The Price Of Not Pursuing Your Passions

Unanswered questions and a restless mind

Lately, I’ve been juggling a few different projects. I know it’s not optimum, but I’ve been trying to get a feel for what I like best. It’s difficult nowadays because of technological development and the internet, we have so many different options available to us for starting a career or business.

We’ve also got to balance sometimes conflicting needs: short term earnings, long term earning potential, passion and interest, stability and security; there might be something you’re passionate about that has great long term earning potential, but right now you need short term cash to keep you afloat.

Some of your passions might fill one or two of these needs but not the others. Your job might meet the stability and security needs, but is lacking in other aspects.

Which needs do you prioritize? This will depend on a whole host of factors that aren’t for the topic of this article.

The point is, life: very complicated.

These decisions: very exhausting.

What I’ve realised recently is that choosing security over your passions is like choosing fear over love.

One of the things I love to do is write. I’ve been writing on Medium, but very inconsistently. I’ve had a lot of other stuff on with family, my career, and another side hustle I’ve been earning money with for over 3 years now. So I’ve been writing where I can.

Writing allows me to untangle and explore my thoughts. This doesn’t just help me to clear my mind, but it’s also therapeutic. I’ve wanted to explore this further by blogging at least once or twice a week for now, then seeing where it goes. But I’ve come up with all these excuses (good ones at that) for why I can’t: I have other priorities right now, it probably won’t work out in the long term, it’s oversaturated right now, it seems like everyone on the internet is a ‘writer’ these days. There’s also the fear that people won’t resonate with what I have to share. what if I embarrass myself? what if I fail? You know how this goes.

The mind can always produce a seemingly endless list of reasons to avoid chasing your passions. It’s because there’s so much uncertainty involved. Your mind prefers certainty, it prefers what it knows: it’s much more comfortable.

Whenever it comes to something uncertain, naturally the mind tends to engage in fear-porn. Because you don’t know, the opportunity for speculation is endless. You can come up with all sorts of reasons for why something won’t work out or what might go wrong.

Endless!

You could spend the whole day imagining all these fictions about why you shouldn’t do something.

Loss Aversion

In behavioural economics, loss aversion is a cognitive bias in the mind where, as humans, we tend to prefer avoiding losses over acquiring equivalent gains. For example, we would feel more pain from losing £100 than we would experience joy from gaining £100.

Economists use loss aversion to understand why certain people make irrational decisions. I.e. why investors sometimes hold on to stocks for too long or sell too early. And why people don’t engage in games even when they have positive expected outcomes.

Personally, I think loss aversion is a more complicated, term for fear. If you boil it down, that’s all it is. But, for this article, we’ll use the term “loss aversion.” It sounds more scientific and makes me feel a little better about the way I avoid risk in life.

This cognitive bias is what plays a major part in the decisions we make to not follow our passions. Psychologically, the idea of potentially losing out on our security, on what we have (or at least what we think we have) right now, far outweighs the idea of potential gains that could come from venturing into the unknown.

Regret

I believe that this cognitive bias, this fear, actually stems from a lack of perspective. We’re thinking about all the things we have to lose, but what are they? How much do most people really love their lives as they are? From looking at the statistics on rising depression, alcoholism, drug abuse (both recreational and medicinal), suicide etc; I’d guess that most people aren’t all that happy with what they have anyway.

On the other hand, there is something to be lost when we don’t go after our passions, when we stay where we are that loss aversion doesn’t take into account: Our peace of mind. Peace of mind can be lost when we don’t go for what we truly want. Our minds can be haunted for months, years and decades by that question: what if?

“What would life look like if I ventured into the unknown?”

“What if I’d just gotten up and spoke on stage? What if I’d just sucked it up and done the work? What if I’d just written an article every day? What if I’d stopped drinking and started waking up early every day to work on my passions? What if I’d left my job and started this new career?”

Of course, you can tell yourself that it wouldn’t work out, you wouldn’t do well, and you’re not naturally talented at the thing anyway; you can come up with lots of reasons like the ones I stated earlier in the article. But at the end of the day, you will never really know. Because of this, it will always play on your mind.

You can sit there and speculate on what might, could, and would happen forever because until you’ve actually done it, there is no answer.

At least if you try and dedicate yourself to whatever it is and it doesn’t work out, you’ll know. It could be embarrassing, it could be painful, but at least you’ll know. At least you can put it to bed.

If you never even try, if you never really give it a go. There will always be that niggle: What if?

We’ve all seen those rags to riches stories; we’ve heard of people who started from nothing, without talent and skill, but somehow got to an amazing place in their respective disciplines, by dedicating themselves and figuring things out along the way.

You could pick those stories apart if you wanted. You could say that they got lucky, that’s always an easy one. You could look at their circumstances, find something that doesn’t apply to you and use it to justify why you wouldn’t succeed. There are lots of ways you could go about this.

But, at the end of the day, because you will never actually know for sure, the thought of what if will still haunt you. There are still things I wonder about from when I was young. In a previous article, I wrote about how I used to be really good at maths and got asked to do extra classes so that I could take my A-level maths a year earlier. I never did.

I used to be a talented athlete, but I never gave it my all because I was scared of failing. Not that I’m haunted, but to this day, I do still wonder what would have happened if I had dedicated myself. I’ll never have answers, and so the questions will always be there.

Chasing your passions may be scary, but how does that compare to a restless mind, filled with unanswered questions? To me, that’s one of the scariest things you could face. Getting to the end of your life and being filled with regret and unanswered questions.

They say ghosts are the souls of the dead who couldn’t pass over to the other side because they have unfinished business. Now they wander the earth endlessly trapped in the “inbetween,” a no man’s land for lost souls, looking for something they will never find.

To me, that sounds like Hell.

It’s important to note, I’m not saying people should quit their jobs, drop everything and only do what they like. Sometimes you have to do things you don’t like to gain the skills, experience and or security that allows you to work on your passions. In that case, the things you don’t like doing are just a stage to get you to where you want to be.

Sometimes you may have to compromise; maybe you won’t do the thing you’re most passionate about if there are no economic prospects. You might do something that you’re still pretty passionate about but is financially justifiable.

Everyone’s situation is different, but the underlying principle is the same. Overall it’s important to go for things long-term that have at least some type of balance between passion and income/security for you. And if something is really burning at you, if there’s something you’ve always thought about doing, that keeps cropping up, maybe just try it. At least then it will be put to bed, one way or another.

If you liked this article, every week I unpack the deeper meaning behind one commonly misunderstood principle.

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