When was the last time you felt real excitement and passion in your work? What about your life in general? How important is passion to you?

This week’s question from Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions arrives loaded with cultural baggage about what passion is supposed to look like, when it’s supposed to strike, and how essential it is to a life well-lived. We live in an era obsessed with passion as the ultimate arbiter of authenticity—follow your passion, find your passion, live your passion. The assumption embedded in these imperatives is that passion is both readily identifiable and inherently positive, a kind of emotional North Star that, once discovered, will guide us toward fulfillment and success.

But the question’s phrasing reveals some of the complexity lurking beneath these simple formulations. It asks about “real” excitement and passion, implying that there might be fake versions, superficial approximations that masquerade as the genuine article. It separates work from “life in general,” acknowledging that passion might manifest differently in different spheres, or might be present in one area while absent from another. And by asking about the last time we felt these things, it assumes they’re episodic rather than constant—experiences that come and go rather than permanent states of being.

These distinctions matter because they point toward the gap between how we’re taught to think about passion and how it actually operates in most people’s lives. The cultural narrative around passion tends to be romantic and dramatic: the artist who can’t stop creating, the entrepreneur who works eighteen-hour days without fatigue, the activist who dedicates their life to a cause. But for many of us, passion is more complicated, more intermittent, and more difficult to recognize than these archetypal stories suggest.

The question also probes the relationship between passion and importance—how much should passion matter in our decision-making? Is a life without obvious passion necessarily impoverished, or might there be other ways to find meaning and satisfaction? Can passion be cultivated, or must it be discovered? And what do we make of the gap between the passion we think we should feel and the reality of our actual emotional experience?

The Uncomfortable Truth About Emotional Flatness

My relationship with this question is complicated by what I consider to be a fundamental aspect of my temperament: I’m not a very emotional person. This admission feels almost shameful in a culture that prizes emotional intensity and authentic feeling, but it’s the starting point for any honest engagement with questions about passion and excitement.

When I try to recall the last time I felt “real excitement and passion” in my work, I come up empty in ways that would probably concern a therapist. My work life is characterized more by steady engagement, occasional satisfaction, and general competence than by anything resembling passion. I do my job reasonably well, I care about doing it properly, and I appreciate the various forms of meaning and structure it provides, but I would be hard-pressed to describe any of this in terms of excitement or passion.

This creates an interesting cognitive dissonance. On one level, I feel like I should be concerned about this apparent passion deficit. The cultural script suggests that work without passion is essentially a slow death, a waste of human potential, a failure to live authentically. Yet on another level, my actual experience of this supposedly passion-free existence doesn’t feel particularly tragic or unfulfilled. I’m generally content, reasonably productive, and able to find various forms of satisfaction in what I do.

But here’s where things get interesting: when I really examine my emotional landscape, I realize that I do experience something that might qualify as passion, though it manifests in ways I hadn’t initially recognized or valued. I find myself becoming unexpectedly, sometimes irrationally angry about certain issues—corruption in elected leaders, the state of education and childcare, the lack of affordable healthcare, even bad drivers. This anger can be intense, consuming, and persistent in ways that my more positive emotions rarely are.

The question is whether this anger counts as passion, or whether I’m stretching the definition to make myself feel better about my apparent emotional flatness. There’s something slightly desperate about reframing anger as passion, as if I’m trying to convince myself that I’m more emotionally engaged than I actually am.

The Passion of Righteous Anger

But perhaps the relationship between anger and passion isn’t as much of a stretch as it initially seems. Both emotions involve intense engagement with something outside ourselves, both can motivate sustained action and attention, and both signal that we care deeply about something, even if that caring takes an unexpected form.

When I become angry about political corruption, I’m not experiencing a detached intellectual disagreement—I’m feeling something visceral and personal about the gap between how things are and how they should be. This anger can keep me awake at night, drive me to research issues more deeply, motivate me to have difficult conversations, and generally consume mental and emotional energy in ways that mirror what we typically associate with passion.

The difference may be that anger-based passion is reactive rather than proactive, focused on what we oppose rather than what we embrace. Traditional passion narratives center on positive attraction—the writer who loves language, the teacher who loves learning, the activist who loves justice. But there’s another kind of passion that emerges from negative response—the person who can’t stand injustice, who is driven to action by outrage rather than inspiration.

This distinction matters because reactive passion often goes unrecognized and undervalued, both by the people experiencing it and by the culture at large. We’re taught to identify passion with joy, enthusiasm, and positive energy, so we may not recognize our anger-driven engagement as a legitimate form of caring. Yet some of the most important work in the world is done by people who are motivated primarily by what they can’t tolerate rather than what they love.

Consider the history of social movements: many of the most effective activists have been driven less by abstract love of justice and more by concrete anger at specific injustices. The person who starts a nonprofit after losing a family member to a preventable disease isn’t necessarily passionate about nonprofit management—they’re passionate about preventing others from experiencing what they experienced. The whistleblower who risks their career to expose corporate malfeasance isn’t necessarily passionate about transparency as an abstract concept—they’re passionate about stopping harm.

This suggests that passion might be broader and more varied than our cultural narratives acknowledge. Instead of looking for the positive emotional charge we associate with passion, we might need to look for sustained engagement, deep caring, and willingness to invest time and energy, regardless of whether these manifest as excitement or anger, joy or outrage.

The Tyranny of Passion-Seeking

The cultural emphasis on finding and following your passion creates its own set of problems, particularly for people whose emotional landscapes don’t match the expected patterns. The injunction to “follow your passion” assumes that passion is readily identifiable, that it leads toward viable life paths, and that living without obvious passion is somehow deficient.

But what if passion isn’t always obvious? What if it develops slowly over time rather than striking like lightning? What if it manifests as steady commitment rather than emotional intensity? What if some people are simply built to care deeply about things without experiencing the emotional fireworks we associate with passion?

The pressure to identify and follow passion can create a kind of emotional impostor syndrome, where people feel inadequate because their internal experience doesn’t match the cultural template. This is particularly problematic for people who are naturally less emotionally demonstrative, who prefer stability to intensity, or who find meaning through consistency and competence rather than through dramatic emotional engagement.

There’s also the practical problem that passion-following advice often ignores economic realities, family obligations, and the simple fact that not all passions translate into viable careers. The person who is passionate about 15th-century poetry may need to find ways to honor that passion while also paying rent and supporting dependents. The advice to “do what you love and the money will follow” is often given by people who already have money, or who have the luxury of family support during the inevitable periods when the money doesn’t follow.

Perhaps more importantly, the focus on passion can obscure other legitimate sources of meaning and satisfaction. Competence, service, stability, creativity, connection, learning, contribution—all of these can provide deep fulfillment without necessarily generating the emotional intensity we associate with passion. A person who takes quiet satisfaction in doing their job well, who finds meaning in supporting their family, who enjoys the rhythm and structure of steady work, may be living a rich and meaningful life even if they never experience anything that looks like passion.

The Evolution of Passion Over Time

Another complication in thinking about passion is that it’s not static. What excites and engages us at twenty may leave us cold at forty, and what seems boring or irrelevant in our youth may become central to our sense of purpose later in life. The expectation that we should identify our passion early and stick with it ignores the reality that people change, circumstances change, and the things that matter to us evolve over time.

I think about this in relation to my own experience of anger-based passion. The issues that make me irrationally angry now—healthcare, education, political corruption—might not have registered as emotionally significant to me a decade ago. Not because I didn’t intellectually understand their importance, but because I hadn’t yet had the life experiences that would make their impact feel personal and urgent.

This suggests that passion might be less about discovering some pre-existing truth about ourselves and more about allowing ourselves to be shaped by our experiences, to let our caring develop organically rather than forcing it into predetermined categories. Instead of asking “What am I passionate about?” we might ask “What am I learning to care about?” or “What issues am I growing into?”

The developmental aspect of passion also explains why some people feel lost when asked about their passions—they may be in a transitional period where old interests have faded but new ones haven’t yet emerged. This can feel like emotional emptiness, but it might actually be a necessary part of growth, a fallow period that allows new forms of caring to take root.

Passion as Luxury vs. Passion as Necessity

The contemporary discourse around passion often treats it as a luxury—something to be pursued once basic needs are met, a higher-level concern for people who have the privilege of choice in their work and life circumstances. But this framing misses the ways that passion can emerge from necessity, constraint, and even suffering.

Some of the most passionate people I know became passionate not because they had the luxury of following their interests, but because circumstances forced them to care deeply about things they might otherwise have ignored. The parent who becomes an expert advocate for their disabled child, the community member who organizes against environmental pollution in their neighborhood, the worker who becomes passionate about labor rights after experiencing exploitation—these people didn’t choose their passions so much as their passions chose them.

This necessity-driven passion often has a different quality than luxury passion. It tends to be more urgent, more focused, and more connected to concrete outcomes rather than abstract ideals. It’s less about self-expression and more about problem-solving, less about personal fulfillment and more about preventing harm or creating change.

Recognizing this distinction helps explain why passion-seeking advice often feels hollow to people facing real constraints. The single parent working multiple jobs to support their children may not have the luxury of soul-searching about their true calling, but they may be living with intense passion nonetheless—passion for their children’s wellbeing, passion for economic justice, passion for creating stability in unstable circumstances.

The Quiet Power of Sustainable Engagement

Perhaps the most important insight about passion is that it doesn’t always announce itself with emotional fanfare. Some of the most passionate people I know are also the most steady, consistent, and apparently calm in their approach to their work and commitments. Their passion manifests not as excitement or emotional intensity, but as unwavering commitment, deep knowledge, and sustained engagement over time.

This quiet passion may actually be more valuable than its more dramatic counterpart. The person who can maintain steady engagement with important work over decades, who continues to care and contribute even when the emotional high wears off, who finds ways to sustain their commitment through difficulty and routine—this person may be living with deeper passion than the person who burns bright and fast before burning out.

This is particularly relevant in thinking about work, where the sustainability of our engagement matters more than its initial intensity. The teacher who continues to care about their students year after year, the social worker who maintains compassion despite bureaucratic frustrations, the researcher who pursues important questions through long periods of mundane detail work—these people may not always feel excited about their work, but their sustained commitment represents a form of passion that’s both more reliable and more socially valuable than emotional intensity alone.

This perspective suggests that instead of asking whether we feel passionate about our work, we might ask whether we can find sustainable ways to care about it, whether we can maintain engagement over time, whether we can continue to find meaning and purpose even during periods when enthusiasm wanes.

The Importance of Passion: A Qualified Defense

So how important is passion, really? My answer is both more and less important than the cultural narrative suggests.

Passion is less important than we’re told insofar as it’s not the only source of meaning, fulfillment, or ethical living. A person can live a rich, valuable, and satisfying life without ever experiencing what most people would recognize as passion. Competence, service, love, creativity, learning, and contribution can all provide deep satisfaction without requiring emotional intensity.

Passion is also less important than we’re told because it’s not a reliable guide to practical decision-making. Following your passion can lead to poor choices if that passion is unrealistic, unsustainable, or disconnected from your actual skills and circumstances. Sometimes the most passionate choice is the least responsible choice, and sometimes responsibility itself becomes a source of meaning that transcends passion.

But passion is more important than skeptics might argue because it represents a form of deep engagement with life that enriches both individual experience and social contribution. People who care deeply about something—whether that manifests as excitement, anger, commitment, or sustained attention—tend to be more alive, more engaged, and more likely to make meaningful contributions to the world around them.

The key is expanding our definition of what passion looks like. Instead of looking for emotional fireworks, we might look for sustained engagement. Instead of expecting passion to feel good all the time, we might recognize that caring deeply often involves discomfort, frustration, and difficulty. Instead of assuming passion is about self-expression, we might understand it as about responsiveness to the world’s needs and opportunities.

Finding Passion in Unexpected Places

Perhaps the most liberating insight about passion is that it can emerge from anywhere, often in forms we don’t initially recognize. The accountant who becomes passionate about financial literacy education, the security guard who develops deep knowledge about the history of the building they protect, the parent who discovers unexpected engagement with their child’s learning disability—passion often grows in the soil of ordinary responsibility and attention.

This suggests that instead of searching for passion, we might be better served by practicing attention, remaining open to what captures our interest and concern, and allowing ourselves to be surprised by what we find ourselves caring about. Passion may be less about discovery and more about cultivation, less about finding the right thing and more about learning to engage deeply with whatever we’re doing.

My own experience bears this out. The issues that make me angry—that perhaps represent my version of passion—didn’t emerge from systematic soul-searching or career planning. They developed organically through life experience, through paying attention to the world around me, through allowing myself to be affected by what I encountered rather than trying to maintain emotional distance.

This organic development of caring suggests that passion might be available to more people than we typically assume, but it requires patience, attention, and willingness to be shaped by our experiences rather than trying to shape our experiences around predetermined ideas about what should matter to us.

The Courage of Ordinary Engagement

In the end, perhaps the question isn’t whether we feel passionate about our lives and work, but whether we can find the courage to engage fully with whatever we’re doing, to care as deeply as we’re capable of caring, and to remain open to the various forms that caring might take.

This doesn’t mean accepting mediocrity or settling for less than we might achieve. It means recognizing that engagement and meaning can emerge from unexpected sources, that passion takes many forms, and that the absence of obvious passion doesn’t necessarily indicate the absence of a meaningful life.

For those of us who don’t experience the emotional intensity typically associated with passion, there may be comfort in recognizing that our steady commitment, our quiet caring, our sustained attention to what matters—these too are forms of passion, ways of being fully engaged with life even if that engagement doesn’t announce itself with emotional fanfare.

And for those moments when we do feel genuine excitement, when something captures our imagination or stirs our emotions in obvious ways, we can receive these experiences as gifts rather than necessities, as moments of grace that enrich our lives without being required for their validity.

The deepest wisdom about passion may be that it’s both more ordinary and more varied than we typically recognize. It’s available in small moments of attention, in steady commitment to ordinary responsibilities, in anger at injustice, in quiet satisfaction with work well done. It doesn’t always feel good, it doesn’t always lead where we expect, and it doesn’t always look like what we think it should look like.

But when we expand our understanding of what passion can be, when we stop looking for it to match cultural templates and start recognizing it in its actual forms, we may discover that we’re already living with more passion than we realized—we just needed to learn how to see it.