate about 30% of it. Sometimes more.
Again, that’s just life.
The issue here is, once again, expectations. If you think you’re supposed to be working 70-hour work weeks and sleeping in your office like Steve Jobs and loving every second of it, you’ve been watching too many shitty movies. Life doesn’t work like that. It’s just unrealistic. There’s a thing most of us need called balance.
I have a best friend who, has been dreaming of becoming a cinema director and script writer whatever since childhood. It isnt just working for him. And by not working, I mean he’s not even trying anything. Despite years of passion and saying he’s going to do this or that, nothing actually ever gets done.
What does get done is when his father makes him join engineering. Holy shit, he’s all over that like flies on fresh cow shit despite the fact that it sucks.
And he is doing great! He is studying well, scoring well in internals and crap, living a fine and comfortable life.
But then two days later it’s back to, “Man, I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Im really sick of it.”
I meet so many people like him. He doesn’t need to find his passion. His passion already found him. He’s just ignoring it. He just refuses to believe it’s viable. He is just afraid of giving it an goddam honest try.
It’s like a nerdy kid walking onto a playground and saying, “Well, bugs are really cool, but NFL players make more money, so I should force myself to play football every day,” and then coming home and complaining that he doesn’t like chocolates.
And that’s bullshit. The problem is that he’s arbitrarily choosing to limit himself based on some bullshit ideas he got into his head about success and what he’s supposed to do.
Here’s another point that might make a few people salty: If you have to look for what you’re passionate about, then you’re probably not passionate about it at all. If you’re passionate about something, it will already feel like such an ingrained part of your life that you will have to be reminded by people that it’s not normal, that other people aren’t like that.
A child does not walk onto a playground and say to herself, “How do I find fun?” She just goes and has fun.
If you have to look for what you enjoy in life, then you’re not going to enjoy anything. And the real truth is that you already enjoy something. You already enjoy many things. You’re just choosing to ignore them.
