The first recession I remember was in 1981.  I was still a child and did not understand why the adults were so despondent but even I could see that it was bad.  One of the few things I remember from that time was my mother and father telling me that when I grow up I should do something I love.  Looking back a few decades later I noticed the advice is always the same when the economy is in the dump.  “Do what you love.”  So I was not surprised when I came across this story on CNN.com.

My response to this (having seen it one too many times now):  What a load of crap!

Doing what you love is a stunningly bad idea for one very simple reason:  You won’t love it for long when it becomes the primary means of meeting your financial obligations.

I understand why this old chestnut gets rolled out when the economy is bad.  If one is going to work hard for little money one might as well enjoy the activity.  The problem of course is that this advice ignores one fundamental lesson of economics… Economies are not down forever.  Eventually the economy will pick back up, GDP will rise and demand for whatever your love is will increase.  Shortly thereafter there will come a day when you realize that you actually cannot stand doing this.  “Sure I loved it when I started but now it has become my life and I have no time for anything else,” is a nice distillation of the common refrains of those who fell into this trap.  The trap is that one aspect of a beloved activity is that it happens on your terms.  You decide when you want to tend to your bonsai trees, paint that bowl of fruit, work on your novel, help the orphans, save the planet or help the troops.  When you do it as profession you have to accommodate its schedule.  Not feeling up to tending the trees?  Tough you have 3 orders to fill.  Those orphans?  Well now there are dozens of them who are assigned to you.  The rigor of a profession can wear on you quickly if you entered from the standpoint of “doing what you love”.

The ideal is finding a profession with which you have an intense love/hate relationship.  You need to be able to allow yourself to take a “whether” day (“I’m not coming in whether you like it or not”).  If your love for that still-life won’t allow you to just leave it and take a break, you will burn out and you will grow to hate the activity you once so loved.  This may seem to be a semantic difference but I have known (or heard about) many people who have found themselves in a career that they were sure they would love (they loved it when they were doing something else) only find the day-to-day grind of the job was crushing.  Do not get me wrong, people can start out loving something but they will eventually have to transition to a more nuanced appreciation of it.  Some activities are more amenable to this than others.  Some activities are well suited to reaching this quickly.  Science is a prime example.  Most enter with a love of science but the frustrations, pains and maddening nature of it force a quick transition (in fact well before a person becomes a professional).  Teacher and social worker seem to reside on the other extreme, hence the high burnout rate.