The Trouble With Passion

couple of years. And author and sociologist Aaron Seck, who wrote the book The Trouble with Passion, How searching for fulfillment at work fosters inequality, brings up some really interesting questions. For the longest time, we've always been taught or told right, love what you do, and then it won't feel like work.

Follow your passion right to do all of these grand things. One, I think we need to acknowledge the place of privilege that those sentiments come from, because there are plenty of people who work in service oriented industries where there is anything but passion or joy. Right, it is a means to an end and an opportunity for them to put food on their table, pay their bills, you know, and

simply adult. But for those of us who are in more white collar professional spaces, I think that the past year plus has offered us an opportunity to really think about how it is that we work and what we want our relationship to work to be. A couple of years ago, I decided after I had been working in policy in Washington, d C. For many years, and then had transitioned into doing more media work, then transitioned out of both of those things, and then wanted to make

a move from Washington, DC to New York. I was working at a very well known PR and communications firm, and my relationship to work changed dramatically. I was working roughly on average, sixty to eighty hours a week. My phone was attached to my hip. It went off all the time, anytime, morning, noon, or night, holidays. It didn't matter because part of my work was PR, the other part was crisis PR right, and so you just need to be on all the time and the client is

always right. That was the sentiment my relationship to work, where I had always oriented myself with organizations and spaces where I had and felt shared mission and value, and I was just exhausted. On top of which I was making an obscene commute because I had just moved back to New York and I didn't have a place of my own yet, and so I was staying with my family on Long Island. I was making an obscene commute

into the city every day. It was a three hour round trip commute, every single day, five days a week. Everything was weighing on me. The job was weighing on me, the commute was weighing on me, and it showed. It showed up because everything for me, when it pertains to stress, manifests itself Physically. I was starting to look really ashy, lose color, I was gaining tons of weight. I just felt like shit, and so I made a really tough decision, And it was a similar decision that I had made

a couple of years prior. There are moments in my life where either tragedy or just burnout requires me to make adjustments and realign myself. When I had left a nonprofit back in DC, I left in the midst of tragedy. One of my closest friends had died in a motorcycle accident outside of the country, and it had me wondering

what the fuck I was doing with my life. If everything can be up in smoke and gone in an instant, then what does it mean to really live, and I recognized that at that time I was working at an organization that was doing really great work, working on environmental education, working on saving the planet and the environment, but it wasn't my passion and it didn't feel like my purpose. I was getting promoted and I was good at what

I was doing, but I didn't love it. And for me, loving what I'd do was more important than anything else, And in the moment of tragedy and loss, it had me reassess what I was doing and how I wanted my time. Whatever time I did have left to be of service, but what kind of service? So I left my job and I replaced my energy, realigned my energy into building out my first podcast and my first media platform.

That was in the early twenty tens. Then fast forward to a couple of years later when I would enter into a completely different industry working in PR. Because everything in media at that point I had learned. I taught myself, but the hours were ridiculous. My body, my mind, my spirit just could not keep pace. So after a couple of years, I decided to pull the plug and thought that I wanted to go and work at a startup. But after a couple of months there, I realized that

this wasn't a good fit either. So I did the ultimate thing. I took a risk and a bet on myself, and I said, I'm going to take a handful of clients that I have, I'm going to take the media work that I do, and I'm going to create. Essentially, if I were in college, they would call it an

independent study. I created my own path, design my own work and how I wanted to work and the things that allow me to do what it is that I do is one All of you who are so supportive, both financially and emotionally and spiritually with your you know, keep going and keep pushing and keep speaking out sis. I can't tell you how much your comments and your thumbs up and your likes and your shares really do bolster me, particularly when our political climate gets me down.

But I say all that to say that I decided to design my life around how I wanted to feel and how I wanted to be of service. And again understanding that that's a privilege, I knew that if I wanted to take this risk on myself, and God forbid I failed, I wasn't going to be out on the street. I didn't have kids, you know, so I don't have to worry about mouth to feed other than my own.

And you know, I know that I have family and friends that act as emotional support and if I needed to lean on them in another way could also float me as well. Again understanding those points of privilege. But the reality is is that we do have the ability to design the kind of lives that we want. And I think that the questions and the tools that Erin provides in her book really allow us to kind of

think about how do I want to feel right? Knowing that we all, unless you're some type of heiress, will need to work, right, but what is our relationship to work and how do we create a relationship that is healthy. One of the questions that you will hear me ask Aaron is about, you know, whether or not we're asking

or expecting too much of work? Right? Well, we know that work expects too much of us, But because we are there for forty fifty sixty and plus hours a week, are we looking at work in the way that if we had more time or could reorient our time, we would be able to put towards hobbies. Does work or should work be a passion project, when in fact, we should never be pouring all of ourselves into one thing,

one person, or one space or place. And so what does it look like to diversify, right, what is meaningful to us and where we find that meaning? Aaron will unpack this in our conversation, which I hope that you guys enjoy, because it really was incredibly illuminating. You know. I can remember in high school one hundred moons ago going in to sit down with my guidance counselor. I

think it was approaching. I was in eleventh grade, right, so you're starting to really think about college and where you want to go and what you want to do. And it's so crazy to me now as an adult, thinking that we expect people at sixteen and seventeen years old to put a stake in the ground and decide, Yeah, for the next four years, I'm going to concentrate on this thing, and then I'm going to go get this

job and I'm going to live this life. And we expect people to be able to make that decision at sixteen and seventeen years old, but then don't allow people to drink until twenty one. It's very odd, what we like, the pressures and the expectations that we have, and what we're socialized to believe is normal. And then in hindsight you're like, yeah, that's a terrible idea because for me, I would have if I could go back in time,

I would have wanted to take a gap year. I believe in a gap year, I would have taken the year between high school and going to college and go and volunteer, do AmeriCorps, do Peace Corps, do something that allowed me to actually see and experience the world and feel and understand what I wanted my role to be

before I would then dive into anybody's studies. I also think, you know, regardless of what kind of student that you are, those twelve years, right, those you know from K through twelve or isn't aggressive time of learning and growing and experiencing life. And so really you should take a break, right so that when you were showing up on campus or at your vocational you know place that you are ready and prepared and refreshed to be able to align yourself and really like have an open mind and are

ready to grow and experience. Because I'll tell you that I remember walking into my Guidance Counselor's office. I took some type of test that was going to tell me what kind of career that I should have, and if funny enough, I believe God, I wish I had saved that paper because that would be like wild to see. But I want to say that some of the things that were like pushed out after this test were journalists I want to say was one of them. Lawyer was

another one. Something anything that had to do with like research, investigation, asking lots of questions were the things. And you know, if you know me, and obviously you do because you listen to OKAYEF, you know that I pretty much kind of hit the nail on the head, but not without a lot of, you know, trial and error along the way. But I think that it's really interesting that instead of asking young people what do you want to do, we should start asking them how do you want to feel?

So that you can then learn to create a life and a work life balance around that. Right. And I think that these next generations are understanding their relationship to themselves, their identities, and the kind of alignment that they want.

And I think, honestly it's from watching their parents and their grandparents work out of alignment and work in a way that it's just like, well, this is just the grind, this is the hustle, this is what you do, and recognizing that they are pausing their happiness for forty hours a week right in and hoping that the weekend or that day and a half that we get is going to be enough to fill all of the other gaps.

So this is a really exciting conversation that I have with sociologists Aaron Seck and tell me in the comment sections what you guys think about your relation to work. Has it changed, you know, during the great pause that many of us had in twenty twenty. Did you leave a job? J did you start a new job? Are you in between spaces? Are you going into a totally

new industry? Let us know in the comment section below, because I think it's in the conversation at least I know that I've been having with my friends and family, and I'm certain that you all are having it with yours. So coming up next is my conversation with sociologist and

author Aron sek Folks. I am very excited to welcome to woka F for the first time, sociologist Aron Seck, who is the author of The Trouble with Passion, how searching for fulfillment at work fosters inequality er I feel like I have been telling people and providing people with the wrong advice after reading your book. The thing that we've always been told that if you love what you do, it won't feel like work, that if you just go after your passion, then you know, all will be Well,

what are we getting wrong about this? Well, first of all, it's a natural response to the complexity of the labor market. Right. We see the labor market out there. We know that people are working not forty hours a week, but fifty or sixty or seventy hours a week, and so the idea of saying, well, I might as well love when I do if that's going to be the labor force I'm going into, seems like a pretty rational response. So what we're getting wrong is the recognition that passion seeking

is based in privilege. So it's based in having safety nets and springboards that can be able to support people to be able to manage the kind of precarity of searching out jobs that they might be passionate about, or changing up what they're doing in their career to find a brand new field where they don't have a whole lot of experience and kind of retool having the social

networks to get those kinds of connections. Ultimately, the sense that we tell people that they can do whatever they like as long as they're passionate about it and work hard enough is precisely in line with the idea of the meritocratic ideology, which we know doesn't exactly describe the way that the labor market is structured. You know, it's funny because right now, you know, we keep seeing articles, right, and I'm sure that you are paying attention to all

of them. There is a mass what do they call it? The Wall Street Journal I think did an article and they called it the mass resignation, right, that over eleven million people have left the workforce. And you know, we keep talking about our listening in mainstream media and on cable news about there being a labor shortage, and my response to that is that there isn't actually a labor shortage.

There's a shortage of good quality jobs. There's a shortage of jobs that you know, allow for people to be able to not only put food on their table, but by medicine at the same time, provide them with the health benefits that they need, the childcare credits that they need,

and so on and so forth. And so why do you think that, you know, aside from the things that I listed, when you see those headlines about, you know, the work industry right now and the fact that across industries there are thousands of people on strike right why do you think that that is happening? And was it a shock to you? It's not a shock to me.

And I think in part the quote unquote labor shortage or the great resignation is in part due to all of a sudden there is a competition of employers for workers, and so they're put in competition and having to elevate things like pay and benefits in a way that they weren't pressured to before. So part of it is structural, but there's also this huge cultural part of it. So what I talk about in the book is the way that understanding our experiences with the labor market is not

just an economic consideration. It's also a moral one. It's also an existential one. The labor force, regardless of where we are in it is a site of meaning making in our lives that can be fantastic or can be drudgerous and full of dread. And so what happens with the great resignation is for especially the college educated folks that sort of have a potential ability to step back and say, what do I want from my work? What

does being a worker mean to me? These questions about wanting to find meaning fulfillment and work come to be

front and center. And in fact, some of the research I did that is beyond this Trouble with Passion book with my graduate student Sophia Hiltner, we actually looked at workers during a pandemic, so this is October twenty twenty, and we surveyed college educated workers and compared the commitments to different labor market priorities of people who had kept their jobs the same over the course of the pandemic

and people who had lost a job or refurloughed. And we found that people who had lost a job and referlowed were more invested in seeking passion than people who had kept a stable job. And that is in part related to the kinds of existential instability insecurity that comes with this context of a global pandemic, alongside the kind of immediate experience of losing or potentially losing one's one

sense of economic stability. And so it's not just necessarily people looking for the highest income or the most stability, but rather how kind how can I align my work with who I want to be or what I want so to look like it? Is it now? Right? And

is this? Are we privileged in this sense? Right? That we are in a space where I mean, for me and and i'll and I'll say this for me, the height of the pandemic provided an opportunity for me to take a pause, right when when we were in quarantine and when you know, the world slowed down, it provided an opportunity for me to have a pause and really think about what is the kind of content that I'm putting out into the world. How is it that I want to be aligned with my work? Um? How is

it that I want to show up? And I found I understood in that moment that that indeed was a privilege, right, It was a deep privilege to be able to do that. I was not an essential worker, right, So I understand it from that vantage point. But is it also you know, are we looking for passion or are we looking for alignment and is there a difference between those those two things? Great question. So I would say we are looking for alignment in our paid work in a way that's really risky.

So there's the risk of financial ruin potentially if someone follows their passion and don't doesn't have the privilege or of some form of savings or other things they can rely upon. But it's also an existential risk in a lot of ways to try and align our work with

our sense of self. And the reason I say that is because even if you're in a job that you find deeply fulfilling and meaningful, it's very likely that the people that you're working for, the organization that you're working with, is benefiting far more from the passion based labor that you are providing to them than you are getting paid for.

One of the things I find in the book is through an experiment, an experiment that employers really light job applicants who express passion for their work, and it's not just that they like them because they think that they'll be fun colleagues or you know, bring a good vibe to the community, but that they'll be able to get more labor out of them without an increase in pay.

So right, so there's a knowing exploitation of passion. And so if we hand ourselves over hand our meaning making over to the labor market, something that is so precarious and unstable and certainly is not designed to support our meaning making goals, that puts us at risk our deep

sense of self. And so it's so interesting because this moment where people are taking stock of their work, the content of their work exactly as you described, in this moment, if they find a misalignment in that, there's one solution that let me fire the work, let me find something about work that I like more. Another thing is, let

me find meaning outside of work. Let me let me shrink the space of work in my life and expand the space of work outside of my life so I can find that meaning fulfillment that's missing in my life

outside of my paid employment. You know, it's it's so interesting because it's like, do we work so much that we have a lack of hobbies that we're looking for everything to be in this one space and place right, Like, you know, if you are putting in on average, forty plus hours a week at a job, it's and then you sleep and then you eat, and if you care for kids or an elderly parent or what have you, like that's your time, right Like, that's that's your life

in a nutshell. And so it's like are we putting are we as workers placing too much value in what it is that we're doing because we're looking forward to fill all of the other avenues of our life that we may have gaps. Yeah, absolutely, And I think it's really tricky because the labor force is not set up

to help us get out of that trap either. So the difficulty, So the reason that that that passion seeking is so risky financially is because we don't have the same social safety nets and protections as other post industrialized nations.

So if one says, you know what, I just want to work part time so that I can invest in myself and invest in my own meaning making, there's very little support for someone who is in that kind of position, or who might be in some kind of precarious work and loses their job or is furloughed to some respect. So the riskiness involved is part of the kind of structure of the American labor force, but it's also tied into culturally what we think of as as being a

good worker. So it is very unusual for somebody who says, I'm going to come in and I'm going to do my work and I'm going to leave after him where my forty hours are done. I'm gonna put my effort in, but then I'm going to leave and not have a sense of personal dedication to that work to be coded

as a good worker. The idea of an ideal worker in the United States is, and has been for over half a century, the sense of you are devoted to the work that you do, and so breaking from that not only risks potential sanctions from one's employer, but people thinking that one is not morally aligned with expectations of being a worker, especially for professional workers. Why do we think that this is the case? Now? What is it about these younger generations that is shifting how we are

thinking and looking at work right like? What what? What is what is it about our society right now and the people that it is producing that we are that we are in this moment. So I think it's a confluence of two historical processes. One is a cultural process. One is related to the ex huge explosion of the expectation for self expression and an identity formation sense about the late nineteen eighties early nineteen nineties, right, everything that we have in our lives we expect to be connected

to a sense of self expression. One of my favorite favorite examples is the little the Firefox web browser has at the very top of it. You can change the skin on it to be something that aligns with something that's self expressive to you, whether that's like a color or a sports team, or you know, a particular form of architecture or something. So there's this giant expectation, this ubiquitous expectation that everything in our life we should be able to do self expressively, and so our work is

certainly no exception to that. But then alongside of that is this huge shift in precarity in a labor market since the nineteen seventies, So even for those who have a college degree, the expectation that you can get a job in a company and that company will sort of take care of you as long as you do your work and put your time in just doesn't exist anymore.

And so one solution to that kind of procurity might have been a big growth, a big swell in collective action of pushing back on expectations for overwork, pushing back on the kind of precarity that exists in a labor force.

But what has happened instead, the kind of general reaction, in part because of the lack of structural support for kind of collective solutions, is people saying, well, if I need to work sixty seventy eight hours a week, and I and that's my path as a college educated worker, I might as well do something that I like, I might as well have it align with my sense of self. And so part of it is the lack of other alternatives for individual workers to seem to see ways out

of the issue of precurity and overwork. You know, is there a way too? Like how how does this? How does this connect to our understanding of burnout? And also it's burnout a privileged term as well. Like again, like I asked these questions because I realized that, you know, I have only ever work, only ever had white collar work experiences, right, like outside of being a teenager and working in a grocery store when I was a teenager, and that was really for fun, right, that was not

to put food on the table. It was to like buy what my parents wouldn't buy me right, um, and and wasn't like you were forced to work. It was just like I wanted to because I want this extra thing outside of that. My entire career is in white collar type of work. Is burnout? Right? And this word that we use we see everywhere, we see memed, we see quoted, we see self care. Now you know as as as prevalent as ever. Is that also one privilege? And then two? Is there a way to set up

your life where you don't have burnout? Or is burnout just a product of having to work? Right? And and that like when you have to work and you have to work a lot because you're adulting, and as much as you know, we may not like it, like that's part of life. It is burnout just a part of life? Or is that the way in which we have been socialized to understand work. That's a really great question. So my sense is that burnout is a way is a language that's been utilized to try and claw back some

pushback on the expectations of the labor market. But it is a privileged term. Any time workers have the opportunity to think about adjusting the quality of their work, their work circumstances the environment in which they work to find a better option for them. That in itself is a privilege and usually something that's that's only reserved for those with the college degree. Because of the kind of precarity

and the bifurcation of good jobs and bad jobs. In the United States, people with out of college degree, those in the service sector blue collar work increasingly have more precarious hours, less advantageous kind of work, more deskilled kind of work, where even thinking about does this give me

burnout or not? Or is this something that aligns with their passion or not is really outside of the realm of what is often available to them structurally because of how work is organized in the United States, and so with burnout is aligned the idea of passion seeking. It's sort of the contrast of one another. People often want to seek out their passion if they feel burnt out, but burnout is attached to a sense of overwork in a lot of ways. So one can seek passion because

they feel burnt out. One can seek passion because they don't feel connected to the work that they do, but burnout is often attached to the sense of I am working more than I want to and it is bleeding over into other areas of my life, and that that sentiment of work affecting our non work lives is something

that all work will have an impact on. It's sort of that's the characteristic of labor, of giving our labor over to somebody else in a capitalist economy, but the expectations that the labor force has of us are extreme

in many ways. That leads the kind of burnout. So we can think about burnout on an individual level, what we can think about the kinds of structural practices and processes that lead to this overwhelming amount of burnout that I think we've seen grow over the last couple of decades is a burnout unique to America because of the way in which we overwork, the way in which we have the least vacation time of any other industrialized nation.

You know the joke every summer always comes around where you know, if you send a if you send an email to somebody in Europe between like July and September, it's like I'm off for the next six weeks, you know, wish you will like. And in the United States, US even taking the two weeks standard vacation time and taking that as a block is seen as crazy. So I'm like, is burnout something that is unique to America because of how we're because of our culture and how we're socialized.

I don't think it's certainly not unique in terms of the experience of right, there's many other countries where that, you know that happens. But I think it's unique in the extent that particularly professional workers experience burnout because of these intensive hours, compared to European nations, for example. But I think it's also unique in the utilization of burnout

as a concept to interpret people's experiences. And I think in other places the same experience of the characteristics that feeling burnt out may be more likely to be identified as exploitation, something that is structural, something that is not

at the individual level. But in the United States, because of neuroliberal norms about us being responsible for our own lives and our own work, there's more likely that we interpret the experiences of our workplace as something that is that is connected to us and call it burnout rather than exploitation. So what is what should we be thinking about when we think about work eron? Like, you know,

I know that for myself, I left traditional firms. I you know, came from a policy background, a political background, you know, left traditional nonprofits, left firm life in order to work for myself. Why did I make that decision?

Because I wanted to own my own hours, and I wanted to decide who and when and how I wanted to work right And I understood that to be the privilege of the experience that I've had, the degrees that I've had, and the ability to build a brand in a certain way that has allowed me to, you know,

so far, continue to be success full. But how is it everybody can't be an entrepreneur, nor does everybody want to be an entrepreneur, right, because that is a different type of hustle and a whole different type of burnout, you know, to be honest, But how should we be looking at work? How should we be looking at work's

role in our life? Is it just that, you know, look, it's a means to an end, which I've heard a number of my friends start to say now where I never heard them say those things before, But again this time, in this very you know, black mirror world that we're living in is having us think in different ways. So is it a means to an end is that our passion project. Do we need more hobbies so that we

create more of a balance. How should we be how should our relationship with work be growing, and how should we be engaging moving forward? Sure, there are individual solutions,

and I think there's collective solutions. So at the individual level, I think we need to see what ways we can shrink the footprint of work on our lives, regardless of if we're passionate about our work or not, just to allow ourselves to reclaim as much time as we can outside of our paid employment with the intense pressures of overwork. And for everyone, regardless of if they're in their passion or not, but especially people who are following their passion

or in their passion. As I talk about in the book, we should diversify our meaning making portfolios. By that, I mean finding places outside of work to anchor our identity and our sense of self, to protect that sense of self from the vagaries of the instability of the labor market. And that's hard. If you work a lot. That's hard. It's work to find space for that other meaning making

in our lives. It takes practice, it takes scheduling. We have to think about it and do it very explicitly, but then at more general at the kind of collective level, I think we have to really question how we talk to young adults about career decision making. So I was a passion principle evangelist I told students for this research, so like, oh, you're passion figure out the job stuff later, And that's not the way that we should be approaching

career decision making. I think we have a much more holistic way of talking to young adults about the role of work in their lives, the kinds of goals that they have, and if they say I want to spend a lot of time with my family and I don't want to be working a whole lot, how can we help them think about engaging in work that furthers those goals.

And then we also want to think about the way that we're communicating expectations to blue collar and service workers, people who are in jobs that may have very little option for the expression of passion. I think there's a sentiment where there's more more and more of an expectation of the performance of being passionate about one's job. For baristas and hotel clerks and things. If you go and you look at sort of plaquards for coffee shops and things,

they will often use the language of passion. And it's an additional burden we place onto service workers if we expect them to perform making a coffee for us as though it was their passion, as well as being nice and kind to us and performing the emotional labor that's

always been there. And then beyond that, we need to really champion the kinds of legislation and kinds of changes in our own workplaces that help reduce things like overwork, that allow for more work life balance and give access to a wider array of people to benefits and social safety nets, and things that can engagement in the labor

force less risky, less precurious in general. I have one one more question for you too, that came up as you were answering the last question, which is, so should we then be if I am a high school guidance counselor right and A and and you know my students are coming in and they're should I be tapping into how they want to feel as opposed to what they

want to do? Because what I'm hearing from you and what I what I think that the message of your book is is that it isn't just about the doing of the thing or the being passionate about the doing of the thing. It's about how do I want to feel in my life? Right? Like it? Am? I? Right? Should we be? Is it more about us tapping into that which is very different than how we work in this country, and I think how we work in general.

You know, the joke was always work as a four letter word, like all of these kinds of things, you know, should we be tapping into the feeling and then building our work around that. I think it's a two part. One is more pragmatic. One is trying to see how we can encourage them to have a wide variety of skills. So if someone is really interested in anthropology, have them get a computer science minor, for example, something that can actually be give them more options on the labor market

to help the reduce the potential for procurity. But also aligned with that sense of feeling, asking essentially what kind of human do they want to be in the world, and allowing that to be one of the guiding principles they take into account, and really making sure that we are not moralizing passion as the most valuable way to

think about career decision making. When I interviewed career counsel and coaches for the book, I was really struck by how many of them were willing to tell the people that they advise students and workers not to worry about money, that they shouldn't care so much about money, that they really should find work that aligns with their sense of

self and their sense of identity. And this is These are the professions that are given permission to give us advice, that we trust to give us advice, and if even they are not able to move outside of the trap of passion, I think it's more and more important that we think about how to do that, folks. The book is how the book is, I'm sorry, The Trouble with Passion, How searching for fulfillment at work fosters inequality by sociologists

Aaron Sik Aaron, thank you so much. This was such an illuminating conversation and one that I think that we all are finding ourselves having right in you know, at our at our brunches, at our offices, you know, on zooms, in the private chats and all of these spaces to figure out what it is that we're all doing so your book is more timely than ever. Thank you so much for making the time to join Woke. F thank you. That is it for me today. Folks on woke app

as always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.