What If We Completely Misunderstood Passion?

As the party started winding down the kids sneakily crawled in from the other room, tugging on their parents’ shirt to find out if they could stay just a little longer. They had already sent their best ambassador to ask, and their brave attempt had failed. Their pleas fell on deaf ears, but before they could escape unseen, the uncles from the other side of the room locked eyes with them and called them over. The yawn started to build up inside of them in anticipation of the conversation that was to come. The kids felt like the uncles were all secret actors who were handed the same worn-out scripts.

“What do you want to do when you grow up? Have you found your passion?”

The kids didn’t want to tell the adults that they didn’t dream of labor at ten years old. And besides, they had come up with a clever strategy to simply repeat the profession of the uncle that asked the question. It reduced their cognitive load so that they could get back to what really mattered. Crowning the ultimate Monopoly champion. Or maybe Roblox these days, I’m too old now to know what games are being played at sleepovers.

But these questions, even though innocent in nature, carry a profound premise that underlies them. It brings up the question of whether passion is something that is fixed and waiting to be discovered, or if it is a cognitive muscle that can be developed. In other words, is the mathematician passionate about math because something in their upbringing, genetics, or early education caused them to uniquely resonate with it, or is passion itself a developed relationship to the world that, once cultivated in one domain, can eventually be extended to another?

To better understand this dialectic, we have to first understand the long history of passion and how it became coopted by the modern economic structure.

For most of human history, people created their identity relationally and socially rather than psychologically. A person’s identity was formed by family, class, religion, geography, and gender. Prior to the 16th century, the individual was not the primary political or social unit. Everything from marriage to work was assigned or inherited.

Therefore, in these societies, meaning was not tied to some “expression of the true self” and instead came solely from fulfilling duties that were constructed towards the larger social or cosmic group. The first major shift in the importance of the individual came in the 17th century, during the Enlightenment, when older forms of rigid social structures began to be questioned using the methods of reasoning being developed. This transformation was then compounded by thinkers in the Romanticism era of the 18th century, who elevated individuality, emotion, and authenticity to what constituted a good life and society. The Romantics argued that every individual possessed a unique interior world that ought to be expressed rather than suppressed. This is where the idea that fulfillment comes not from conforming to external roles, but from uncovering and expressing one’s “true self” emerges.

In the 20th century, after World War II, these ideas merged with psychology and consumer capitalism. Thinkers like Abraham Maslow popularized ideas of self-actualization, fulfillment, and realizing one’s inner potential. As industrial economies shifted toward knowledge work and creative labor, work increasingly became tied to individual identity. People no longer just asked, “how do I survive?” but asked “who am I really?” as well. The phrase “do what you love” became culturally dominant, making ideas of passion philosophically relevant.

Late capitalism then absorbed these Romantic ideals almost completely. Corporations and modern work culture began encouraging workers to treat labor as self-expression, creativity, passion, and identity. Passion became individualized and internalized. If someone lacked passion, it appeared as a personal failure to discover their authentic essence.

So now we come back to the original question. Is passion something that is fixed and out there, or is it a muscle that is practiced and developed?

This question was explored in episode three of the Re-Educated podcast with Vera Michalchik , who is the Director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. She studies how people learn across different environments with a major focus on curiosity, interest-driven learning, and interpersonal relationships in education.

In the conversation we had in 2022, she argues that passion is not simply hidden inside a person waiting to be found. Instead, passion develops relationally through exposure, repetition, mentorship, emotional experience, and participation. I wanted to take these pieces and build a framework around the various components of passion. I call it the DOEE model for a lack of ability in coming up with a coherent acronym. If someone can help me with that, please do.

1. Deep Attention

To illustrate this practically I want to draw from a movie club group I started in 2024. Mind you at this time I knew nothing about film, other than the fact that I loved Finding Nemo. I wanted to explore the medium more intentionally, so I found some film enthusiasts and curated a space for all of us to meet and discuss. The biggest lesson I’ve taken away over these last few years is that even though materially we are all watching the same film, we always see something completely different.

In the beginning, each scene held such little weight to me. It was just some actor doing some action to progress the plot to the end outcome. I leave the film entertained, and the movie doesn’t really change me or sit with me in any meaningful way. But when the other people would watch, the scene came to life in such a different way. I just couldn’t understand it at first.

But as they spoke about it, it became abundantly clear. They took into account the historical context of when the film was made, the discography and philosophy of the director, the specific choice of language and script writing, the tone of the soundtrack, and the ways in which the lighting influenced the viewing experience. Though it was the exact same film, what we actually saw and paid attention to couldn’t have differed more.

Deep attention is the heightened awareness of everything that is happening. It is the awareness of the aesthetic, the historical context, the philosophical considerations, the challenges, and the complexity. It is also the ability to sustain focus on one thing over a long period of time. To sit with a theory or a painting for weeks at a time. A neuroscientist practices deep attention when they become hyper familiarized with the tiniest deviations in a brain scan, while a tennis player does it when they notice the micro twitch in the opponent’s eyes before serving.

2. Openness to Experience

In essence, open-mindedness meets the ability to fail and change. For an experience to truly be felt and embodied, it has to affect the person deeply. Poetry that moves, does so, not just because it is good or profound, but because the person reading the poem is also in a state that allows the depth to penetrate their experience.

When our schedules and perspectives remain extremely rigid, this movement becomes almost impossible. A student who is adamant that math is not for them is much less likely to have a profound experience with math than a student who holds slightly less rigidity in their attitude. Similarly, a person who is extremely strapped by their schedule will not have the time to dive deeply into something that arises in their day unexpectedly.

The openness to experience, which is half in the lifestyle and half in the mentality of a person, is essential for passion to rise. The fundamental reason for this is that passion cannot be predicted or anticipated for. It is truly random at times. On the other hand, it also changes, and that is also okay. It’s okay for a person to move their sights and interest. A person who is fascinated by medicine is allowed to change their perspective to be fascinated by interior design later in their lives. Wandering is accepted, and often helps develop knowledge about the original topic.

The capacity to allow passion to move through the body requires a certain degree of openness to change and uncertainty. An extremely routine and controlled schedule cannot allow for the immersion needed for an all-consuming passion or interest to develop.

3. Embodied Participation

Embodied participation stands slightly in contrast with deep attention. Let’s take the example of a basketball player, LeBron James (the goat) who is about to shoot a free throw to win the game. In this moment, does he think about the historical context of the free throw, the consequences of losing the game, the physics explanation for the optimal placement of the hands on the ball, and the influence of the crowd volume on his free throw percentage? Or does he quiet his mind and lose all sight of the intellectual noise, and become present with the shot?

Embodied participation is what many artists and creators call flow state. The ability to lose oneself in the moment, the body moving instinctually through the medium. In this moment there is no difference between the surfer and the wave. There is just one. Without the ability to reach this flow state, a person will always be restricted by their mind from truly experiencing anything. This in essence makes passion almost inaccessible. For passion is often all encompassing.

In fact, the original meaning of the word “passion” is derived from the Latin word passio, meaning “suffering” or “to endure.” Passion referred to the experience of being overtaken by something beyond rational control. The best visual of this is the jazz player, with their eyes closed, who simply loses themselves into the rhythm itself.

4. Existential Lightness

The fourth piece is one of the most difficult to cultivate under the strains and pulls of the modern economic structure. Existential lightness is the ability to momentarily exist without the need or search for meaning or reason. There are countless examples for this, but let’s take the self-taught mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan. His intuitive discoveries in number theory, infinite series, and mathematical analysis profoundly shaped modern mathematics despite his lack of formal training. It is well documented that he pursued mathematics not primarily for utility, career advancement, or external reward, but because he experienced mathematical patterns as profoundly beautiful in and of themselves. Mathematics for Ramanujan was an expression of his obsession with reality itself. There was no larger purpose.

Vincent van Gogh, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ludwig van Beethoven, Nikola Tesla, Franz Kafka, Jane Goodall, Carl Jung, Andrei Tarkovsky.

The list of others like this is endless. Though their work is heralded by the rest of society, their contributions were never due to some well-thought-out reasoning. More often than not, they had no idea that they would make the changes to the world that they did.

Passion leads us in ways that aren’t directly and obviously productive in the capitalistic sense. Sometimes the need for reason itself can diminish the light of passion. Simultaneously, meaning often arises many years or decades later. Sometimes the meaning of painting for a person doesn’t arise until doing it for decades. This is also okay. A passion doesn’t always need to be justified. It can simply just be. The meaning may or may not arise at a later point.

The DOEE Framework

And so here we have it, the DOEE framework. It is important to note that passion alone isn’t something a society can be built on. Duty and responsibility to the collective is the other piece that can temper the extremes of chasing a passion, especially when it is harmful to the collective. But what is clear is that this belief that passion is simply something that exists out there is harmful. It causes a person to endlessly search, without understanding that passion is a way of relating to the world that can be developed, not found.

And so as we revisit the original question, the uncles asked, we now know how to best respond. There’s nothing specific I am passionate about. I am simply a person who has exercised the muscle of passion thoroughly. So throw anything at me, and using the power of DOEE, watch me be passionate about it.

At a later date, I will add to this theory by incorporating this framework into the classroom, talking about ways to teach, systematize, facilitate, and nurture these values. If you'd like to listen to the conversation that inspired these ideas you can find it below.