Practicality vs Passion – Deep Psychology

Let’s talk about the topic of practicality vs passion. Do we really have to choose one or the other in our career life?

I don’t want to just take a position and trot out scientific studies to back up my point. There is plenty of evidence to support the importance of both practicality and passion. I do have an opinion, but it’s a nuanced one.

It’s difficult to look squarely at this topic because it’s so close to our hearts. I admire your bravery in even searching for it on the internet. But if we want to live a passionate life, we must question many of our cherished assumptions and habits, and embrace change.

Ultimately, I believe that the practicality vs passion dichotomy doesn’t really exist at all. You can have a career that is both practical and passionate. In fact, I believe this is the best kind of career.

Practicality vs Passion: Addressing the Question Itself

To help me give my point of view, I want to address the problems with the practicality vs passion dichotomy.

This dichotomy suggests there are some careers that are high-earning and high-status but dull and unexciting (think doctor, lawyer, accountant, and so on) and other careers (say, dancer, teacher, sportsperson) that are exciting and linked to hobbies and interests, but low-earning and low-status, or only reserved for a lucky few.

The implication is that you must choose whether you want money and status on one hand, or passion on the other.

This perspective might seem obvious because it’s how we typically view career, and it’s what we’re fed as we go through the education system. But in reality, it rides on a host of questionable assumptions:

• Assumption 1: it’s fulfilling to use your career to earn lots of money and build social status, whether or not you’re passionate about it.
• Assumption 2: passion is of secondary importance to money.
• Assumption 3: you necessarily earn less money in a career if you’re passionate about it.
• Assumption 4: passion is frivolous and naïve.
• Assumption 5: passion and practicality must inevitably be separate.

Let me address some of these assumptions, drawing on my life experience. If we manage to successfully see through these assumptions, we may find that the original practicality vs passion dichotomy crumbles.

To begin, let’s look at whether money and success are inherently fulfilling.

Do Money and Status Guarantee Fulfillment?

We tend to reduce happiness to success, and success to money. The unspoken formula is that happiness is caused by success, and that both run in direct proportion to money. If someone earns more money than us, they’re necessarily happier. If they earn less, they’re necessarily unhappier.

I hope my stark portrayal of this assumption might help you realise how silly it is. But isn’t this exactly the assumption we make? Be very honest with yourself about how you view yourself and others based on financial means.

In my view, happiness is a complicated topic that we cannot reduce to one single dimension, let alone money.

I’ve known many people, including friends, family and acquaintances, who’ve had good salaries and important roles in their organisation. They took the “practical” route, following the most lucrative path in their respective fields. Others consider them a role model.

Yet over and over I saw that by mid life, they realised they were completely miserable in their career, and that this had infected their entire life. They suffered huge crises of meaning, and concluded that all their ladder-climbing was a waste of time, that having a high salary doesn’t mean much, and that they truly hated their jobs.

Even then, many of their family and friends still look at them in admiration, mesmerised by their impressive income. It seems they simply don’t have antennae for anything other than big numbers.

The thing is that money and possessions are easy to see and grasp hold of. It’s easy to see a fancy house, a flash car, expensive holidays, fancy clothes and big restaurant bills. They catch our attention, and together they create a squeaky-clean veneer of success and happiness. But that doesn’t mean there’s any substance behind the appearance.

We’re in a materialistic age where we all think that somehow, if we just make the next big buy, or get the nice bonus, or jump up a rung in the social ladder, we’ll finally reach the top of the mountain. This belief is built into our modern mind, and it’s very difficult to question and debunk it.

At the same time, I don’t want to be an idealist and say that money doesn’t matter at all. Anyone who has experienced financial issues will know that they can bring serious inner disturbance.

I wouldn’t ever encourage someone to follow a “passionate” career path that guaranteed poverty. In my opinion, you won’t feel much passion for anything if you struggle to get your basic needs met.

But I do encourage you to truly question this black-and-white assumption that success = happiness, and that success is directly proportional to money. If you can’t see the holes in this perspective from your own life experience, look at well-off people around you.

But I mean look: really look. Their face, their speech, their body language, their demeanour, their habits, their behaviour. Are they truly happy, joyful people?

I believe what we want in life is contentment. We each chase it through myriad forms, and we all have contrasting ideas about what contentment means. But ultimately, we’re looking for contentment, and it’s very easy to confuse the shiny externals for contentment.

Let me ask: if we wind up miserable after choosing the “practical” route, is it really practical at all? Where did all that “practicality” take us?

No Passion in Life = Depression

Let’s follow the assumption of the practicality vs passion dichotomy: that practicality precludes passion. Imagine that you’re a well-paid but thoroughly unpassionate professional who works from nine ’til five from Monday to Friday.

Assuming you don’t commute and sleep for eight hours a night, that leaves eight hours per day, most of which you’ll spend showering, cooking and organising your life. In theory, you should have five or six hours to do whatever you want.

But if you’ve worked a full-time job, you’ll know that in reality you get around two to four hours of “me time” on weekdays.

Let’s make another questionable assumption and say that you dedicate all that time to your passions. This means that the percentage of the waking time you dedicate to your passions is between 12 and 25%.

Just think about that for a moment. How can you be happy living your life that way? Would you, if given the freedom to design your life just as you wanted it, ever concoct such an arrangement?

Sure, you might spend a lot of the weekend on your passions, but much of our weekends are filled with other obligations. Besides, the thought of 35 hours of painful work starts to weigh on you once Sunday afternoon comes around. How much of your week do you really enjoy when you spend so much time on boring work?

From my own experience, and my experience with adults who maintained an unfulfilling career, I’ve found that it infects our entire life and world. We enter into a Groundhog Day arrangement, suffering our way through the week, living for the weekend, hoping for some repsite.

If you live like this, what you’re really doing is stumbling miserably through life, wishing away most of your time, and hoping that one day you can retire so you can spend your time as you please.

I don’t say that to judge, but to be direct and honest. And what difference does it make if you earn good money? You’ll still feel that misery.

In fact, this inner vacuum of meaning might even lead you to pursue a big salary: if you don’t feel satisfaction through your work, you’re obliged to pursue it through other means.

One of the dominant themes in my childhood was experiencing my parents go through the Friday climax and Sunday comedown, with the usual Sunday-night dread and complaints about the week ahead.

It’s easy to dismiss this as normal, or to hide from the painful truth of our own life, but we’re merely denying the obvious: an unpassionate life is a miserable life.

Most People Haven’t Really Tried to Live Their Passion

Another issue with this topic is that most of the people who preach practicality over passion are people who haven’t truly pursued their passion. They’re often bitter about their own life choices, so evangelise children and youngsters with the importance of “practicality”.

They tend to be rigid, narrow-minded and uncreative. They grasp on to the known and the common. They’re ignorant of the breadth of opportunities in the world.

They’ve never taken a firm decision to pursue their passion until finally it becomes their career.

In the world of professions, practical is synonymous “common”, “predictable”, “done before” or “tried and tested”. But just because a path hasn’t been well worn doesn’t mean it’s not viable. And just because a path is well-worn doesn’t mean it’s right for you.

Since I began Deep Psychology, only a handful have believed me when I’ve looked into their eyes and sincerely told them I’d one day make a living from this.

Many people have been quick to question me, arrogantly giving me all kinds of reasons why it wouldn’t work, even though they have never even run a small blog, let alone a popular website. They seemed to have my life figured out, yet have no clue about their own.

Less than four years after I started Deep Psychology, almost one thousand people visit the website every day, from all over the world, and it’s featured on some of the most prestigious sites on the internet.

The same goes for my partner, who gave up her original ambitions to be an engineer to pursue a career in design, which is her passion.

For years, even when my partner had already graduated and found a job, her mother insisted to others that she was still an engineer and would eventually work for her country’s government. She saw this design stuff as a childish foray, an insincere attempt at building a real adult career.

Less than four years into her highly impractical career, my partner is earning more than her parents have ever earned combined. She has proved her mother to be wrong, so wrong. And, most importantly, she is now living her personal purpose.

It’s understandable that people feel regretful and bitter about their humdrum working lives. And I realise that parents and family just want the best for children and relatives, and can only offer advice based on their life experience.

But that doesn’t mean they’re justified in giving unsolicited, ill-informed advice. They have no right to put the brakes on pure passion and love for life.

You Must Be Practical to Live Your Passion

People tend to view passion as frivolous and naïve, as though disconnected from the nitty-gritty realities of life. They associate passion with unserious hobbies or side projects.

In living my own passion, I’ve found that we need to be both more idealistic and more practical than the average person. Idealistic because you need to build and maintain a high-level vision, be imaginative, and dream up amazing new possibilities.

You must also be fiercely practical, because you must look at the world as it is. You can’t just dream up an ideal career without taking into account what works and what doesn’t. You must be more stark and aware than the average person.

Many people mistake their cliched ideas of a field for the field itself, taking all kinds of things for granted. To live your passion, you can’t do that.

You have to look both closer and broader at the opportunities out there. If you do, you might just discover amazing, rare gems of possibility that others overlook.

There are amazing possibilities out there, and you can only discover them by getting your hands dirty: building skills, working in the field, and following the clues. We must research, create, test and refine, research, create, test and refine. That is eminently practical, but not rigidly so.

For example, most people see blogs as fun personal diaries read by a few family and friends, not as a serious business. But in my journey with this project, I’ve read a lot about the industry and experimented with many different income sources. Ultimately, I’ve discovered that blogging can be big business, and the average person knows nothing about this possibility.

Sure, if you write about great your breakfast and your cat are, you probably won’t make any money. But if you really learn how to generate traffic and write articles about topics that people search for, you can make serious money.

With serious traffic, you can turn your blog into a full-blown business. There are no real limits to how much you can publish and how much traffic you can attract.

Finding these gems means you’re more in touch with reality than the average, “practical” person, because you’ve dug deep beyond the cliches and stereotypes and discovered what’s really possible in your field.

Practicality vs Passion: They’re Not Separate

Ultimately, what I want you to realise is that this dichotomy is fake. Sure, if you follow the beaten track and don’t seriously pursue your passion, it’ll feel that most of your life is about bringing in the money, while a small part is about doing what you love. And that is indeed regrettable, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

I know many people whose career is based on their passion. They are successful, respected professionals doing great work in the world.

They are proof that practicality vs passion isn’t really a dichotomy at all. They’re not in opposition: it’s not practicality vs passion, but practicality and passion. You don’t have to choose: you can have a career that is eminently practical, one that meets all your basic needs, and that you’re also deeply passionate about.

To learn more about how to build a career based on your passions, do read these articles:

Your Destiny: Find It and Live It
Find and Live Your Life Calling
Your Zone of Genius and Why You Must Live It
Don’t Try to Discover Your Talent

And you might like to learn about the Zone of Genius