The Birth of the Passion Hypothesis

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when our society began emphasizing the importance of following your passion, but a good approximation is the 1970 publication of What Color Is Your Parachute? The author, Richard Bolles, was working at the time for the Episcopal Church advising campus ministers, many of whom were in danger of losing their jobs. He published the first edition of Parachute as a straightforward collection of tips for those facing career change. The original print run was one hundred copies.

The premise of Bolles’s guide sounds self-evident to the modern ear: “[Figure] out what you like to do… and then find a place that needs people like you.” But in 1970, this was a radical notion. “[At the time,] the idea of doing a lot of pen-and-paper exercises in order to take control of your own career was regarded as a dilettante’s exercise,” Bolles recalls¹. The optimism of this message, however, caught on: You can control what you do with your life, so why not pursue what you love? There are now more than six million copies of Bolles’s book in print.

The decades since the publication of Bolles’s book can be understood as a period of increasing dedication to the passion hypothesis. You can visualize this shift by using Google’s Ngram Viewer². This tool allows you to search Google’s vast corpus of digitized books to see how often selected phrases turn up in published writing over time. If you enter “follow your passion,” you see a spike in usage right at 1970 (the year when Bolles’s book was published), followed by a relatively steady high usage until 1990, at which point the graph curve swings upward. By 2000, the phrase “follow your passion” was showing up in print three times more often than in the seventies and eighties.

Parachute, in other words, helped introduce the baby boom generation to this passion-centric take on career, a lesson they have now passed down to their children, the echo boom generation, which has since raised the bar on passion obsession. This young generation has “high expectations for work,” explains psychologist Jeffrey Arnett, an expert on the mindset of the modern postgrad. “They expect work to be not just a job but an adventure[,]… a venue for self-development and self-expression[,]… and something that provides a satisfying fit with their assessment of their talents.”³

Even if you accept my argument that the passion hypothesis is flawed, it’s at this point that you might respond, “Who cares!” If the passion hypothesis can encourage even a small number of people to leave a bad job or to experiment with their career, you might argue, then it has provided a service. The fact that this occupational fairy tale has spread so far should not cause concern.

I disagree. The more I studied the issue, the more I noticed that the passion hypothesis convinces people that somewhere there’s a magic “right” job waiting for them, and that if they find it, they’ll immediately recognize that this is the work they were meant to do. The problem, of course, is when they fail to find this certainty, bad things follow, such as chronic job-hopping and crippling self-doubt.

We can see this effect in the statistics. As I just established, the last several decades are marked by an increasing commitment to Bolles’s contagious idea. And yet, for all of this increased focus on following our passion and holding out for work we love, we aren’t getting any happier. The 2010 Conference Board survey of U.S. job satisfaction found that only 45 percent of Americans describe themselves as satisfied with their jobs. This number has been steadily decreasing from the mark of 61 percent recorded in 1987, the first year of the survey. As Lynn Franco, the director of the Board’s Consumer Research Center notes, this is not just about a bad business cycle: “Through both economic boom and bust during the past two decades, our job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downward trend.” Among young people, the group perhaps most concerned with the role of work in their lives, 64 percent now say that they’re actively unhappy in their jobs. This is the highest level of dissatisfaction ever measured for any age group over the full two-decade history of the survey⁴. In other words, our generation-spanning experiment with passion-centric career planning can be deemed a failure: The more we focused on loving what we do, the less we ended up loving it.

These statistics, of course, are not clear-cut, as other factors play a role in declining workplace happiness. To develop a more visceral understanding of this unease, we can turn to anecdotal sources. Consider Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner’s 2001 ode to youth disaffection, Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties. This book chronicles the personal testimony of dozens of unhappy twentysomethings who feel adrift in the world of work. Take, for example, the tale of Scott, a twenty-seven-year-old from Washington, D.C.

“My professional situation now couldn’t be more perfect,” Scott reports. “I chose to pursue the career I knew in my heart I was passionate about: politics…. I love my office, my friends… even my boss.” The glamorous promises of the passion hypothesis, however, led Scott to question whether his perfect job was perfect enough. “It’s not fulfilling,” he worries when reflecting on the fact that his job, like all jobs, includes difficult responsibilities. He has since restarted his search for his life’s work. “I’ve committed myself to exploring other options that interest me,” Scott says. “But I’m having a hard time actually thinking of a career that sounds appealing.”

“I graduated college wanting nothing more than the ultimate job for me,” says Jill, another young person profiled in Quarterlife Crisis. Not surprisingly, everything Jill tried failed to meet this high mark.

“I’m so lost about what I want to do,” despairs twenty-five-year-old Elaine, “that I don’t even realize what I’m sacrificing.”⁵

And so on. These stories, which are increasingly common at all ages, from college students to the middle-aged, all point toward the same conclusion: The passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also dangerous. Telling someone to “follow their passion” is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.