A few weeks ago, a close friend spoke to me about a personal crisis. “I don’t even have a career,” they lamented, getting more and more worked up. This person is only 28 years old. I wouldn’t necessarily say I have a “career” either, and I’m 32.
Over the course of my entire life, I have been told, both implicitly and directly, that one of the ultimate goals in life is to “do what you love.” This has been force-fed to me through official sources such as elementary school programs urging, “If you can dream it, you can do it!” I’ve heard it said, in some form or another, from almost every authoritative adult figure in my life. It has been repeated and mantranizied (I’m making up a word, just go with it) by my peers. Facebook posts, off-the-cuff comments, and full conversations have all brought home the same ideal.
However, I’ve always had several problems with the idea that success is derived from doing what you love. First, this marginalizes the idea of being successful to one area of your life: work. Relationships, personal growth, and almost every other aspect of life are left by the wayside if you’re using this metric of what it means to be happy.
Furthermore, for many people, such as my friend I mentioned earlier, finding out what you love to do takes time, sometimes even years. “Do what you love” assumes that you already know what you love, which for many people is knowledge that comes from experience. I distinctly remember being made to choose the course of my high school curriculum while I was still in 8th grade. So, as a 14-year-old, I was expected to already know what vocation I would be pursuing as an adult. The importance of the decision was highly emphasized to us, and we made the choice in the same day — the same hour, actually — that we first heard about it, without time to think or consult with our parents or anyone else, for that matter.
Even for those rare individuals who have always been comfortable with the knowledge of what they’d like to do for work as adults, knowing what you’d like to do and being able to actually do it are two very different things. Probably my biggest grievance with the prevalence of the phrase “do what you love” is that it leaves out the reality of privilege. Not everyone is afforded the opportunity to pursue their passions, and that’s not even scratching the surface. I am nowhere near qualified enough to go into detail on this issue, but I do understand that doing what you love is not simple or even feasible for many people.
I am watching our ideas on work change as I get older, but when I was a kid, the nebulous idea of “work” seemed like the be-all and end-all of what an adult’s life was. In my late twenties, when I worked part-time but was also a stay-at-home mom, I struggled personally for years with the idea of failure. I wasn’t using my college degree, and my job was something I enjoyed, but not anything I was passionate about. Yet, I did get fulfillment from taking care of my baby. It was complicated to navigate. The idea of being “successful” was something that never really held much appeal to me, seeming as it did to equate to money almost exclusively. But during that time, I decided that the phrase “love what you do” was a much better mindset for me than “do what you love.” I found enjoyment in what started out as “just” a job because I made the active decision to change the way I looked at it.
Volunteer work, child-rearing, social relationships, romantic relationships, self-care, and personal growth all fit under the “love what you do” umbrella that I had created for myself, and working a job that wasn’t my dream didn’t feel like something I needed to feel down about. It seems to me that, while telling people to aim for the stars is all well and good, promoting being content with and celebrating non-work-related achievements is a much healthier way to be.
Coco June is a Memphian, mother, and the Flyer’s theater columnist.
