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Why Doing What You Love Can Ruin Your Life
Hard truths on self-actualization and “fitting in”.
I’ve always struggled to feel like my passion and my work were “the right thing”.
For the longest time, I thought my “passion” was supposed to be this thing that I selected from a list of options that other people had curated for me.
I took all the career tests at school, went to a million clubs, tried a million sports and hobbies, and took a bunch of personality tests. It was overkill, and I never really felt like anything “fit”.
I gave up on the idea of passion because I thought it didn’t exist. I became nihilistic and just did things because I that that was what life was — following a path until you physically can’t anymore.
However, more recently (and I don’t really know why), I’ve started to believe that your “passion” is really something that you’re meant to create.
It doesn’t exist unless you build it.
For me at least, I don’t fit comfortably into any category.
I once wrote a Quora answer about being a nerd (I’m definitely a literature nerd at this point and I am definitely a grappling nerd), and people left comments saying that I don’t “fit comfortably into the nerd category” because I have muscles or…
