As a thirty-something year old who is more than a decade into a tech career I love, I found myself noticing a growing gap in life outside of work, a gap where passion should live.
Not for lack of trying. Over the years, I’ve tried to be passionate about many things with varying levels of success. From gymnastics as a child, to collecting semi-precious stones, drawing, writing, photography, travelling, lifting weights, and living on the ocean.
Some of these things were short lived, others occupied several years of my spare time, and some of them I’m still doing.
If I’m truly honest with myself about where the desire to follow any of these passions came from it would be one or more of the following:
Genuine curiosity
To prove to myself that I am worthy
To virtue signal to others that I am worthy.
I’d like to say genuine curiosity featured in all of my experiments, but a great deal of this curiosity was clouded with doubt.
I’m not so sure you can truly be passionate about something when your reasoning is entangled with a need to prove one’s self-worth. As I slowly discovered, following a passion to impress others is not a road to fulfilment, nor does it allow you to be your true self.
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