A job we love! (Part One)

We all would like to have a job we love and we tell the same to our children, grandkids or anyone we care enough for, because the perfect match between our passions and an occupation that falls right into what we love is, for most of us, so hard to come by. And it’s precisely that reality that forces many of us into accepting all sorts of compromises and often abandon that “Dream Career” we’ve hoped for.

So a fair question is what can we do if there’s no match between what we’d love to do and the reality of another occupation that seems unable to procure us much pleasure without even mentioning “Passion”? More specifically, can we “grow” in love with an activity we loathe. 

This is probably one of the most honest tensions in adult life: the gap between the work we dream of and the work we end up doing. And it’s naming something most people feel but rarely articulate, that is the quiet grief of realizing that passion and occupation don’t always align, and the deeper question of whether love for a job can be cultivated rather than found. 

Let’s not kid ourselves, a “dream job” is incredibly rare, as matching one’s passion to that person’s occupation is uncommon, not so much because people lack passion, but because our passions are often non‑marketable, they also change over time, while jobs are shaped by economic needs, not personal dreams. 

In my case, even though I embarked in what could be termed a “Dream Career” in the ski business, my job never felt super easy and was fraught with frustration from unreasonable owners, incompetent superiors or just lack of material resources, so the “dream” often turn into a recurrent little nightmare. Finally, there are also unforeseen aspects of a dream job that can turn into horrible experiences of their own...  

Most work available to us contains repetition, constraint, and compromise, so the idea that everyone should “follow their passion” is comforting but highly misleading, if not utopia, as most of us end up building a life around imperfect work and never discovering that ideal career and this perfect fit. Tomorrow, we’ll see what can be done about it…