From Interest to Income obsession: Turning Every Passion into a Job

No matter what I do, I want to do it as a career.

Read a non-fiction book, then all of a sudden I fantasise about writing my own. Watch a YouTube video, and before I know it I've started planning ideas for a YouTube channel. See someone taking a photo, I start researching camera equipment to become a photographer. Read a fiction book, come up with a book idea to write one myself.

Success of enjoyment

Why is it that if I do something, I think to myself I should try that as well and see if I can be successful at it, instead of enjoying the activity as is?

Why do I always want to start a side hustle, a new career? Learn something new again and again? Not mastering what it is, I start planning a way to master it?

Productivity over passion

Why does productivity and planning get in the way of pleasure, relaxation, and being in the moment?

Is it because money is scarce, or is it because we are bored and want variety, change, and a challenge? Because I know deep down that no matter what I choose to do, it will eventually become another job, and the excitement and novelty will wane and turn into just monotonous repetition.

But I still lie to myself and dream about being a one-hit wonder.

Legacy is a fallacy

But if we think back to the time of the Egyptians, how many people are remembered in history? Just the Pharaohs and a minor few out of the billions that have lived during that time. And which writers, poets, painters, bakers, or accountants have survived the history of time from that era?

Knowing this to justify learning a new skill to build a legacy is fruitless.

Why do we do this? Is life so hard that we dream of having a second job or another source of income jus to get by, or is it just novelty, or is the dream all we want, and planning out that dream just makes it last longer?

Are we lying to ourselves, or are we just bored?

No matter what activity I do, I seem to always want to turn it into a career. Why can’t I be satisfied with my job, with my boring mundane life? What is a legacy anyway after 100-1,000 years, to strangers I have never met? Is my ego so fragile I need strangers in 100 years to say my name? This can’t be it.

I want to turn everything I do into a job because that is how I was raised: "You're good at that, you should open a shop, you should sell those, you should become that, do that, make a living off that." This is what I always heard when I was growing up: make money doing something your good at in the eyes of others, not for the pleasure but for the financial reward.

We are a product of our environment

That is how I was raised and how I judged something's worth.

So naturally, if I like something now, I need to make money doing it; otherwise, it’s meaningless, worthless, and pointless according to my childhood. We are a shadow and echo of the environment we grew up in, that is clear to me now.

I just wonder if you're the same, and if so, what would you be like if money or status weren’t the goal but rather happiness and contentment in our lives and careers? I would like to believe the world and everyone in it would be in a better place.