TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the subject of doing what you love in your life. Something that’s often a lot easier said than done. Another variant on the subject could be that old quotation: “Do what you love and the money will follow.” Something that, actually, from what I’ve observed now from being 50 years old, very very few people actually do.
I remember first hearing that phrase, “Do what you love and the money will follow,” in my early 20s, maybe even in my late teens. At some level, it made a lot of sense to me. In part, I was doing a lot of what I didn’t love at that point in my life—studying in college, doing stuff that I really didn’t like that much and that I found boring, at least formally on paper. But in my private time, I was doing a lot of what I loved.
When I think about this concept of doing what you love in your life, I speak now at 50 years old as someone who has made a life of doing a lot of what I love, often at a lot of sacrifice. I think also doing what you love, if you’re going to really do what you love in your life, inevitably is going to set you on a course, sometimes a collision course, for a lot of sacrifice. Because from what I’ve seen, we live in a world, we live in a conglomeration of so many different societies where most people, from what I’ve observed, don’t do what they love a lot of the time. A lot of the structure of their lives is based on doing many many things that they dislike or even hate.
I remember when I was a kid, one of my dad’s friends once told me, he says, “I’ll tell you what the definition of work is. Work is doing what you hate.” Work is—that’s just reality. You do what you like in your spare time, if you’re fortunate enough to have any. I remember hearing that, and this was a guy who seemed to know a lot more about life than I did. I remember thinking, “Hmm, okay, I guess he’s right. Work is you do what you hate in life, and you just suck it up, and that’s what life is. That’s what being an adult in the modern world means.” Well, ah, now I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree that it has to be that way.
I think of the criticism that a lot of people can throw at me, and when I’ve talked about this, have thrown at me: “You’re just speaking as someone who has had a lot of privilege. You’ve been very fortunate in life, and it’s even an insult to talk about such things when so many people don’t have the opportunity or opportunities that you have and have had.” In part, I agree with this; in part, I don’t. The part that I agree with is, yes, I’m very fortunate. I am very very fortunate to have a life where I can spend so much of my time and energy doing what I love. But I don’t think this privilege was something that really was handed to me.
I mean, yes, I’ve been in places in the world where people do start life with less fortune, less privilege in some ways than I have. There’s no doubt about that. But I know a lot of people who started life with the exact same privilege and fortune that I did, and sometimes more privilege and more fortune than I had. And they very quickly ended up becoming people who spent their life doing what they hated, and they still do that. I see all of these people all around, and I realized from a very very early age I was different.
Also, I spent a lot of years doing what I didn’t like, and at some level, I knew I didn’t like it. I knew that when I had a chance to become more free, I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to go to school and study stuff that I hated and listen to teachers and professors who I didn’t respect and who I didn’t admire or emulate. I didn’t want a life like they had, so why would I do everything that they told me to do? It seemed pretty clear to me at a certain point that if I do what they say, all that’s going to happen to me is I am going to become like them.
Then I also saw that a lot of people, most people, the masses of the norm, actually spent their lives, or the best hours of their day, often many many days in the week, most weeks in the year, doing things that they really disliked, hating it. Then spending the free time that they had kind of living for addiction, for addictive comfort, finding ways to distract themselves from the misery of their lives. This was the time in their life that they called the happy times, where they went out drinking and partying, using drugs, gambling, doing all sorts of other things that were addictive. Lots of romance, sometimes very unhealthy romance, sex, raising children who they really didn’t like that much.
So many people I knew, they were raising children. They defended raising children; they called it the greatest thing to become parents. But they didn’t really seem to like their kids that much. They didn’t seem to love their kids that much. They spent a lot of time complaining about their children, being unhappy about their children, and raising children who didn’t seem to be very happy themselves. The parents were putting a lot of energy often into forcing their children into molds that their children didn’t really want to be in, in a way that parents were forcing the children to become like the parents. Yet this was the thing that they considered to be the greatest thing of value in their life, the thing they were the most proud of, the thing that they got the most societal acceptance for. It seemed very unappealing for me. I didn’t want this.
Not that I didn’t want to have kids, because I did early on. But I thought if I am ever going to have kids, which I ended up not doing, I want this to be part of a life of passion and love. I want it to come out of a passionate relationship. I want it to come out of an extremely healthy place in my life. Certain of those criteria have not been met. I also want to raise kids, if I ever were going to do it, in a world that was nurturing of children, profoundly nurturing of children, in a community that was profoundly nurturing of children and nurturing of me too. I really don’t see this very much in the world.
So how do I live a life doing what I love? Well, gosh, where do I start? I think the main thing, the fundamental thing, is following my curiosity, following my passion. Thinking to myself, “What do I really want to be spending my life doing? What do I want to spend my day doing? What do I want to do right now?”
So I think of today, when I woke up in the morning. What did I feel I loved the most? What would I have loved to do the most, given all the options of what I had to do? I thought, “I want to make videos. In fact, I want to make a video on this very subject today.” The thing that allowed me to do this was having lived a life for many many weeks, months, years, now decades, that gave myself the freedom to do this.
What I’ve seen is that what really helped—and this is probably in the biggest picture—is first not having settled on a career that I didn’t love. Instead, yes, I did a lot of work throughout most of my 20s that I felt mixed about. I tried to do what I liked as best I could, but there was nothing that I found until I was 27 years old that said to me, that spoke to me, that said, “Daniel, this is who I am. This is what I really want to do. This is what I want to devote more than a week or a month or two months to doing. This is what I want for a career.” And that first career for me, the thing that I said, “Oh my God, I feel it, I know it, I’m 100% confident in,” I want to be a psychotherapist. And it was a perfect match.
For me, for almost a decade, I absolutely loved it. The last, well, hmm, year and a half, two years, I started realizing, although I still loved it in a lot of ways, there were other things that I loved more. And for me, that precipitated a very huge shift in my life and a big sacrifice. Suddenly, I was in a position where I realized to follow the course of my life, I don’t want to just spend the next few decades of my existence, the prime of my middle ages of life, just doing a job that I no longer felt the same passion for. And so I shifted careers. That was something that was key, and that was something that brought up a lot of confusion, not only in myself but the people around me.
Most people I knew looked at me, I’m like, “You’re really going to give up a career? You’ve finally built a great psychotherapy practice. You have a real skill. You have a full practice of clients. You have a beautiful apartment.” I was working out of my apartment at that point. Everything was working. I was in a great neighborhood in New York City. I was finally, after how many years of life, making enough money to live on, to have a nice life. I paid off all my debts. Everything was great. I was helping a lot of people. But there was just something in me that was old and familiar, a little voice that said, “There’s something more that you want out of this existence. You’ve learned what you came to learn.”
And then I think about decisions about doing what I love that have nothing to do with career, like getting away from my family. Doing what I love, meaning being around people who love me and respect me, being alone rather than being around people who were rude to me and cut me down. Another thing that I found that I really loved was uncovering my true history. The true history, especially of how I had been traumatized—a history that my family system, incidentally, who were the very ones who had traumatized me primarily, had denied me. They denied me knowing my own history.
What I found is that some deep and passionate and self-loving part of me became profoundly curious about this history. And more than just curious, desperate to know it. Because I started figuring out that if I don’t know this history, know exactly what happened to me, and then solve it—solve the grieving that’s inside of me, solve all these confusing feelings that are bottled up and buried inside of me—I’m going to be a miserable person. I’m going to be unhappy. I’m going to have a purposeless, horrible existence, just like them, like the people who harmed me and like so much of the world.
And so when I talk about really studying my history, making sense of it, unpacking it, uncovering it, also looking at things that I had done that were not healthy, that were not good loving things in the world, not altruistic things, not to other people or to myself, I certainly know how painful and unpleasant and horrible it was to go through this process. But the reason I bring it up is because when people say, “Oh, you’re so privileged to be able to do things at your life at 50 years old that you want to do, to live the life that you love,” I think, you know, I think anybody who really wants to unpack their history can begin this process. It doesn’t require money. It doesn’t require education. It doesn’t require being of a fancy western nationality, any of these things. But it will be hell, no matter how much privilege you come from.
And the hell for me in not only beginning to study my real and true history, my history of trauma, all the buried things inside of me, but to really make progress on this path was that my family system rejected me. And that was horrible. And it’s like, in a way, it seems very counterintuitive, especially to the subject of this video, that doing what I loved would bring me misery. And I think the reason that I kept doing it is because somehow I knew, in part because of intuition and in part because I had already started to make progress, and I therefore had actual intellectual data to study through both of these different areas. I realized not only this was saving my life, but this will save my life, really saved my life.
So no matter how bad my family system, my greater family system, the society around me turned against me, when I started really studying my history, I knew the part of me, the core and engine of truth inside of me, knew that this was the greatest thing I could do for myself. This was bigger than any career. This was bigger than any fun thing I would do, any romance, relationship, activity, art that I could make. This was the key of my life, and this is what I loved.
And when I saw that the world around me, society, my greater family system, but primarily my parents, hated me doing this most important thing that brought my life true value, it was like a wake-up call for me. And it actually shined a whole new light on my history and helped me to realize that my society, my greater family system, and my parents had never, on the deepest core level, wanted me to do what I really loved. And that is when I really began to turn my back on those sick sides of them.
For a long time, I thought maybe by becoming more me, they will love me more, because I really still believed they deeply loved me. And I hoped that they would follow this path of exploring themselves and becoming more real. That was fantasy. It was incorrect. It never happened. Instead, they turned more and more against me, and I realized how stuck they were—my parents, my greater family system, the world at large. And that, in part, is what motivates me to make a video about the value in doing what we love, what I love. Because it actually, on a really deep level, is very, very uncommon.
Starting with the internal exploration of following our curiosity to know our own history, to know who we really are, and then to extrapolate from that to build an external life—relationships, friendships, romance, whatever—a career, the whole way we exist in relation to the world that’s based on doing what we really love, it’s actually very rare. And so I come here to share my own experience of how it was possible for me. And all these decades later, continuing on this path, a path which I’ve discovered I can’t seem to control very well. The more I do what I love, the more it seems that I have no choice but to continue doing what I love, no matter what the sacrifice is.
I mean, I’m much poorer than I ever was when I was a psychotherapist. I’m not bringing in all the money that I was bringing in, even though compared to other psychotherapists, I charged a lot less. I think actually because I really loved my clients and wasn’t trying to milk them for all their money. Instead, I was trying to be as fair as possible because I loved them out of an extension of loving myself. I wanted to be fair to them. But even now, I earn much less than that. I make much less money, but I don’t care. I mean, granted, it would be nice to make more, but I really don’t care because I have the freedom to follow my passion.
And I think, in general, what would change the dynamic of, well, the greater society, my family system, average people in general, that would allow them to do more of what they loved would be if they were willing to make more sacrifices, suffer more pain, be outside of the norm. And I think it is terrifying. And I think for a lot of people, it’s very hard to start this process and to build the nexus of a deep internal self-loving life that doesn’t require as much dependency on social relationships with others, with the family system.
If people only could find some way to survive and have a self-loving life more outside the family system, more in their own individual unique way, it’s very difficult. But I think if people could figure out how to do that more and more at the beginning, I think it could grow and grow. Gosh, and I think what a world we could live in if everybody could.
Do this, and I think this is actually the birthright of every person and the birthright of our species as a whole. For every individual to live a life really following the truth of their true inner self, connecting with the truth of their inner self, healing all the traumas that had been foisted on them, having relationships based on the truth of who they really are, living in community with other people who are doing what they love, having meaning and purpose in each day, and not just living with the philosophy that work is you have to just do it to suck it up so that you can finish work and then go participate in comfort-laden addictions. To turn that whole dynamic around, I picture a world where everyone in our species would do that. And it may yet come someday, but nay, and I hope for that.
[Music] You.