Last time, I attempted to give that controversial advice – to follow your passion – the benefit of the doubt by showing that its origin might just be the result of plenty more factors than laziness or pickiness on the part of Millennials. In the next few posts, I’ll pelt the idea with common objections, take a few swings at it on my account, and then see if there are any gems hiding inside or if it’s all just fluff.
OBJECTION #1: It obviously isn’t working, just look at these charts.
There’s a sneaky statistic going around that points out that job satisfaction has gone down even as the advice to follow one’s passion has blown up. I heard it first in Cal Newport’s TED talk. He’s got some good points but the problem with the charts are that they don’t provide quite enough information. Actually, the problem is that it’s a correlation, not a causation. Science people would be disappointed. People with glasses might make more money on average than non-glasses wearers but that doesn’t mean glasses are the secret to a pay raise… though it’s worth a try. In this textbook case (literally, my college textbook) accumulated years working is the secret; older people tend to have glasses.
For instance, are those charts saying that people who are following their passion report being dissatisfied with their passion-jobs or that people who are not following their passion – but only know the concept – report being dissatisfied? I’ve dug around a bit but haven’t yet been able to uncover the life circumstances of those surveyed by Conference Board. So if you happen to know… But I suspect that it was a spectrum reflecting US demographics and not one asking if people were actively following their passions.
In any case, it certainly makes it sound like workers these days are dreaming of other jobs. It is true that in one survey a particular, obviously spoiled, generation did score high in valuing an interest in their work, fun, creativity, and compensation. You can probably guess which gen that was… yep, the Baby Boomers. Just wait until real life hits that young idealistic bunch.¹
Also not noted in the first chart is how many instances of “follow your passion” were actually the longer phrase, “do not follow your passion” – or worse, about other types of passion.²
But after seeing those charts what I really began wondering about were other factors – other things that happened around the same time that may’ve influenced the surveyed employees. I never actually had a history class that covered the 1980s. We hardly had enough time to find out who won WWII. So just in case you’re in the same plight, the Allies won. Had they not, I’m pretty confident we wouldn’t be having this debate. Otherwise, back to the 1980s. It might be painful thinking about those haircuts and the fashions that we were tricked into wearing, but we must find out the truth.
So, could it be that many jobs since the 1980s (when follow your passion graduated from Disney films to actual career advice) have just gotten more depressingly tedious, i.e. soul-sucking?
As a side note, when did “soul-sucking job” become a term? I suspect it was around the 1980s. If so, it had good company. Guess what else took off in the 1980s? …the dreaded cubicle, eater of body and soul. No doubt it was the stress caused by the cubicle culture that directly resulted in giant triangle hair, perms, and felty cocoon coats. I suspect that ladies were hoping to cocoon themselves within their cubicles and wait until things got better. The hair was merely camouflage to meant to imitate those fake office plants.
But I’m only using the cubicle as the mascot of a major change in American jobs (maybe first-world jobs?). Suspicious indeed. You can read more about the unexpected history of cubicles here.
It was a time when mergers, buyouts, and layoffs became commonplace. The Population Bulletin notes the tiny changes that occurred during this time:
As the U.S. population nearly doubled between 1950 and 2000, the labor force has also grown, from 62 million in 1950 to 149 million in 2005. Wages and benefits have increased, and occupations continue to shift from mostly farming and manufacturing work to white-collar jobs. Changes in population composition and labor force participation rates have also resulted in a workforce that includes more older Americans, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and people born outside of the United States.”
Beginning in the 1970s, income disparities began to widen.” (cbpp.org)
From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, growth in one measure [goods sold] nearly mirrored the growth in the other [employee pay]. But since the early 1970s, the two measures have split severely. Productivity has continued to grow, but wages of most workers have stagnated when controlled for inflation. (cnn.com)
And Baby Boomers – you know, those Woodstock people who lit up everything from Berkley to joints – i.e. our managers began to turn 40 right when the term “Mid-life crisis” began to catch on.³
Computers and wordprocessors became more widespread which for many people meant desks, data-entry, and number crunching. The internet began. And finally, the internet began. The world at your finger tips and you’re viewing it through a tiny glowing box that hurts your eyes [4].
In short, not only did a small amount of things happen to employment during the 1980s, lots and lots happened. Jobs began to change dramatically. It was the biggest change in work since the Industrial Revolution, which is why we can google “jobs that didn’t exist 5 years ago” and become envious.
After looking at all these factors, it might well be asked whether it was the advice to follow one’s passion that provoked job dissatisfaction or whether job dissatisfaction provoked the advice.
And there are other factors too that might make people answer the same questions in entirely different ways. It’s the same type of factor which plays into the age old question, is the glass half empty, half full, or just bigger than it needs to be? Paradigm. Is it possible that past generations tended to view their work differently? For example, those with the old Protestant Work Ethic tended to view their work through Heaven’s eyes (“Do all for the glory of God” and “As unto the Lord and not to men”) and so granted even mundane tasks some basic meaningfulness because their view was on something larger than themselves.
Something that’s meaningful for one person may be inconsequential for another, however. What makes work worthwhile to you probably depends on your culture, your socioeconomic status and how you were taught to see the world, according to Pratt. An academic might find value in scholarship, for instance. “But a firefighter might look at an academic and ask, ‘Are you helping people on a daily basis? If not, it’s not worthwhile work at all.’” (apa.org)
This same article noted that one study – which observed zookeepers instead of zoo animals – found that zookeepers reported being very satisfied with their jobs despite grungy jobs and low pay. They felt it was meaningful (and probably cool to get that close to tigers).
So, what are people taught to value these days? Besides their own voice, authenticity, victim-status, and inner-hero? I’d say a grab bag of values centering around words like “peace and love.” I don’t really blame Millennials for bringing this about – only for believing it. After all, the people they grew up watching on TV and listening to in class or around the dinner table weren’t Millennials.
Just one more point. I was going to say that since people are less happy in general (despite having generally more money), it would make sense that work satisfaction would be lower as well. I would allow that an unhappy life could be blamed for unhappy work. But the study that I found said that Americans were less happy than 30 years ago… and they blamed longer working hours. They also blamed fracturing social relationships – which I plan to say a lot about at a later time.
No doubt wealth, shifting cultural values, and the abundance of choice (see last post) played in too but my point was aimed at the changing nature of work itself.
So that’s that. After looking at charts and Dilbert comics for several hours, it seems more complicated than one bit of advice. I don’t doubt that the advice to follow your passion has permeated our culture and had major effects. I’m just not convinced that it’s to blame for folks being dissatisfied or that job dissatisfaction proves that following your passion isn’t working.
Not to shatter all my hard work, but at the end of doing all this research, I found another – shocking – set of stats that claim an overall job satisfaction rate of 88%. Go figure.
Oh, and you know that chart which showed job satisfaction going over a waterfall? I found the rest of the chart under an article entitled, “Job Satisfaction Continues to Rise.” I know, right? But to be fair, the articles that I’d found on dissatisfaction were from 2010. In 2011, American job satisfaction finally began to bob back up again since its dip during the 2008 recession. The Conference Board points to increases in wages and stability… but we all know the real reason: It was because the term “Lifestyle Design” had been coined in 2007 by Tim Ferris and its frequency in books skyrocketed.
Next time… more objections.
Footnotes:
- This survey makes my peers look far more responsible than they’re pretending to be…I wonder if it can be trusted?
- I tried adjusting Google Ngram to find out but with so many possible ways to make the phrase negative, I couldn’t get helpful results.
- Coined in ’65; popularized in ’75; http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/17/us/elliott-jaques-86-scientist-who-coined-midlife-crisis.html
- This isn’t to say that factory workers don’t envy office workers. It sure seems nicer from behind the smudgy factory windows. But then, I’ve known office workers who wish they had some mindless work to do with their hands. Both have been known to jump out of windows.