The case against Passion

"Follow your dreams" is terrible advice past a certain age

My life story is best told through a series of passions:

Dropping out of university to build apps, quitting every 9–5 job no more than eighteen months in, and building Standard Notes, a single product which, to my eternal surprise, I managed to stick with for eight years.

The death blow to any endeavor was always the same: I began to feel a certain kind of pain. A restlessness. A sense that this wasn’t the true thing I should be doing. What began as an adrenaline-crazed frenzy of productivity and excitement fizzled into something with about as much excitement as a cup of lukewarm black tea.

The emblem of the culture of my youth was Steve Jobs’s Stanford commencement address: you can’t connect the dots looking forward, only backward. Trust the journey. Trust what is in store for you.

A tale as old as modern time, oozing out of every Hollywood script and Pixar movie.

And yet, it did seem true for me. I describe it as a “pain function”—subjective circumstances that reproducibly cause discomfort. Discomfort that you are compelled to evict yourself from at all costs. Each of us has a slightly different pain function, but it decides our course of action.

Back then, I didn’t call it a pain function.

I called it fate. Whispers of destiny.

I see now it is nothing more than an unreliable evolutionary device.

A trick to get you moving.

Take monogamy, for example: