Do We Really Need to Find Our Passion?
Which troubles are we willing to bear gladly?
In late capitalism, passion is usually described as something that brings us freedom, as though a person who finds their "true passion" will break free of their chains and begin living in endless prosperity. But isn't passion, in truth, a feeling that enslaves rather than frees us? Epictetus opened his Enchiridion with exactly this distinction: some things are within our power, our judgments, our responses, the meaning we assign to what happens to us, and some things are not, wealth, reputation, and whatever passion is supposed to deliver. Freedom, in his account, was never the satisfaction of desire, since desire depends on the world cooperating, which it rarely does. It was the correct use of what actually belongs to us. Passion promises freedom through getting what it wants: prosperity, recognition, an escape from constraint. That was never something passion had the power to guarantee. The freedom actually available to us was never the one passion was promising in the first place. Perhaps what we need, rather than passion, is a space of value and freedom in which we can labor without burning out. This is so because producing or creating is not always a pleasurable process. Quite the opposite: it often involves a kind of horror. To keep going despite this horror, we need to find a harmony with our own being.
What does it mean to be in harmony with our own being?
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