Photo by Zabara Tango

Is it possible to live a life without passion?  Can one go through life without a single passion for anything?  It seems that I’m encountering more and more people that don’t seem to know what they really love to do in life.  Most of my peers are college seniors, and inevitably, the most asked question of the times is “what are you doing after graduation?”  Most will reply that they are seeking a job in a field which corresponds to their major.  Some of these people will actually like their major and are excited about working in it.  The majority however, are going with the flow and either say that they don’t really like what they will be doing, or they claim that they do with feigned excitement.

Then, out of this group of people who are not really interested in their chosen paths, there are a few who will know what they are truly passionate about.  Out of those, some will plan on pursuing it at some level, and the rest will be to fearful to take a chance on what they truly love to do.  I can understand these people, even the ones that don’t pursue out of fear have something to live for, they can still cultivate that interest in solitude.  But what I don’t understand are the rest of the people that are uninterested in their paths, and also have no idea what they really like to do.

We as human beings have been able to use our innate cleverness to rise above the daily struggle for food and survival.  At some level, I like to think that all this progress was made to give us the chance to attain a higher level of satisfaction.  Satisfaction that is gained through pursuing to do with our lives what makes us happy.  The group of people that are choosing uninteresting paths are doing so out of necessity for money, for stability, for survival.  If we do this, then we’re just propelling ourselves back to what we already broke away from.  If we sacrifice our passion for stability, we might as well go back to hunting and gathering in the forest, because we are giving up our uniquely human opportunity.

The people without passion perplex me.  What drives someone to survive when there is nothing to greatly stimulate them?  Most people who don’t think they are passionate about anything might be overlooking important aspects of their behavior.  If we took a little time to question ourselves, we might discover a hidden interest we never noticed before.  Maybe passions are sought out.  Maybe we have to try out everything we can in the hopes of finding something that truly captures us.  Isn’t it worth it to take a chance on being rewarded our our work internally at the cost of a stable but suppressing job?  Or at the very least, cultivating a passion on the side while holding a stable job.  But with no passion at all, I fail to see what reason there is to keep struggling.  I fail to see the great benefit in my humanity.

I’ve always been very critical of how people are programmed from day 1 to operate a certain way in our society. I had never really thought of the benefits this may have until this summer. I was back in India and had a lot of time to kill during the day so I decided to try and teach basic math to our maid. I spent about a week trying to get her to understand the concept of multiplication and it seemed as hopeless as ever. She could replicate answers to previous problems I gave her, but she couldn’t figure out any new ones for herself because she didn’t really have an understanding of how it all worked.

This made me think of how part of the conditioning society provides for us is our education. After seeing the poor display by our maid, this made me a little glad that I had been exposed to higher learning and had the luxury of thinking about the bigger questions in life. It’s hard to imagine someone who isn’t able to understand math being able to understand other abstract ideas. I think there is some point in our learning where the law of diminishing returns comes into effect. For example, getting a PhD will not affect my ability to reason as much as my kindergarten class did. So I assume that there is some necessary level of education that human beings should have which will afford us the luxury of thinking for ourselves and analyzing the ideas that govern our thinking.

The trick is to learn as we grow up but not take everything at it’s word. Instead of going to school and memorizing information to spit back at our parents, professors, and future employers, we should try to learn and understand the material for ourselves and think of what it means to us. That is after all, at least I think, the benefit of humanity’s ability to reason. If we don’t do this, then we really aren’t getting as much as we can out of our learning and instead of something that can help bring us to a higher plain of consciousness, we let it hold us even more tightly in the cages of society’s programming.