this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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You know the old saying, ‘Get a job doing the thing you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life!’?
That’s really bad advice. Get a job doing something you like, but not your passion. If you burn out on your passion, you’ve lost the thing that brings you joy.
The real advice is to realize that every job has components that are not fun.
There are professional athletes who still love to play their sport, and intend to retire into coaching, but hate dealing with marketing and promos and media availability. Lots hate the travel. Some don't like some of their teammates or coaches.
I know doctors who hate dealing with the paperwork, and programmers who hate dealing with documentation or testing, and lawyers who hate tracking their timesheets. But each of these are part of the job. The question is whether the entire bundled package deal is a pretty good job or not for yourself.
That's a great way of putting it. Unfortunately, the drudgery of each job is rarely explained or even acknowledged to young people entering the workforce. That's how we end up with burnt out people in their 20s and 30s.