What's wrong with passion?
An excerpt from my fave grad school professor’s latest Metropolis article:
Passion is not enthusiasm. It is not love. It is not enjoyment, and it
is not flow. Passion is an unstoppable overflowing of emotion that
destroys in its satisfaction, that torpedoes lives and marriages and
nations, that shoots husbands or coworkers or strangers in rage. It is
the hot lava of the soul, and it burns what it pours over. It is not
the positive team-building thing your supervisor would have you
believe. Passion causes wars and brutal killings and divorces, and has
astronauts wearing Depends and the headmistresses of girls’ schools
going to jail, and gets husbands run over in parking lots. To say that
a bunch of software engineers or graphic designers are passionate about
their work is to try to interject sex and confusion and addiction and
desire into a kind of work that is essentially asexual, organized, left
brain, and sober.
Aaaah, what I wouldn’t give to have Natalia’s seminar once a week again, just to keep the intellectual juices flowing….