About Passion

Piggybacking on my last post, I want to talk about passion. Not the porny, sexy kind of passion that immediately springs to mind when some of us hear that word, but this idea that in order to be qualified for and capable of doing even the most menial, low-wage job, you must have passion for it.

So, I want to get this out of the way up front: fuck that noise. And fuck you if you’re one of the people drafting those job ads looking for people who have a passion for, say, washing dishes, or for cleaning up other people’s piss and shit after football games.

No one has a passion for being a minimum wage slave. No one has a passion for working 90 hours a week and never seeing their kids or their partner. No one has a fucking passion for getting a divorce because of all the ridiculous demands placed on them by these jobs demanding people have passion in order to do them. No one has a passion for working seven days a week and all holidays. No one has a passion for going to work when it’s dark outside and going home when it’s dark outside and never seeing the sun. No one has a passion for watching the owner or the CEO or the GM or whatever the title is go on vacation four times a year while they can’t even get a single fucking day off.

Passion has become a code word for desperation. How desperate are you to come here and work 90 hours a week for a salary that’s based on 40 hours? How desperate are you to accept a lower base pay with the promise of a “competitive bonus program” that you’ll never see because the people who make those decisions will always be able to justify not paying the bonus out? Meanwhile, by the time you realize that, it’s too late and you’ve already worked 50 days straight while the owner and her husband went to the Galapagos Islands, then to visit family in Maine. They brought you back a t-shirt though!

“Do you have a passion for selling clothing?” is really just someone asking how badly do you need a job selling clothing. Because unless the clothing is your own label, I doubt very many people have a passion—a genuine passion—for selling ready-to-wear clothes to people who don’t have a passion for wearing them.

As I said in my previous post, toxic companies know they're toxic and it is imperative that they convince you to be an active participant in the toxicity. Trust me. I've done it. Because I believed the lies—if I just worked more days, if I just worked longer hours, if I just cut labor and sent home those people who needed as many hours as they could get… there would be rewards. Bullshit.

People think it’s as easy as just quitting and finding another job, and believe me, I have quit jobs like that before. But it isn’t always easy to “just find a better job.” Because those toxic jobs mean to trap you doing them. That’s why you can’t have days off and have to always be on call—so you won’t go to an interview and find another job and quit on them, leaving them to do all the shit they make you do.

Those rewards are always just over the horizon, too. Just around the next corner. But you round that corner and SURPRISE! There's another fucking corner. And another one after that. On and on. The rewards are MORE hours doing your job and the jobs of the people you were told to send home. MORE days. If they could work you eight days a week, they would.

And when you comment on the extra hours and the extra days? The lack of workers?

“But you said this was your passion!1!!”

So, yeah. I quit talking about passion years ago. I encourage you to do the same. Because it will be misinterpreted and it will be exploited and you will get trapped and by the end, the only thing you’ll have a passion for is getting the hell out of there. But before you go, make sure you cuss those people out. And make sure you do it with all the passion you can muster.