# "Are you passionate about something no one would ever be passionate about?"



## ThatGuy11200 (Sep 3, 2012)

I hate the word 'passionate' in job adverts. It's usually attached to the most inane nonsense.

I'm currently filling in an application that asks "Are you passionate about improving data quality?" :bash

No I'm not! Who would be?


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## andy0128 (Dec 19, 2003)

No sane person enjoys working. You might at best derive some partial pleasure from it amidst long days sleep deprived working alongside some toxic two faced people


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## Maslow (Dec 24, 2003)

ThatGuy11200 said:


> I hate the word 'passionate' in job adverts. It's usually attached to the most inane nonsense.
> 
> I'm currently filling in an application that asks "Are you passionate about improving data quality?" :bash
> 
> No I'm not! Who would be?


A nerd.


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## komorikun (Jan 11, 2009)

No one is going to have passion for what I do. If they do then something is wrong with them. It doesn't save lives and it's not creative. At best, it's good for people who enjoy organization and classification. 

But if you are really OCD, you won't like it since things keep changing and it's a moving target. Information is also often lacking to really be accurate. And I'm always correcting other people's errors, sometimes repetitive errors which drives me nuts. I often find my own idiotic errors. Sometimes soon after I made the error, sometimes a month later, sometimes several months later.


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## WillYouStopDave (Jul 14, 2013)

I think sometimes people literally brainwash themselves into believing they're passionate about things they have to do. If you're going to be doing it for ages and you have no choice, you might as well believe you're enjoying it.

Imagine doing nothing but making french fries for 4 hours and hating every minute of it. You almost have to believe there's some greater purpose to it beyond earning pocket change. 

Imagine people who work in factories overseas. If you ever get curious and take things apart you can see that some things are made mostly by machine but some things definitely have the human touch. Imagine doing nothing but putting hair dryers together all day every day and being required to act like you're happy about it. What kind of mentality would you need to stay sane if you did that for 10 years straight?


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## ThatGuy11200 (Sep 3, 2012)

komorikun said:


> No one is going to have passion for what I do. If they do then something is wrong with them. It doesn't save lives and it's not creative. At best, it's good for people who enjoy organization and classification.
> 
> But if you are really OCD, you won't like it since things keep changing and it's a moving target. Information is also often lacking to really be accurate. And I'm always correcting other people's errors, sometimes repetitive errors which drives me nuts. I often find my own idiotic errors. Sometimes soon after I made the error, sometimes a month later, sometimes several months later.


What is it you do?


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## truant (Jul 4, 2014)

"Are you passionate about something no one would ever be passionate about?"

Most of the things I'm passionate about seem to fall into this category. My hobbies include designing my own form of psychotherapy, inventing a new subgenre of fiction, and undermining the values of contemporary civilization. Of the three, only the last seems at all popular.

I think it's silly for companies to expect that kind of passion about their products or services. If someone told me they were passionate about customer service during an interview I'd assume they were lying and trying to manipulate me into giving them a job. Which, incidentally, means they'd probably be good at sales. No one is passionate about customer service because people are *******s. But the best way to sell wheelbarrows to *******s is to hire an ******* to sell them.


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## Paul (Sep 26, 2005)

WillYouStopDave said:


> Imagine doing nothing but making french fries for 4 hours and hating every minute of it. You almost have to believe there's some greater purpose to it beyond earning pocket change.


The person who makes french fries for 4 hours is literally feeding people, pretty much the most basic human need, and is contributing in direct easy to see ways to the happiness of countless faces that pass by the drive thru window. They have a purpose. It's bankers and middle managers and marketing people and bitcoin traders and the rest of the leeches who exist only to skim profit from others -- those are the ones who have no greater purpose.


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## Nekobasu (Apr 22, 2018)

ThatGuy11200 said:


> I hate the word 'passionate' in job adverts. It's usually attached to the most inane nonsense.
> 
> I'm currently filling in an application that asks "Are you passionate about improving data quality?" :bash
> 
> No I'm not! Who would be?


lol seriously it says that on the application? *facepalm*

Hey similar subject, I used to be a manager at a lumber yard, and one time I was looking through applications people had sent in, I was hiring for a part time yard position, anyway this kid filled an application out and it was covered with ketchup and mustard. I was like "WTF?" I called him in for an interview just for the laughs, but he ended up working great out there. The ketchup and mustard ended up being because he was working at Mcdonalds when he was filling it out. guess he was passionate eh?


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## Persephone The Dread (Aug 28, 2010)

I'm into sexology so I talk a lot about it in a few places online. One person I talk to is also in contact with professional sexologists (despite not being qualified really, such is his level of interest in certain understudied areas.) Some of the stuff we talk about is very controversial and I'm upset with some of the political agendas that some professional sexologists take on.

Most people I talk to are quite autistic and this is clearly a special interest for some of them. I wouldn't say this is a super uncommon area of interest, but to be into it to the extent I am might be hence why most people I talk to are diagnosed autistic or if not would probably fall into the broad autism phenotype if taking relevant tests. One person I talk to is actually currently studying a completely different subject at university level which must take up a lot of time, and yet is in this one chatroom daily for a considerable amount of time, and on reddit talking about stuff and creating surveys. Most of these are related to one particular topic that he's interested in which I am also interested in, but I'm also interested in most things related to sexology and psychology.

I talk to a bunch of self identified rationalists so I've started discovering more of that community's content too, but I wouldn't say I'm part of it (or trying to be, cultishness freaks me out at a point, having said that I don't read lesswrong atm I've mostly read a few other bloggers) and like... I'm not that intelligent lol. Some of these people are just.. Way above my level.

I'm not really sure how this happened tbh since I basically never talk to people but about a year ago I was researching some stuff and got invited to a chatroom via reddit and then ended up in more chatrooms.

I'm also really into music but that's really common. (listening mostly though I have experimented a tiny bit with music creation/production and briefly self teaching certain instruments, also briefly took cello lessons and went to music school as a kid but learnt very little and these were only breif periods before the age of 10 since anxiety and other stuff got in the way at the time.)

I'm also quite into fantasy and mythology and stuff like that and gender related stuff (which overlaps with sexology.)

I've had many other interests over the years too though (they kind of wax/wane.) I tend to mash up my different stuff so I like reading about sexological stuff in past cultural contexts, and connecting it to mythology, also like reading about androgyny and representations of it in mythology, and I also have read a bunch of stuff about Japanese media and fanworks (a previous special interest of mine was Japanese language + culture,) in connection with sexology or gender. Like this sort of thing. And since I tend to be into fandom generally I also read people's takes on sexology topics related to Western fandom as well.

That's why a lot of my posts here are about these topics. I think people mistake enthusiastic interest for knowledge/intelligence sometimes though which is a bit awkward since there's a lot I don't know about all the topics I'm interested in.

I sort of learnt to not talk too much about stuff in real life, because it bugs people after a while when you make everything about your interests. I'm quite self conscious about how obsessed I seem about certain things, even here though I don't bother filtering here _too _ much. As you can see from the fact that I wrote out this long post that isn't 100% connected to your OP. 

But yeah, I can guarantee that someone probably is passionate about that topic and about any topic, and that a lot of them will probably be diagnosed autistic lol (autistic people can develop the most obscure interests at times and become completely obsessed with whatever they happen to be into.) But certain stuff is almost always going to be considered boring and interviewers know this but expect you to lie anyway and I really don't like that.


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## Maslow (Dec 24, 2003)

If you're passionate about technology, you can make a lot of money being an expert in your field. That is, unless you suffer from SAD, in which case, you're screwed.

Actually, being passionate about some area of study is the secret to success in any field. 

I watched a video last night by a professor who studies the use of propaganda and writes books about it. He lectures and goes on talk shows expounding on his theories. He's probably making a lot of money doing that.

Look at all these political pundits on TV. Some of them are making a fortune... 10s of millions of dollars a year. They're passionate about politics.

I've often wished I was passionate about something. I was going to become an "expert" on databases a while back but lost interest for some reason.


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## LampSandwich (May 5, 2012)

*I think so and I don't want to be... *


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## ThatGuy11200 (Sep 3, 2012)

Persephone The Dread said:


> I'm into sexology so I talk a lot about it in a few places online. One person I talk to is also in contact with professional sexologists (despite not being qualified really, such is his level of interest in certain understudied areas.) Some of the stuff we talk about is very controversial and I'm upset with some of the political agendas that some professional sexologists take on.
> 
> Most people I talk to are quite autistic and this is clearly a special interest for some of them. I wouldn't say this is a super uncommon area of interest, but to be into it to the extent I am might be hence why most people I talk to are diagnosed autistic or if not would probably fall into the broad autism phenotype if taking relevant tests. One person I talk to is actually currently studying a completely different subject at university level which must take up a lot of time, and yet is in this one chatroom daily for a considerable amount of time, and on reddit talking about stuff and creating surveys. Most of these are related to one particular topic that he's interested in which I am also interested in, but I'm also interested in most things related to sexology and psychology.
> 
> ...


Ironically, people with autism probably wouldn't get the job.

Talking about making everything about our interests; I've realised that when I talk to the one person in the last 5 years I consider a friend, we mostly seem to talk about Star Trek and Star Wars. I worry that she gets bored with it, but maybe that's why we get along so well. That and I think we are both the kind of person who tends to focus on one person to get to know well, to the exclusion of other people.

You should play some Bioware games if you haven't already. Someone could write a thesis about sex in those games.



Maslow said:


> If you're passionate about technology, you can make a lot of money being an expert in your field. That is, unless you suffer from SAD, in which case, you're screwed.
> 
> Actually, being passionate about some area of study is the secret to success in any field.
> 
> ...


Being passionate about a subject is one thing. Having the personality to engage other people is another. I've sometimes toyed with the idea of doing Let's Play videos on YouTube. But I know I don't have the personailty for it.


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## AffinityWing (Aug 11, 2013)

I think I've recently discovered a passion for translating from Japanese, so I want to help translate things like previously untranslated songs and visual novels. It's a dream I don't hope to realize, until I've gotten good enough at the language first though, of course.  Since I'm interested in visual novels in particular, I'd love to join a company like Mangagamer one day.


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## Erroll (Jan 18, 2016)

I am passionate about exploring the nature of consciousness, and how physical experience morphs into emotional experience.


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## Itsmelacee (Apr 30, 2014)

Why I choose #selfemployed life. Companies don't care about you.


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## sad1231234 (Jul 10, 2016)

Yes, physical work, to some extent. Makes me feel good about myself, pumps me full of endorphins, and keeps me distracted the **** away from my god damn mental problems. I guess i'm lucky in that area, cause most people cant stand working but for me it makes me feel alive. Like my worries melt away and i feel great and my thoughts are on fire! Haha.


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## sad1231234 (Jul 10, 2016)

andy0128 said:


> No sane person enjoys working. You might at best derive some partial pleasure from it amidst long days sleep deprived working alongside some toxic two faced people


Haha yeah no SANE person enjoys working. Come to think of it, if i didnt have all these self esteem issues and stuff then i would hate working too.



WillYouStopDave said:


> I think sometimes people literally brainwash themselves into believing they're passionate about things they have to do. If you're going to be doing it for ages and you have no choice, you might as well believe you're enjoying it.
> 
> Imagine doing nothing but making french fries for 4 hours and hating every minute of it. You almost have to believe there's some greater purpose to it beyond earning pocket change.
> 
> Imagine people who work in factories overseas. If you ever get curious and take things apart you can see that some things are made mostly by machine but some things definitely have the human touch. Imagine doing nothing but putting hair dryers together all day every day and being required to act like you're happy about it. What kind of mentality would you need to stay sane if you did that for 10 years straight?


making french fries has a purpose though, you are offering people a customer service experience and offering them food. You can smile to yourself at how many people's day you brigthened



Erroll said:


> I am passionate about exploring the nature of consciousness, and how physical experience morphs into emotional experience.


ahh me too but it is very unfortunate that there isnt really any work related to that area. Except psychology, but i dont think i could bite my tongue through so many years of hearing people's problems lol. But yeah exploration of consciosuness is a great thing to do in your free time, and it is very rewarding and carries great importance. Because after all, what is more important in our realm of existence then our very sentience itself?



Itsmelacee said:


> Why I choose #selfemployed life. Companies don't care about you.


Business are good and contrary to popular belief, they dont have to take a lot of money to start up. Some of my parents businesses have been made on a dirt cheap budget yet created revenues that greatly exceeded even many skilled professionals salaries.


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## Erroll (Jan 18, 2016)

sad1231234 said:


> ahh me too but it is very unfortunate that there isnt really any work related to that area. Except psychology, but i dont think i could bite my tongue through so many years of hearing people's problems lol. But yeah exploration of consciosuness is a great thing to do in your free time, and it is very rewarding and carries great importance. Because after all, what is more important in our realm of existence then our very sentience itself?


You're right that virtually nothing is known about the inner workings of consciousness. Theories and philosophical thought abound though.

One theory that I find interesting is that consciousness is the result of a phase change, like water turning into ice or vapor, depending on the temperature. I feel that electrical signals originating in millions of sensors throughout the body become information when they are associated with memories stored in a person's brain.

When information reaches a certain density, via numerous associations with remembered events, it undergoes a phase change into conscious information.

I think that a great experiment (not feasible with current technology)would be to set up a large Markhov neural network, and feed this neural net a recording of the electrical signals of all of the sensory experience that an X year old person has had, and the resulting outgoing electrical signals from the brain to the body. That way the deep net could learn what an X year old experiences and how they react. If the neural net reacts to new input signals the same way that the X year old might have reacted, we might have recreated the X year old's consciousness.


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## sad1231234 (Jul 10, 2016)

Erroll said:


> You're right that virtually nothing is known about the inner workings of consciousness. Theories and philosophical thought abound though.
> 
> One theory that I find interesting is that consciousness is the result of a phase change, like water turning into ice or vapor, depending on the temperature. I feel that electrical signals originating in millions of sensors throughout the body become information when they are associated with memories stored in a person's brain.
> 
> ...


Thats an interesting theory, i havent thought about that. I am more of a believer in consciousness originating from all matter or from certain networks of matter, especially from neural networks of matter. But i guess what you mean is that consciousness sort of originates from a home so to speak or from a headquarters, although i don't know of much information to back that. It would be great if some kind of study carried out would point to how it all worked or something.

Yeah maybe everything is subconscious or something, and undergoes a phase change into consciousness when it reaches a certain level of information association.

Yeah that would be interesting huh, to recreate a form of neural network and to test for any similarities in its behaviour to a sentient biologically brain. I think if they had some huge funds and technological advances along with some brilliant minds then they probably could find some suitable/substantial theory for the origins of consciousness. Too bad the damn governemnts wasting their money on global domination and the lockheed martin project and all this bull**** instead of things that actually matter.


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## Erroll (Jan 18, 2016)

sad1231234 said:


> But i guess what you mean is that consciousness sort of originates from a home so to speak or from a headquarters, although i don't know of much information to back that.


I really believe that headquarters for consciousness lies in the brain. I only know a little bit about a lot of stuff, but I really think that consciousness happens as a result of feedback loops forming between different areas of the brain. Ever hold two mirrors up facing each other. You can see them reflecting each other back and forth tending towards infinity. I think that feedback loops in consciousness are like that. I think such loops match current sensory experience with memories, in order to recognize similarities and differences in/between current sensory experience and remembered sensory experience.



sad1231234 said:


> Yeah maybe everything is subconscious or something, and undergoes a phase change into consciousness when it reaches a certain level of information association.


I've read that most everything happens sub consciously. Benjamin Libet did an experiment that showed that certain body movements happen 500 milliseconds before we are conscious of them.

Also along these lines, have you ever given up on remembering a name or something, and gone about your business, when, out of nowhere, the name that you were searching for pops into your consciousness? Subconscious works in the background working on problems and endeavors, as we go about our conscious daily business. It's like subconscious forms our thoughts and consciousness is just to communicate our thoughts out to the world.



sad1231234 said:


> Too bad the damn governemnts wasting their money on global domination and the lockheed martin project and all this bull**** instead of things that actually matter.


Well, you're a smart guy, sad. Why don't you take up an academic career in consciousness studies, although there is no established discipline called that? But psychology, physics, biology, neurology, cytology and just about any area of study, can be related to consciousness. If I had any smarts myself, I would look at how well Chaos Theory matches what's going on in the deterministic chaos gong on in feedback loops between different areas of the brain. Chaos Theory has established certain recurrent patterns happen in deterministic chaos, with periods of chaos in between. James Gleick does a nice job of giving an overview of chaos theory in his book "Chaos; the making of a new science. Douglas Hofstadter's "I am a strange loop" also talks about feedback loops in relation to consciousness. Maybe you can build a new and improved sad1231234


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## sad1231234 (Jul 10, 2016)

Erroll said:


> I really believe that headquarters for consciousness lies in the brain. I only know a little bit about a lot of stuff, but I really think that consciousness happens as a result of feedback loops forming between different areas of the brain. Ever hold two mirrors up facing each other. You can see them reflecting each other back and forth tending towards infinity. I think that feedback loops in consciousness are like that. I think such loops match current sensory experience with memories, in order to recognize similarities and differences in/between current sensory experience and remembered sensory experience.
> 
> I've read that most everything happens sub consciously. Benjamin Libet did an experiment that showed that certain body movements happen 500 milliseconds before we are conscious of them.
> 
> ...


Thats interesting, about the mirrors. I never thought of it like that. Maybe consciousness is some kind of signal, according to a popular theory, and our brain is a receptor which sort of amplifies/builds-upon that signal to the point of creating consciosuness as we know it?

Oh yeah, a lot of things happen subconsciously, our conscious brains are like the very tip of the ice berg of human consciousness.

Yeah i have also had that happen all the time lol. Exactly, its like the conscious mind is this sort of interface between our subconscious and our reality. I think that according to evolution we would have evolved that way to sort of function more efficiently or something.

Thanks haha although i wouldnt quite say it is smartness, but rather the desire to think and to question and to analyze/scrutinize, an ability that everyone possesses. I guess im not so interested in those career choices lol, im kind of busy with the "why dont i have any friends" stage in my life to be thinking about careers lol. Hmm i dont see why you dont look into such logical endeavors, you most certainly seem to be mentally capable of it. Interesting thoughm i'll definately check into some of those theories some time!


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## Erroll (Jan 18, 2016)

sad1231234 said:


> Thats interesting, about the mirrors. I never thought of it like that. Maybe consciousness is some kind of signal, according to a popular theory, and our brain is a receptor which sort of amplifies/builds-upon that signal to the point of creating consciosuness as we know it?


Perhaps a civilization explores the universe by broadcasting entangled copies of their DNA molecule to distant planets. Like having some of your neurons light years outside your head.



sad1231234 said:


> Exactly, its like the conscious mind is this sort of interface between our subconscious and our reality. I think that according to evolution we would have evolved that way to sort of function more efficiently or something.


I like thinking of the consciousness as an interface to reality.



sad1231234 said:


> im kind of busy with the "why dont i have any friends" stage in my life to be thinking about careers lol. Hmm i dont see why you dont look into such logical endeavors, you most certainly seem to be mentally capable of it. Interesting thoughm i'll definately check into some of those theories some time!


Yeah. I don't have many friends either. My wife. An old friend with whom I have recently become reacquainted. I just wish that having friends didn't seem like work. I guess I'd just like to figure out how to enjoy people.

I've had my career already. Professional loafer nowadays


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## leaf in the wind (Mar 28, 2017)

WillYouStopDave said:


> I think sometimes people literally brainwash themselves into believing they're passionate about things they have to do. If you're going to be doing it for ages and you have no choice, you might as well believe you're enjoying it.
> 
> Imagine doing nothing but making french fries for 4 hours and hating every minute of it. You almost have to believe there's some greater purpose to it beyond earning pocket change.
> 
> Imagine people who work in factories overseas. If you ever get curious and take things apart you can see that some things are made mostly by machine but some things definitely have the human touch. Imagine doing nothing but putting hair dryers together all day every day and being required to act like you're happy about it. What kind of mentality would you need to stay sane if you did that for 10 years straight?


_Sometimes _I think I actually find meaning in my job, then wonder how much of it is just self-brainwashing so I don't have a mental breakdown (because what I currently do has no meaning). I don't know why I'm at the office most of the time, or why employment in my position there is even necessary.

@OP
I think improving data quality is a good interest though, professionally-speaking... Many people would be passionate about it if they're into process improvement and value-added activity. Pretty much everywhere I've ever worked or interviewed with has cited "data integrity" as the major weakness in the company. I would have a passion for it if I had any kind of programming/dev skill for it.


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