A Shift in Goal Posts

The Final Predator of Passion

Editor’s Note: This is the final piece of a four-part series exploring our natural oscillation between safety and passion in both relationships and career. It all kicked off with a question brought to me by relationship therapist Esther Perel: ‘Can We Want What We Have?’ 

I stopped to go deeper by exploring why the answer to that question can be a tough one to find. 

The goal is to build a life we love, right? To ‘want what we have’. In order to do this, we need to let our passions serve as a lighthouse so we land on the shores of our own authenticity. Passion is erotic. It is instinctually those things that make life exciting to live. It is our responsibility, then, to protect the eroticism within ourselves. This is easier said than done when the Predators of Passion run wild and with stealth, often unnoticed: 

1. The Comparison Trap: “Be just like everyone else, but better.” - Brene Brown 

2. Higher Information Influx: “Information abundance is the paradox of our time.” - Tiago Forte

3. A Shift in Goal Posts: Our expectations of relationships and careers have changed from pragmatism to self-actualization.

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Be My Everything

The sexual revolution in the ‘60s marked an undeniable change in the roots of marriage. Feminism and the gay rights movements challenged traditional family structure and norms. It gave a voice to the formerly speechless and a freedom to level the playing field of relationships. 

“Never in the history of family life was the emotional well-being of the couple relevant to the survival of the family. The couple could be miserable for thirty years, you were stuck for life, you married once—and, if you didn’t like it, you could hope for an early death of your partner. Marriage was a pragmatic institution. You need to have it, but, once you’re in it, it’s not a great thing, and certainly not for the women. 

And then we added romantic needs to the pairing, the need for belonging and for companionship. We have gone up the Maslow ladder of needs, and now we are bringing our need for self-actualization to the marriage. We keep wanting more.” Esther Perel, The New Yorker

While wanting more from our relationships is not a bad thing in and of itself, is it realistic to seek all forms of ‘more’ from one individual?

Falling prey to the predator of passion that is a Shift in Goal Posts creates pressure on the equilibrium of relationships. The Shift in Goal Posts for marriage from pragmatism to self-actualization has the potential to suck passion out of relationships. When we rely on one individual for all our needs, we have “cherished spouses, but famished lovers” as Perel states in her book, Mating In Captivity. 

This shift is underscored by The Comparison Trap and a Higher Information Influx. We are being told through more than one avenue — our families, the social media of our couple friends, advertisements — that a partner should be able to provide the benefits of a secure, pragmatic marriage as well as a romantic one. 

However, Perel notes that “a very common mistake [in relationships] is to expect one person to give you what a whole village used to provide: identity, belonging, support, while also promising adventure, excitement and entertainment.” 

The subtext of this progressive dialogue is loneliness. 

This loneliness is one that our partner cannot alleviate, because he or she cannot be everything we may need. We look for both safety and passion, oftentimes sacrificing the latter. While it is important that a partner provides elements of both safety and passion, our relationships should not be the only place we seek this dichotomous human need. 

Through the combination of Mom calling to let you know that ‘dad and I were having babies by your age’ and Instagram putting romantic getaways on display, we have built an image of what a relationship should look like. The modern age has us believing that pristine relationships are all-encompassing and a path to self-actualization. 

In reality, our path to enlightenment — and the way to protect our individual passions and eroticism — is being a whole person ourselves, just as we were prior to entering a committed relationship. And perhaps more importantly, letting our partner be the same. 

More Than a Job

Historically, passion has not been a career goal either. Much like marriage, career was also anchored in pragmatism. It’s always been about securing financial means. However, society has developed to a point where so much of our identity is tied to our work that it makes sense why wanting “more” in our careers is a natural progression. 

With the rise of therapy culture, society has largely gone from viewing reality as external and agreed upon to internal and subjective. This is an idea that entrepreneur Erik Torenberg notes in a recent edition of his weekly newsletter. 

“While truth used to reside in religion and society, over the last 50 years we’ve made our feelings the highest source of all truth. So for 99.9% of human history, you adapted yourself to theories, and you didn’t expect the world to adapt to you — but now it’s the opposite. The Therapeutic Turn posits that psychology itself has institutionalized this world view — that truth and authority can be found inwards, and that the highest goal of society is self-actualization.”

Just like we see in relationships, we have started to view our careers as a means of self-actualization as well. This is not wrong, but it is unrealistic and abusive to passion. We have set the bar so impossibly high that we are no longer able to enjoy career as one element in the wider context that is life. 

What’s more is that many of us have not reconciled the gap between older and newer ways of thinking about careers. We still want to make sure we’re financially secure, but feel uneasy in a standard corporate gig. 

Sound hypocritical? It is. Sound familiar? Same. 

A Shift in Goal Posts as it relates to career can be summarized by the term “passion economy”. However, I find severe irony in this phrase. As we seek self-actualization through our careers, we actually threaten open exploration of passion by tying our own creativity to a financial incentive.

This is limiting as it is no longer enough to have passions in addition to our careers. They must be one. I mean, can you even call it a passion if you’re not making money from it?

A Higher Information Influx forces countless examples upon us of people building a life through non-traditional means. Then, we fall further down the rabbit hole until we are caught in The Comparison Trap, thinking ‘I should do this too’. 

We are led to conclude that there are two outcomes that can be considered successful:

Ideally, you should be both. But under no circumstance should you be neither. A median outcome is no outcome at all. 

This is ridiculous. 

That ‘median outcome’ is how the previous generation and generations before them built beautiful lives. For most of us, it is how we were raised. Why is it then, that we want to move so far away from this? We put so much pressure on ourselves to evolve, but rarely stop to ask ‘what are we evolving towards’?

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Wanting more in our relationships and our careers is merely a reflection of growing in our relationship with the self. This is a noble pursuit. We hold ourselves to a higher standard in these two facets of life than anywhere else. This is because our relationships and our work make up the largest portions of our identities. 

Shunning society for its influences on these pieces of our identities is not my MO. I simply challenge myself, and offer you the same, to evaluate what factors are driving the need for more. Are you comparing? Who are you competing with? Is your work your identity — does it have to be?

Shiv

P.S. I’ve loved exploring the Predators of Passion with you all over the past few weeks. If you’ve enjoyed the series, please share this newsletter with your family and friends. You can find a full archive of Stories by Shiv here.