PAIN & PASSION

May 3rd, 2019

It’s recommended that if you haven’t read or listened to Episode 6 of Tinkered Thinking that you do so before listening to this one.

“Follow your Passion” is a piece of advice that has a good intent but almost no thoughtfulness behind the shape of it’s language.  Episode 6 of Tinkered Thinking thoroughly rips this obnoxiously over-used phrase to pieces, and leaves any reader or listener with a far more practical piece of advice.

That being said, and with the full context of that Episode, there may be some good use that can be resurrected from the troublesome word Passion.

As Episode 6 explores, Passion has roots that indicate pain and suffering, and such things can be a great source of insight with regards to where and what we should focus on.

Life can accurately be defined through the lens of solving problems.  Every little annoyance and trial that emerges during the course of the day can be seen as a puzzle or problem that we can solve.

The worst of these puzzles and problems create real pain, real suffering, and they are ultimately the first problems that we should seek to solve.

These are problems that in essence,  we are already passionate about.

There’s no need to go looking for some task or career that is going to unrealistically light up our life with joy and fulfillment.  There are already things that we can actively work on.

Lack of income causing stress and making the stress of debt compound in unhealthy ways?  Boom, a problem with passion already built into it.

Annoyed with some process that could be solved with some sort of product or new process that’s easily seen in the imagination?  Boom, the experience of dealing with the absence of such a solution is a form of suffering, a kind of pain, which inherently defines our passion for any given thing.

Those high and generous sounding words follow your passion might be more appropriately reworded as

solve the annoying and painful problems in your life and you’ll feel better about your situation.

The greatest boon of following the nauseatingly overused directive in the way here outlined is that with more problems in our life effectively solved, it opens up resources both emotional and cognitive to follow the advice Episode 6 seeks to give in absence of passions followed:

with less pain and suffering in the day to day, we can then follow that fainter voice of curiosity and discover real treasures hitherto unimagined.