for love or money
Why following your dreams may not be your best career move.
In her last term of high school, the girl who would later become my mother was called in by the careers counsellor. “Right,” he said, “do you want to be a nurse or a teacher?” “Well, I don’t like blood,” my mother replied, after a minute’s thought, “so teacher?”
What she didn’t say, or even think to say, is, “I want a job that pays me as much coin as possible so I can be financially secure for the rest of my life.” It was 1970, the option did not exist.
It’s now almost 50 years later. Career choices for women are unlimited. Independence and financial success are ours for the taking. So why is it that many – arguably most – young women still do not choose a job based purely on bank?
If there’s a single, pervasive idea underpinning the way we think about work, it’s this: our career – rather, our dream job – must be driven by passion. It must excite us creatively and fulfil us entirely. Above all, we must do what we love. But it’s a myth every bit as limiting, and on the same locked course for frustration, as Teacher vs Nurse. “The concept of ‘do something you’re passionate about and you’ll never work a day in your life’ is really a fallacy,” says career coach Lauren Maxwell. “But I can’t tell you the number of women I work with who say, ‘I write, I paint, it’s my passion and I want to do it as a job.’”
However, are they to blame when the highly visual, celebrityled culture we marinate in supports the idea so entirely? Our Instagram feed is awash with photographers on location, designers in studio, dancers at the barre. Influential lifestyle sites such as Goop and The Glow glorify, to the point of fetish, women who flicked the grind and turned their love of cold-pressed juice into an empire.
The columnist Caitlin Moran, writing after Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the US presidential election, drew attention to the way romantic comedies still inform our subconscious idea of “women’s work”, as wary as we are of the form. Wedding planners, kooky dogwalkers and confessional magazine columnists populate the screen because, in Hollywood still, “women should not have jobs involving hard slogs, difficult decisions... diplomatic speech, power, or proper, steely heartbreak,” Moran wrote. “Women should not have ugly jobs... their jobs are, essentially, sexy, self-fulfilment hobbies.”
And that is the word: hobbies – which, by definition, do not pay the kind of wage that provides financial security, enables property ownership or a fiscal safety net to mitigate against the prospect of divorce or time away having children.
“We have to start thinking about our dream job in the context of our whole life,” warns Natasha Janssens, founder of financial advisory Women With Cents. “We’re bombarded daily with this idea of living the dream, but first we have to ask, ‘Is that actually my dream or someone else’s?’ And then think, ‘Can I actually afford it?’”
Because rarely, we should realise, is an Insta-friendly career in artisanal kombucha not bank-rolled by a well-off partner or parents. But we’ve no means to check their privilege, as it were, before launching into our own small-batch baby food or street-style photography. Or before we feel vastly inadequate by the day job we can’t afford to quit.
Consider also that the definition of a dream job will evolve significantly as the years go by. Being a freelance fashion stylist in your twenties – schlepping suitcases of product across sand at 6am and living at home to fund it – may no longer resemble a passion once you hit your thirties, when an event like motherhood makes security or paid leave suddenly become the dream. “Most women will face these challenges down the track,” Janssens says. “Values will change. So while there may be a time and place for pursuing a passion, being too naive and romantic early on is not serving us.”
Even in certain quarters of the life-coaching industry, emphasis for women is put upon “soft values” rather than pragmatic ones. While men, more openly and acceptably, give primacy to status, money and power, women are conditioned to think almost exclusively in terms of personal fulfilment.
“When I ask most women what their values are, they’ll list abstract things like honesty or trust, because they don’t actually know,” says career coach Suzanne Williams of Grace & Grind. Think harder and be mindful of your behaviour, and your real values may turn out to be paying bills or a short commute.
“The concept of ‘do something you’re passionate about and you’ll never work a day in your life’ is a fallacy”
“Being a freelance stylist may no longer resemble a passion once you hit your thirties, when motherhood may make security become the dream”
Still, the idea that our work must be “meaningful” and contribute to a good greater than merely paying our own gas bill is almost never questioned, in a society where the nine-to-five is linked intrinsically to identity. “When I meet people in non-work situations... [I] try to see how long I can talk to them without asking about their work or have them ask me about my work,” said Miya Tokumitsu, author of Do What You Love: And
Other Lies About Success And Happiness – and one of the first people to call into question the concept of working for passion and not cold hard cash. “It’s actually really hard to last longer than four minutes.”
In a 2014 thinkpiece for Jacobin (which has subsequently gone viral), Tokumitsu also argued that following your dream “is now the unofficial work mantra for our time”, even though its likely pay-off is personal dissatisfaction and a broader devaluation of actual work – real jobs, boring jobs, even well-paid grown-up jobs. Even if they’re the jobs that would provide women with more plentiful opportunities later on, and put them in a position where they would be able to pursue a dream from a place of financial security. And even if, in the short term, these jobs mean our creative outlet could stay exactly that.
“Are we really so sure that the best thing to do with passion is attempt to monetise it, anyway?” writer Catherine Baab-muguira asked in her essay on the topic for business news website Quartz. “Why not side hustle for love, and keep the filthy hands of commerce off our art or beloved hobby?”
And why not make some proper money on the way through since, as Caitlin Moran pointed out, eventually we must all wake up and think, “Right, it’s [2017], and this isn’t a princess movie.”