It makes for a nice aspirational graduation speech, but as many PhDs will attest passion doesn’t matter much if society doesn’t value your passion and you need to put food on the table.
Problem is, "Find and follow your passion" social expectation from very early in life. In reality, 1) "finding passion" early is hard; Before one turns 12, brain is not fully develop to logically understand the true likes then from 13-19 it goes thru a huge amount of hormonal, emotional and physical changes... what's left is an average 19 year old teen with I'm "not sure my major" in college, let alone the passion.... 2) "follow passion", again the twisted notion where one's work should absolutely be their passion too... otherwise it's just a "hobby" and hobbies are supposedly not helpful....
If one finds their likes early, become really good at it and if that skill pay really well... your are top 0.1% in your field.... for the rest... build a skill that lands you a job then experiment with different hobbies... when you find a hobby you really like hopefully by age 30-35... turn that hobby in to passion, you still have 30-40+ year of average lifetime remaining....
Funny, I feel like before 12 is when our brains are free of social constraints and are most free to determine what is enjoyable or not. 5 year olds certainly know what they like.
5 years old largely follow herd - thing becomes interesting the moment multiple other kids have it and cease to he interesting when other kids change interest.
They will start like things because admired adult claims to like them, they will start to hate food because adult or other kids said it is disgusting. If you praise kid during activity, they are significantly more likely to seek that activity later and if you yell at them they will hate the activity itself. Adults are much better at sorting these influences out.
You can easily manipulate pre schoolers to dislike things and while it is a bit harder to make them like things, it is still relatively easy.
I think it's a social expectation based on selection bias. i.e. I dont think many people are capable of developing passion. That's not to say the average person doesn't have interests or are uninteresting, but few people go out of their way to focus on something that is internally constructive (autodidact, hobbies, art ) as opposed to externally constructive (e.g. tv, video games, internet). Another way to put it, an artist's distraction is their art.
Im speaking from an armchair, and as someone who discovered my passion at a young age (10). Throughout the following 18 years, I rarely met people who are >= mildly obsessed over something internally constructive (granted, I didnt go to college).
It seems to me a lot of the people making a living out of art or other "commercially challenging" occupations have cultivated a passion for the business part of it as well.
I don't mean that in a cynical sense. If you view business and making money as a "necessary evil", a taint on the face of your pure artistry, then you're probably going to be miserable trying to make a living. I prefer to think about it as finding a way to create value for others through what you like to do.
The flip side though is that the business minded artists often produce the most banal work. James Patterson has made 700 million dollars over a decade from his writing and cowriting. His books dominate the shelves, but as art they barely rise to pulp status. Yet his latest novel is cowritten with ex-president Bill Clinton.
He's created value, of course. But what he does isn't art, its mass production of kitsch on an industrial scale.
Yup. And see the terrible situations is all and every vocational and artistic occupations. Competition is so fierce that almost everyone has to work basically for free and sustain themselves by doing menial job on the side. You could argue that most of them would be better finding a life occupation they're at least merely interested in instead, but providing decent living, and keeping their passion as a hobby.
(I've been a professional musician many years ago, merely scraping by from gig to gig with some piano teaching).
I can't help but wonder if a planned economy would be better, someone who said "you're good enough, pursue this we will support you economically", or said "sorry you didn't make the cut you'll have to develop a passion for something else".
Look at other planned economies. They're horrible. No single group can predict the future.
What people need to do is think like responsibly put limits on their adventures. These are grown ass men and women. They are responsible for themselves and if they choose to risk it all on a passion, they have nobody to blame, especially when the money is constantly telling to do something else.
I'm not necessarily an advocate of planned economy (or actually, economy in general; the system I'm looking for has been aptly described as "the end of economy") but what you're saying completely misses the point of what GP was trying to say.
These people are responsible for themselves, and they want to follow a passion, to pursue it, despite there not being very much money in it. The money is constantly telling them to do something else, you are correct. But do we really want a society structured around what money tells people to do? Doesn't that seem even a little dystopian? I heard the phrase a while ago: "a dystopia without a despot".
You say that they have nobody to blame - but that's exactly what's wrong. Why should they have to blame themselves for following their scientific, artistic, philosophical or religious passions? Should they have to "choose to risk it all"? These are the questions that need answering, because I'm not convinced that people need to be considering artistic passions as a risk at all.
I don't think there's a solution to this problem so long as the market decides whether your passion is worthy of you being allowed to survive or not.
Money is societies way of telling people what they want. A person need not serve society, and society need not always be rational. However just with personal transactions if you want something you have to give something in return.
A person can eschew the pursuit of money but aside from basic support I don't think society needs to reward them for expressly disavowing its desires.
But there is already a group of people with a bias holding the purse strings. Their bias is towards profitability in every single undertaking they support. If they were replaced with planners - and let's leave aside the question of whether this is practically achievable - we could dispense with that bias. The planners would have their own biases, of course, but it is not clear to me that their biases are worse than the current ones. I suspect they might be better.
You seem to be using the phrase "no skin in the game" to mean "no exposure to financial risk". I would argue for a more expansive definition. A planner, as a member of society, does have skin in the game, as they have in interest in the overall proper functioning of that society and the happiness of its members.
And by "work out" you seem to mean "generate a desired level of financial return". I'm sure you can see how once you free yourself from that definition, the range of things it might seem worthwhile taking a punt on grows much larger. If Johnny wants to spend his life building pasta looms for preparing elaborate lasagnes, the potential upside is probably not very apparent, but the downside is small too and can be justified as an investment in making the society a more interesting place where people can pursue their niche interests.
I completely disagree with this idea, but down-voting it is kinda lame. A little more openness to different ideas would be a good thing here (and everywhere).
Not at all, because you have to justify the financial upside of your venture and then the investors decide if the return they expect fits within the parameters they have already agreed on for managing their portfolio.
It is more akin to applying for a grant or residency as an artist or for research funding as a scientist. You still have to argue why there is some upside to the work you intend to undertake, but the upside may not be in the form of profit for the investor.
This might start well, but what happens when the environment changes? Maybe that musicians music doesn't pan out, maybe we thought bread would be a more popular export so we have too many bakers. Are we going to jerk people around to follow the command economy, or are we going to simply get outcompeted by capitalism in the global market place?
In my highly subjective view artists are expecting to get paid for something that most of us have the capability to participate in with reasonable results given a similar investment of effort; in other words, most artists differ from the general population not in artistic aptitude, but rather in the desire to be an artist. I would love to sit around and play with ideas for a living, but it doesn't pay the bills in my occupation.
Relatively speaking, the majority of people have the capability to do almost anything. It's only a matter of time and resources.
Natural abilities and genetics can accelerate the learning process, yes, but accelerated mastery is really only an advantage if you're trying to master as many things as possible within your lifespan, or you're working under some other deadline.
What I'm saying here is that artists can probably develop software just as well as anyone else here if they're willing to put in the time and resources.
This has been personally true for me; I began my career as an artist. I've known a few others to do similarly. Most of the people who do coding schools come from other backgrounds, and you can say what you want about coding school grads, but I've met very few who I felt could not become good programmers someday. As you say, some people have a longer, harder path than others, but at the end of the day, the brain is pretty plastic.
Here's where we perhaps differ - I don't think most art being made today passes the test of requiring skills that take significant time to develop. A load of bricks on the floor? A woman knitting using wool pulled from her vagina and dyed with her menstrual blood? When art is purely about crazy ideas then I don't think artists have any special monopoly. If we were talking about the type of artist that has honed their skills over thousands of hours of painting, for example, I would agree that significant investment of time develops tangible skills, but this type of approach is hugely unfashionable I believe, with practitioners viewed scornfully as technicians rather than 'proper' artists.
The scorn of traditional art from conceptual art even spawned a reactionary traditionalist movement, the Stuckists.
As I understand their argument, you're supposed to choose something that can put food on the table, then work really hard at it. Once you're really good at it, you'll be passionate about it.
This is in contrast to the idea that there is something out there that you'll love doing all the time. That's a terrible idea, because you'll always hit rough spots and have to do a lot of things you hate, leading to frustration.
Which is where ability to develop passion or find it at difference places becomes great. You can find passion to something else, something that you can live on.
What happened with the tech industry is that venture capitalists generated so much hype around tech startups that it attracted a huge amount of people who were only passionate about money. Thanks to their fake smiles, polished looks, well tuned voices and flashy, well-rehearsed pitches, these people were more successful in the industry (on average) than people who were actually passionate about the actual technology.
Passionate people were essentially forced to work for the snake oil salesmen whose only passions in life are money and self-aggrandizement.
I think this process also works in successful companies, to their detriment. Google, for example, is wildly successful and people who work their make a lot of money, so it attracts people whose main motivation is to make a lot of money (personally).
That's why I studied Computer Science instead of 'Game Design' in college. I've been designing and making games for most of my life in some form or another (currently board and card games, previously video games) in my spare time, and spent some time in the video game industry, but I got burned out after 4 years and then was able to get a much higher paying job by going back to the corporate world.
The coding problems I solve while coding feels similar (wrestling file formats and external frameworks, optimizing bottlenecks, automating routine processes, recording various data about users and what they do in the system, and debugging hairy multithreaded procedures exists in both industries), and overtime is much less common.
But even though what I work on now gets used by major corporations and assist hundreds of thousands of people, it's hard for me to feel passionate about complex Insurance Policy objects or setting up phone systems so people can get annoyed when a robotic voice is programmed to ignore them as they jab the 0 key or say "customer service" sixteen times because they want to skip the automated process and talk to a human.
And corporate development has its own share of problems, things that are completely out of your control often times, because the directives come down from on high.
And despite there being hundreds of different industries I could work for as a software developer, I imagine I'll still encounter a lot of the same frustrations, just with the veneer of a new problem domain. Past experience shows that learning that new problem domain will carry me and keep me interested in the job for the first year, but after that starts to fade. I suppose I could hop from job to job, but I'm getting older and getting more tied down (i.e. I just bought a house, planning a wedding right now, etc.)
So what do you do when you get burned out by your exit plan?
You may want to consider contract work, where you can work on projects in multiple industries. If you get bored with a project, you just need to ride it out for a few months until something fresh comes along. Gaps between work are a great time to recharge. Of course, contracting comes with downsides like having to deal with crappy expensive health insurance, assuming you are in the US.
If one finds their likes early, become really good at it and if that skill pay really well... your are top 0.1% in your field.... for the rest... build a skill that lands you a job then experiment with different hobbies... when you find a hobby you really like hopefully by age 30-35... turn that hobby in to passion, you still have 30-40+ year of average lifetime remaining....