Why Our Passions Start To Feel Like Work
Or, an exploration into why activities that used to give us satisfaction and joy cease doing so, and what this means for individuals, organizations, and institutions
Have you ever had a passion you pursued, but eventually it started to feel like “work”? Perhaps whatever you’re passionate about actually became your career, and for some reason, you lost interest in this passion. How does this happen? That’s what I want to talk about today. Specifically, I want to discuss three interrelated concepts that are helpful for understanding this phenomenon:
Perceived Locus of Causality: A fancy term that essentially asks, did you decide to do this on your own, or were you forced? It’s not a binary consideration. Choices exist on a spectrum from fully autonomous to totally controlled. We shall discuss.
Optimum Challenge: This is when a task is not so easy that it’s boring and not so hard that it’s impossible, but in the “goldilocks” zone. It’s challenging enough to be interesting and rewarding when completed.
Reward Effects: How do various incentives and incentive structures affect motivation and behavior?
First off, what do I mean by passion? In this context, something you’re passionate about is something intrinsically rewarding, which means that the act of doing the thing is rewarding in and of itself. The incentive is built into the action. You’re not doing it to get paid or to show off or because you were coerced in some way. Exercising, reading, writing, doing math, solving puzzles, cooking—these are just a few examples of things people find intrinsic value in. There could be instances in which you discover you have an aptitude for something, and that sense of being good at it makes the activity intrinsically rewarding. For example, in my last essay about Nightmare Alley, I explained how the protagonist discovered he had an aptitude for reading people. This made him feel good.
Anyways, that’s what I mean by passion. But passion doesn't always last. Sometimes passions are extinguished, and you stop looking forward to them—maybe you even avoid them or come to resent them. Why is this? Well, there are several potential reasons, so let’s explore some.
Perceived Locus of Causality (PLOC)
Let’s first discuss the loss of autonomy. We all have passions that we pursue without anyone poking or prodding us. We might even make time to do these things. On the other hand, if we are tired or not in the mood, we simply will not do them. Whether or not you ever stop to contemplate this basic fact, cognitively, you are aware that you are in control and this feels good.
However, when some force compels you to do a thing at a certain time and in a certain way, there’s a chance you lose some of that autonomy.
In his 1968 work Personal Causation, Richard De Charms developed a concept he called “Perceived Locus of Causality,” which referred to the idea that individuals are more motivated to do something when they believe they are acting of their own volition. It speaks to the level of autonomy a person feels when they decide to act, and this is experienced on a spectrum ranging from totally autonomous to controlled. On the extreme autonomous end is something you do 100% just because you want to, and on the extreme controlled end would be enslavement.
Remember I said that when a force compels you, there is only a chance that you lose feelings of autonomy? That’s because it’s possible that you understand and agree with the force compelling you. For example, if a coach or manager can explain why a tedious or challenging task leads to a positive down the road, you will feel less controlled by gaining that understanding. Events don’t take place in a vacuum; there is always context.
So sometimes, a passion ceases to be a passion when your perceived locus of causality shifts too far away from internal to external.12
Optimum Challenge
As I explained above, an optimum challenge is a task in the “goldilocks” zone. It’s not too hard and it’s not too easy. If you do yoga, you’ve probably been advised to “meet your appropriate edge.” In other words, push yourself as far as you can without pushing so far you hurt yourself. If you’re an educator, you’re probably familiar with psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development,” a similar idea that refers to the types of challenges that lead to growth among students. In Vygotsky’s conception, a task that a student could not accomplish even with help and guidance was beyond the zone of proximal development. A task a learner could accomplish with no help or guidance was also outside the zone. A task a learner could only complete with a bit of guidance and help was within the ZPD and resulted in growth.
Humans and mammals love doing stuff. The sense of joy we get from accomplishing things is wired into our brains. Humans have three motivational systems and one of them, the drive system, is associated with achievement. When we achieve things, our brain releases dopamine and we feel good. In fact, the same part of our brain—the nucleus accumbens—is associated both with smoking crack and winning prizes. So if you’ve never smoked crack, but you have won something, you basically know what crack3 is like.
But we don’t feel like we are achieving things when it requires no effort, and we don’t feel like achieving things when they are impossible. This leads to apathy and amotivation. There’s no point in doing something impossible and there’s no fun in doing something that requires no effort. You get discouraged or you get bored.
In many contexts, if our passions become too easy or too difficult—if we feel that we are no longer growing—we’d likely stop doing them altogether. Our intrinsic motivation would dry up. But sometimes we don’t have a choice, right? Perhaps our career is built on this passion and our means of making a living. Well, now we’re not doing it for the intrinsic benefit, we’re doing it for extrinsic reasons. We feel controlled and lacking in autonomy. We no longer derive a sense of competence from completing required tasks. Our passion has become “work.”
Good employers, good coaches, good organizations of any kind consider optimum challenges when they construct career paths and job descriptions. They know that the more you can harness and support someone’s intrinsic motivation by providing optimum challenges, the happier that person will be, which benefits everyone involved.
But there are also things that need doing that nobody wants to do. This is partly because our society is not organized around maximizing happiness and contentment. Our society is organized around the pursuit of profit, which, in theory, can lead to an equal distribution of necessary resources. There’s a belief—not shared here at Rhapsody, of course—that without the incentive for profit, important, necessary things would not get done. But there are many, many jobs that produce nothing of real value for society and serve only to enrich individuals. We’re ok with this because making money and devising ways to make more of it are valued skills, which demonstrates how detached the pursuit of profit has become from the true objective—an equitable and efficient distribution of goods and services. There are also jobs no human on earth would do willingly except for the fact that everyone needs a check. On the other hand, there are passions that are impossible to monetize even though they make lots of people very happy. We could change how society is organized, but that is a topic for another day.
Reward Effects
For a long time, the hot thing in psychology and developmental studies was behaviorism, a school of thinking that posits human behavior is predicated on a feedback loop between some external event and the corresponding reaction. In psychology 101 classes, everyone learns about Pavlov's dog as an example of operant conditioning. Behaviorism (sometimes called Skinnerism after its most famous proponent, B.F. Skinner) supposes everything we do is a result of conditioning such as this, even if the exact feedback loops are so complex we can’t work them out on paper.
Behaviorism has fallen out of favor, but like many psychological movements—Freudian thinking, for example—its impact on society was so profound we still see remnants of the ideas in our institutions. Also, like Freud, it’s not wholly incorrect. There is a relationship between outside stimuli and reactions. It’s just that research suggests we are more than automatons who react to things mechanically (or at least, we are smarter than dogs).
One area of life where behaviorism echoes is the workplace, where only now are business leaders and owners at least paying lip service to the idea that just giving people more money is not a sufficient motivator4. People care about more than money and are motivated by more than money. It’s also not the best way to increase human wellbeing, but I’m not yet willing to give the majority of CEOs and managers the benefit of the doubt and assume that really matters to them.
The research on extrinsic rewards as a way to motivate in the long term is not auspicious. Generally speaking, the introduction of extrinsic rewards5, i.e money, actually reduces intrinsic motivation, thereby reducing the sense of autonomy experienced. Why would this be? Well, it goes back to our discussion of perceived locus of causality. Research shows that when you add contingent rewards to an activity, the PLOC goes from being internal to external. Now, you’re not doing the activity because it’s intrinsically rewarding. The activity becomes instrumental and a means to get the reward.
One study that speaks to this point involved two groups of people completing puzzles. The members of one group were given $1 every time a puzzle was completed. The members of the other group were not. The true test came after the primary puzzle solving period, a free-choice period where participants could do basically whatever they wanted. Those who weren’t given any reward were more likely to continue solving puzzles than those who’d been rewarded. In other words, the introduction of a reward decreased intrinsic motivation. This kind of study has been replicated many times, including once with college students writing headlines and with children drawing. The children weren’t given monetary rewards, but instead given “good player awards,” which I thought was cute.
I was careful to say “contingent” rewards, because it turns out how rewards are structured has a significant impact on how they affect intrinsic motivation and autonomy. Generally, when rewards are used to control behavior, they tend to decrease intrinsic motivation. But there are ways to structure and deliver rewards so that they do not. For example, rewards given for simply showing up rather than completing or even engaging with a task do not seem to decrease intrinsic motivation. Unexpected rewards also don’t seem to undermine intrinsic motivation because there was no expectation of a reward in the first place. Verbal rewards—simply telling someone they did a good job—can also support intrinsic motivation better than tangible awards, like money.
The research on rewards is voluminous—too much to fully cover here—and my goal is not to provide a comprehensive overview of rewards research. My point is simply that when extrinsic rewards, especially tangible ones like money, are introduced in relation to the completion of an activity, intrinsic motivation will likely decrease—which makes the task feel more like work and less like a passion. There are ways to mitigate this by how rewards are given out.
I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t acknowledge what seems like a gargantuan problem for society. If the introduction of monetary reward generally decreases the sense of autonomy required for human wellbeing, and our entire economic system is premised on the idea that the pursuit of profit, the so-called invisible hand, is the best method to distribute necessary goods and resources—that seems pretty bad? I’m not saying I have an alternative, but it would seem to me that we should be working on one and we should acknowledge that our society, by design, decreases wellness.
If you think perhaps I am being a tad alarmist, OK, but I have one more point to make. One area of interesting research comes from measuring the differences between rewarding outcomes versus rewarding behaviors. Research has shown that when outcomes are rewarded rather than behaviors, the effect is to reinforce the behavior that led to the outcome. And since the outcome is what matters, it encourages taking the shortest, easiest path—even if it is immoral or illegal. That’s why this is often called “The Enron Effect,” based on the company that doled out massive rewards to executives who increased Enron’s stock price, incentivizing the executives to lie and cheat, and leading to the company’s collapse. This research isn’t limited to high-stakes business; however, the same phenomenon has been observed among school administrators who inflate test scores to make themselves look better.
We all have passions and things we do just because doing them makes us feel good. In a perfect world, we could pursue our passions all the time. But this isn’t a perfect world. It’s a world full of constraints, both internal and external. Sometimes, we fall out of love with our passions, and what I aimed to do here was explain why that might happen. On some level, this is a purely individual consideration. But it also has social ramifications, because the way we organize society and its institutions plays a massive role in either supporting or thwarting intrinsic motivation and autonomy, which in turn affects wellbeing. At times, it seems that much of our society is arranged in a way that actually decreases motivation through incorrect reward structures. We can see this in business, in schools and just about any societal context.
My sincere hope is that by reading this, you’ll have a deeper ability to understand your own motivational processes and your own feelings to better navigate the world.
I had originally included the following few paragraphs, but they don’t really fit the theme of this essay and probably should be spun off into an entirely different essay. I’m including them here for anyone interested: One last point, and it’s important (and hopefully not too confusing). In the same way we can authentically endorse and carry out an action that was originally proposed by an external force, we can also do the inverse: We can have thoughts and desires that we do not authentically endorse. In other words, we can internalize belief systems and frameworks that work against us, where we are controlling ourselves.
There’s infinite examples of this. Religious beliefs, political beliefs, family traditions, hard-to-define cultural norms—these are all systems that we internalize to various degrees. Integrating a belief or system of beliefs isn’t a binary proposition, it can be messy and we may not authentically believe all aspects, yet may feel compelled to abide by them. An example I’ve used before is someone who knows they are attracted to the same sex, but their religion forbids acting on these attractions, so they don’t, which can lead to extreme emotional and cognitive distress.
Again, it’s a spectrum. I’m including a chart here to demonstrate what I mean. The specific names aren’t that important, it’s not like I am testing you. The point is just that there’s a relationship between PLOC and motivation, and this affects our sense of autonomy.
A lot of what I discuss here is a part of Organismic Integration Theory, which you can read more about here.
Don’t do crack.
The desire for more money—at least from a wellness standpoint—is also generally misunderstood. People are less concerned with their absolute wealth than they are with feeling properly compensated in relation to their peers and in relation to the work they do. Again, a separate essay I will return to one day.
There are times when extrinsic goals are not actually a person’s end goal. For example, looking to make more money so that one can afford to provide for their family is not the same as looking to make more money to buy a new car. This specific type of pursuit is often called the virtuous pursuit of extrinsic goals and I wrote about it here.