>I do think "do what you love" and its cousin "shoot for the stars" get a lot of people in trouble.
Are you implying your sister was doing what she loved and it got her in trouble? Because the opposite comes to mind when I read stories like this, that perhaps people feel driven to follow the path they feel they are "supposed" to and are worse off for it.
I'm genuinely curious about your perspective but I hope it goes without saying that you don't need to respond if it's too painful.
If you're told "do what you love" doing something you don't love is failure. But most people don't love work. That's why it's called fucking "work". If you're very ambitious, you do love work, because fulfilling your ambition makes up for, you know, working. If you are neither ambitious nor conscientious, you dismiss "love what you do" for bullshit and get on with your life.
If you are conscientious, but not ambitious - that's the dangerous combination. You can't bring yourself to dismiss people's expectations, so you blame yourself.
So, yeah. Maybe I'm full of shit. Maybe I'm just making up a narcissistic story where she wouldn't have killed herself if she were more of an amoral slacker, like me.
But I just wish there were more of a sense of permission to just shrug, say "it's a living" and live your life.
I wonder if this is worse in the US where Americans find so much identity in their jobs. Regardless, as you said, people need room to just “make a living” and find purpose (and hopefully contentment) outside of one's work if we can’t all be following our passion (if we’re lucky enough to have even found our passion)
Personally, "doing" in all its myriad forms isn't something I'm really capable of "loving." Similarly, "dreams" are more of a crushing anxiety-burden than a source of joy.
I think about this a lot because my younger sister, whose personality was similar to mine, but with more conscientiousness thrown in, took her own life in 2014, while enrolled in a top-14 law school and after graduating from Stanford. I get a lot of the mental-illness platitudes re: that, amounting to the idea that if only society had done a better job of ensuring that she got herself to the brain-mechanic and providing better brain-mechanics she'd be a high-achieving lawyer, passionate about the causes she's representing, today.
I wonder, though. She was not ambitious as a kid, and maybe if people had treated this as her personality and not a pathology, she'd have gone to a worse school, taken an easier path, and been happy and alive today.
Me, I have like, some ambitions, and I enjoy my job at times, but it's all in service of the comfort and security of my family and self. And honestly I think this "slacker" personality is on balance an asset for fatherhood.