Jan Jachimowicz

it becomes an imperative and a source of pressure that can make it difficult for people to actually explore how they want to go about pursuing their passion, when they might want to explore their passion.

And it implicitly denigrates other ways of finding meaning in their life.

Amy Wojcicki has this really wonderful distinction between meaning and meaningful.

work can have a meaning without in and of itself being meaningful.

I can think of my work as having a really important role in my life.

It can empower me to do other things.

It might allow me to support my family.

But in and of itself, that work might not necessarily be meaningful.

And we need to be careful, in my mind,

not to denigrate people who find that their work has meaning, but who in and of itself do not find their work to be meaningful.

Because the reality is that for many people, pursuing work that is meaningful is a luxury or something that they feel like they are not able to do at that point in time.

And I think we as a society need to embrace that that is a perfectly great justification to do what it is that we're doing.

I think we would do better by highlighting that for some people, given their life circumstances at some time points, it might actually be more meaningful if they focused on work that isn't in and of itself something that they're passionate about, but that might empower them either to pursue their passion later on in life or to pursue their passion outside of work.

which is an equally noble, or in my mind at least, an equally noble way of doing something that we deeply care about.

Absolutely.

I think part of the challenge is that when we moralize passion in that way, we also worry about how other people might think of us if we were to quit or give up on one passion pursuit.

The implication being, if I am a good person for pursuing a passion, then what must be wrong with me that I'm now giving up on that thing?

There must be something inherently morally wrong with me.

I must be a bad person

for choosing to give up on what it is that I'm passionate about.