Passion overload: Is everyone really that excited about everything?

Sometimes, writing this column can be a bit of a pain: none of my family members have done anything I can mine for content, or there is a subject I’d like to tackle but can’t figure out what I want to say about it. Or I have a dull sense of what it is I want to say but can’t find the right words.

But this is in a minority of cases. Most of the time it goes fine and I enjoy putting it together. I greatly enjoy writing this column. I like the fact that I have a column at all.

However, I’m not passionate about it.

I’m not passionate about anything. I’m not dead inside. I have, I like to think, a full range of emotions. I react to other people and the world around me. It’s just that word: passionate. According to dictionary.com, it means “compelled by, or ruled by intense emotion or strong feeling”, which is pretty much what I always understood it to mean. To experience that on a daily basis would be exhausting and unsustainable. You’d end up with a serious drink problem.

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Passion overload: Is everyone really that excited about everything?

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Or it could be that there’s something lacking in my psychological make-up, because all around me, every day, everyone is combusting with passion. There’s no corner of human existence that an individual or company isn’t passionate about. They’re passionate about plumbing solutions, about mushrooms and baking and glassware, about managing opportunities that drive shareholder value, about customer service, about erectile dysfunction and sea swimming. These are all real examples. They weren’t difficult to find.

Passion has become so ubiquitous we might have to start spraying the country with Xanax, just to calm everyone down.

Or, it could be that this is yet another example of a perfectly serviceable word transformed in an empty buzz-term. (“Awesome” was subjected to similar linguistic abuse.) Yet it seems to be de rigueur on social media bios: “passionate about gut health”. Are you compelled by a desire for probiotics? Are you driven to fury by heartburn and belching? “Passionate about insurance.” Does filling out forms provoke intense emotions?

[ The ‘passionate worker’ is an annoyingly resilient delusion ]

The use of the word “passionate” tells you two things: (1) A person is trying to sell you a product, or an idea, or themselves. (2) They’re lazy about their use of language.

Of course, the meanings of words adjust all the time. Passion originally meant suffering – Christ’s Passion would mean something very strange in the modern iteration – and that’s part of the natural evolution of language. I’m all for that. But the dawn of the passion-industrial complex has brought with it a sort of tyranny, especially for young people.

In job interviews, it is apparently pretty standard to be asked: “What are you passionate about?” forcing the interviewee to conjure up a faux-enthusiasm and somehow link that to the exciting world of hardware retailing. And even before that life stage, when kids are still trying to figure out what to do with themselves, the advice they invariably receive is to follow their passion: as if, with enough navel-gazing, they will discover the one – but only one – interest that will define them for the rest of their lives.

That might work for a minority. But for most, such all-consuming interests might not arrive until decades later. Or not at all. Because humans are complex. “Find your passion” attempts to reduce that complexity to one thing: a unit of production.

If you were of a conspiratorial mindset, you might start to suspect that the modern re-engineering of the word “passion” was more deliberate than organic. Increasingly, young people are expected to intern for free, to accept insecure working conditions and poor pay. Even the mention of such grubby concerns as fair remuneration is presented as the greatest moral failing: a lack of passion.

But that’s just me. If I were a bit more passionate, I might not be so cynical.