Follow Your Bliss, Find Your Passion, and Other Misguided Advice

Have you located that nebulous and elusive thing called bliss, passion, essence, or calling? Are you living your legend? Have you discovered who you are and what you are here to do? The proliferation of books, courses, workshops, theories, and gurus offering to show us where to look and how to find it suggests that lots and lots of people have bought into this idea (which appears to have been perpetuated by the New Agers and many intelligent, educated people who ought to know better).

Included in the message is a sort of imperative along with a sense of urgency: if you don’t find out what you’re supposed to do (so you can do what you love), you’re missing out Big Time! But the belief that we must discover the particular thing we are meant to be doing in order to generate this feeling of bliss or ignite our passion often results in nothing more than a paralyzing seizure of anxiety.

I’ve done my share of participating in this bliss-quest game. And I’m actually pretty aware of what excites and fully-engages me and what makes me feel energized and alive. But what I’ve learned, among other things, is that there’s no seed hidden deep within me (presumably within my unconscious as opposed to within my actual physical body) that holds the key to unlocking my passion, calling, bliss, or whatever you want to call it. In fact, the unconscious is exactly the wrong place to look for that sort of information since—far from being a secret garden—the unconscious is mainly composed of decades of random programming, zombie (automatic) subroutines, and bad or outmoded habits. Its primary job is to keep us alive, not to enliven us. The unconscious is the main enforcer of the status quo.

Head Trips and Stalemates

Along with being exhorted to find and follow our bliss, we are conversely cautioned to distinguish our wants from our needs so that we can direct our efforts and attention on filling our needs instead of satisfying our wants. Needs = important. Wants = unimportant. So one message is that needs matter but wants don’t and another message is that it’s extremely important for us to take the time and put in the effort to discover what we want. The result is that most people can’t answer the question what do you really want? and in this climate of confusion they settle for immediate gratification, which is ultimately unsatisfying.

There are two more factors that muddy the waters. One is the insidious and deadening effect of clutter, which can take up so much of our conscious attention that we literally can’t think straight. How can we possibly focus on what we really want when we’re preoccupied trying to find stuff, remember stuff, organize stuff, and plan how to deal with our stuff? When our lives are filled with clutter, there’s not much room in our heads for anything else.

Another element is that we confuse wants with goals. We don’t know what we really want, but we set goals for ourselves anyway. Often our goals are things we believe we should do or should achieve. It isn’t surprising that the failure rate for reaching such goals is extremely high. But a goal is a means to an end. It encompasses the actions that will get us something we want. If we haven’t identified the end, the goal is meaningless. I began a strength training program at a new gym at the beginning of October. Going to the gym for an hour and a half twice a week is a goal that moves me toward all kinds of things, such as energy, strength, health, and a sense of well-being. I don’t always feel like going, but I’m committed to getting the results. I know why I’m going; so I go whether I feel like it or not.

Big Picture “Wants”

I wrote about my 30-day challenge to answer the question what do I really want? here. Since then I completed and reviewed my 30 index cards, which contain 481 individual items. Some items surprised me, and it was interesting to see what kinds of things showed up the most. (As an aside, going to the gym did not appear once.) After mulling it all over, I realized that every item on those cards fit into at least one of 12 categories, what I call my Big Picture Wants:

Freedom
Energy
Stimulation
Clarity
Equanimity
White Space
Creativity
Joy
Resilience
Connection
Expansion
Impact

Five years from now, I might want other things, but these are the things I want to have in my life right now. And there are all kinds of different ways to get them. Working out at the gym gets me freedom, energy, resilience, and connection, for example. Just identifying these big picture wants helped me gain clarity and equanimity.

Identifying big picture wants expands the playing field rather than contracting it. There is no one right path or course of action to realizing them; there are many different paths, many different ways to be yourself, express yourself, contribute yourself, and enjoy yourself.