why are we lying to young people about work?

hard work isn't the tax you pay for living, it's the tuition for a life worth having -your fav gen z philosopher x

"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life," I was told countless times growing up.

This is bullshit we've been feeding kids for decades.

We tell them that if they just find their passion, work will magically transform into endless joy, as if difficulty is just a symptom of being in the wrong job rather than an inevitable part of doing anything worthwhile. As if work were some unfortunate byproduct of insufficient enthusiasm rather than the very engine of human flourishing.

This lie has metastasized through a generation raised on the gospel of self-optimization and peace-protection.

Walk into any elementary school today and ask twenty kids what they want to be when they grow up. Fifteen will say "influencer" or "YouTuber," drawn not by any particular message they're burning to share with the world, but by the intoxicating mirage of work that doesn't look like work. They see someone chatting into a camera from their unmade bed, turning morning thoughts into millions of views, clicks into Lamborghinis. And, of course, they don't see the 3am editing sessions, the constant anxiety about algorithm changes, the soul-crushing grind of performing happiness for an audience that could abandon you tomorrow.

I don't blame the kids for wanting this. Hell, I'd probably want it too if I were nine years old watching makeup unboxing videos. But what scares me is that we've trained them to see struggle as evidence they're on the wrong path. We've convinced an entire generation that if work feels hard, they must be doing it wrong.

Everything worth having lives on the other side of effort.

Everything good requires tending. Everything beautiful demands maintenance.

The people who understand this most deeply are often the happiest, because they've made peace with the beautiful burden of nurturing. They know that the dishes exist because they've been eating good meals all week. The laundry piles up because they've been living a life worth getting dressed for.

Consider the parents who will tell you, with tears in their eyes, that having children is the most meaningful thing they've ever done. Ask these same people about sleepless nights with colicky babies, teenage rebellion, college tuition anxiety, or the daily negotiations over screen time and vegetables. They won't deny the work… they'll tell you it's precisely through the work that the meaning emerges. The 2 AM feedings don't disappear when you love your child; they become sacred because you love your child.

The same principle applies to every domain of human flourishing. Want a beautiful home? You'll become intimate with HVAC systems, property taxes, and the eternal cycle of cleaning. Want a thriving relationship? You'll have conversations that make you uncomfortable, apologize when you're wrong, and choose love when it would be easier to choose resentment. Want to be an artist? You'll spend more time on tedious technical skills, mind-numbing grant applications, and self-promotion than you will on pure creative expression.

And to extend this: I see people online constantly lamenting that they can't make or keep friends in adulthood, as if friendship is something that just happens to you rather than something you actively create. This, too, requires intentional effort. Want to get invited to dinner parties? Start throwing them. Menu planning, grocery runs, washing dishes until midnight while your guests laugh in the next room. Want good friends? Be the one who texts first, who remembers birthdays, who shows up with coffee when someone's having a terrible week. Be the person who helps with moves even when you'd rather stay home in your pajamas, who plans the group trips that everyone will remember years later.

We cannot keep buying the fallacy that everything meaningful should feel effortless, including the relationships that make life worth living.

The work doesn't vanish when you find your passion.

The work, hopefully, becomes workable.

We've made "work" synonymous with suffering, when it should be synonymous with building. Tending a garden requires effort, but you get to eat the tomatoes. Raising children is exhausting, but you get to watch them become themselves. Creating something meaningful will drain you, but you get to point at it and say, "I made that."

Our cultural obsession with finding passion has obscured a more fundamental truth: discipline matters more than motivation.

Motivation is weather: changeable, unpredictable, often absent when you need it most. Discipline is climate: the steady, reliable conditions you create for yourself regardless of how you feel on any given day.

The novelist who writes every morning before checking their phone isn't motivated every morning. The entrepreneur building their third startup isn't passionate about bookkeeping or HR complaints. The teacher who stays late to help struggling students isn't always inspired by lesson planning. They've all learned something our passion-obsessed culture struggles to accept: consistency beats intensity, and showing up beats feeling like it.

This is why the influencer dream is so seductive and so dangerous. It promises intensity without consistency, passion without discipline, reward without work. It's the lottery ticket approach to career planning, and like most lottery tickets, it's a tax on not understanding probability.

Instead of asking children what their dream job is, we should be asking different questions entirely!

What kind of life do you want to build? What values do you want your work to reflect? What skills do you want to develop? How do you want to contribute to the world around you? What kind of people do you want to work alongside?

And then:

What are you willing to sacrifice for those things? What discomfort are you willing to endure? What would make you proud to be tired at the end of the day?

If you want flexibility, are you willing to trade some security? If you want creativity, are you prepared for financial uncertainty? If you want to help people, can you handle seeing them at their worst? If you want to build something, are you ready for the loneliness of starting from zero?

These questions acknowledge that work and passion can be separate things... Your passion might be birdwatching or medieval history or competitive sailing. Your profession might be accounting or nursing or software development. The goal does not have to be to collapse these categories, but to ensure your profession serves your broader life vision.

Good work should do at least one of these things: fund the life you actually want to live, align with values you can defend at dinner parties, surround you with people who challenge you to grow, or teach you skills that compound like interest over decades. Great work does several of these at once.

But work doesn't have to feel like play, and you sure as hell don't have to love every minute of it.

In fact, here's what we should tell young people instead of chasing passion: "You won't love every minute of your dream job. The surgeon doesn't love insurance paperwork. The chef doesn't love inventory. The teacher doesn't love grading. But they love what the work builds, what it enables, who it serves."

“Find your passion” is also… well, bullshit.

We tell young people to "find their passion" as if there's a vast forest before them, and somewhere among the millions of trees stands the one perfect specimen that will unlock their life's purpose.

This metaphor used to paralyze me more than inspire.

Most eighteen-year-olds' genuine passions involve hanging out with friends, playing video games, binge-watching series, or listening to music. These are lovely ways to spend time, but they rarely translate into economically viable careers for most people.

The unsexy truth is that the path to a life that includes your actual passions often runs through decidedly unglamorous work.

The marketing coordinator position at a healthcare startup might not set your soul on fire, but it could teach you about digital strategy, introduce you to fascinating people building something meaningful, and fund your weekend rock climbing adventures. Your first job out of college doesn't need to carry the weight of your entire identity! It just needs to teach you something and pay your rent.

Life is modular, not linear. You don't choose a career at twenty-two and stick with it for forty years like some kind of professional arranged marriage. Instead of hunting for the mythical perfect tree, follow your curiosity. What ideas make you pause while scrolling? What conversations do you find yourself returning to days later? When a friend mentions something interesting at dinner, what makes you want to know more?

A year after college graduation, my friend Sebin introduced me to an exercise that changed how I thought about direction-finding. She handed me a piece of paper and asked me to mind-map everything I actually thought about during a typical week, not what I thought I should be thinking about, but what genuinely occupied my mental space. The resulting map became a roadmap for the coming year: topics to read more about, people to seek out for conversations, rabbit holes worth exploring.

PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO.

this was mine. :) DM me / tag me in yours!

But this kind of self-directed exploration requires something many young people have been actively discouraged from developing: comfort with uncertainty and struggle.

Gen Z has been raised on the mantra of "protecting your peace", the idea that anything causing stress or discomfort should be eliminated from your life. This advice, while well-intentioned, has created a generation allergic to necessary friction.

We’ve been told that their mental health depends on avoiding difficult conversations, challenging situations, and uncomfortable growth.

But peace isn't the absence of problems, it's the presence of purpose that makes problems worth solving. The happiest people aren't those who've eliminated difficulty from their lives; they're those who've found difficulty worth enduring.

We're becoming the soft, floating people from Wall-E. Ordering everything to our doorstep, swiping instead of talking, letting AI write our emails and create our art. Convenience is stealing everything from us if we let it. The friction is where the growth happens. The resistance is where we build strength. Work, real work, will give us fulfillment in ways we never expected, in ways that all the optimization hacks and life shortcuts never could.

In the 1990s, researchers at Biosphere 2 created a self-contained ecosystem under a massive dome, complete with rainforests, deserts, and an ocean. They grew trees of every kind, providing perfect conditions: optimal light, water, nutrients. But something strange happened: as the trees grew taller, they began falling over. They were dying from their own weight.

The problem? No wind. In nature, trees develop stress wood in response to wind resistance: dense, strong fibers that anchor them and help them withstand storms. Without wind, the Biosphere 2 trees grew tall and beautiful but fundamentally weak. They had no roots deep enough to support their own growth.

In nature, adversity isn't the enemy of growth. It's the condition for it.

Ultimately, here's what I think we should tell young people about work: it will be harder than you expect and more rewarding than you can imagine, sometimes on the same day.

You will have moments of doubt, periods of frustration, and projects that fail despite your best efforts! You will also have breakthroughs that justify months of struggle, relationships that sustain you through difficult seasons, and the quiet satisfaction of competence earned through repetition.

We owe young people the truth: hard work isn't the tax you pay for living, it's the tuition for a life worth having. Everything good requires work. Discipline trumps motivation. Meaning emerges not from avoiding struggle but from choosing struggle that serves something larger than yourself.

The dishes will always need doing.

The question is whether you're doing them in service of a life worth living.