Should Your Passion Cost Your Livelihood?
On Passion, Paychecks, and the Loop I Can't Escape
Everyone wants to pursue their passion, but should your passion cost your livelihood?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the course of this year, through the frustrating and extremely unpredictable and frustrating process of trying to secure a full-time 9-5, and live out the natural next step of the ‘post-grad’ life.
Ironically, my struggle to find a traditional nine-to-five pushed me into part-time work, which gave me more time than I expected to return to the things I had been quietly circling for years: writing and research.
I’ve read countless of essays here on Substack of people sharing the reason why they never pursued their passions for years, pushing things aside and settling for ‘stable’ jobs that pay the bills.
But why does your calling always end up calling?
This question came out of an argument with a friend. And yes, I mean a real, heated, back-and-forth argument. She believes passion should not be a prerequisite for choosing a career. In her view, work does not have to be the place where your soul comes alive. It can simply be the thing that gives you stability, income, and financial freedom, while your passions live somewhere else: after hours, on weekends, in your free time.
Whenever we have this argument, I always point out: How can you pass the days and work a 9 to 5 that you are not 100% passionate about? How can you spend a third of your life doing that does not excite you, push you, or make you feel alive? To me, the idea always felt impossible.
A soul-sucking nine-to-five, or a life shaped by the hours that make you feel alive?
But the more I sat with it, the more I realized the real question was not whether passion matters. The real question was whether we can make space for it.
This question has been gnawing at me for so long. Because I’ve reflected. I’ve sat with this concept. I realize that the reason I never really picked up writing was because I was so afraid I would fail. And my fear that pursing my passion was dangerous. If I could just tamp it down, focus on ‘serious’ things, I could achieve the stability and the life I so desperately wanted.
And of course, a steady paycheck is a necessity in our current economy. It is proof that something works. It pays rent, it buys groceries, it allows you to live. It creates safety and stability. And as humans, we are wired to chase safety, especially when the alternative is uncertainty.
Passion, on the other hand, can feel unstable and demanding. It can ask a life with no guarantee and a lot of up front sacrifice. It can ask you to walk toward a life you cannot fully predict. But uncertainty is exactly the point.
Maybe passion feels dangerous to us because it asks us to imagine possibilities that are intangible to the one we’re currently occupying.
The irony is, even when in the times I was supposed to do ‘serious’ work and searching, I kept watching videos on how to build my publication page on Substack, writing titles of articles in my notes app, making designs for my headers in Canva, procrastinating all my ‘serious’ commitments.
Suddenly the ‘hobby’ that I rarely gave mind to quickly transformed into a side project that I looked forward to everyday.
Out of no-where, I was filled with so much creative energy, writing when I took work breaks, thinking of article titles in my dreams, reading other articles and feeling the ‘ding!’ of a lightbulb in my own brain, and brainstorming all the possible ways I could thread ideas into my new pieces.
Passion doesn’t negotiate. You can delay it, dismiss it, tamp it down, bury it under spreadsheets and job applications and ‘responsible’ decisions, but it will always be there, quietly beating under the surface.
In the videos you procrastinate with. In the notes app at 1am. In the titles you brainstorm before you drift to sleep.
And here’s the invaluable conclusion I’ve come to: giving your passions breathing room doesn't make you less productive. It does the opposite.
The creative energy doesn't stay contained to your "passion project" it blooms into everything you do.
You think sharper, you work faster, you show up differently to your friends and family, you feel happier, you have more energy, and guess what?
You exude more passion.
And to be fair, my friend isn’t entirely wrong (as much as it hurts me to admit). Financial freedom and stability from a 9-5 (that’s not necessarily your life’s work), can still create space for a ‘riskier’ passion.
But that logic only holds if you actually use that freedom. Most people don’t know how to. They keep waiting for the right time, the right circumstances, the right level of stability. And in the waiting, you might just lose some of your light.
You don’t have to blow up your life for your passion. But you do have to give it a shot, even if it’s just for yourself. Because the alternative isn’t strictly stability we’re always promised. It can manifest into a slow, quiet burnout that takes everything with it. The job. The creativity. The version of yourself you hope you’ll become.
Your calling will keep calling. The only question is how long you make it wait.
Having a job you don’t like will drain the life out of you. Passion is needed to keep you going and give you motivation to get through your day. As someone who’s seen you write stories ever since you were a kid, it’s good to see your creativity has lead you to substack where you are speaking about important political issues.
If only passion could sustain life without having to hold an economically extractable full time position. If we had community instead of isolationism and profit driven economy we could all create and instead of extract. Alas - we live in what we live in, and we pursue our passions when we can - for me that often means late into the night!