Envying the Spark: Learn to Grow Your Own Fire
I watch my friend describe his new architectural project with genuine excitement, eyes brightening as he explains design challenges and creative solutions. His passion for his work radiates like heat from a fire I can’t seem to light in myself.
We envy passionate workers because they’ve solved the riddle we can’t: how to love what pays you.
My work provides income, stability, occasional satisfaction, but never the electric enthusiasm I witness in people who’ve found their calling. They inhabit their professional lives with energy I reserve for hobbies, bringing their full selves to work while I bring only my competent self.
The distinction is painful to observe. When my friend talks about his project, he leans forward, gestures expansively, loses track of time. When I talk about my work, I’m pleasant, professional, informative—and utterly hollow. I sound like I’m describing someone else’s job, narrating rather than experiencing.
Passionate workers have merged identity with income in ways that seem miraculous to those of us still searching.
They’ve achieved what we’re told is the ultimate professional goal: finding work that doesn’t feel like work. Their Mondays don’t require motivation because they’re genuinely curious about what the week will bring. Their evenings sometimes blur into work not because they’re overworked but because they’re engaged.
This isn’t the toxic “love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life” rhetoric that obscures exploitation. These are people who’ve found genuine alignment between what they’re good at, what they’re paid for, and what they actually care about. The alignment seems almost impossibly rare, like winning a lottery most of us didn’t even know we’d entered.
We resent passionate workers because they make our own work feel hollow by comparison.
This resentment is quiet, ungenerous, something I’m barely willing to admit even to myself. I’m happy for my friend. I celebrate his success. But his enthusiasm also highlights everything my work isn’t, throws into sharp relief the gap between earning and meaning.
When someone genuinely loves their job, they reveal what the rest of us are missing—the possibility that work could be fulfillment rather than obligation. Their enthusiasm highlights our resignation, their energy emphasizes our endurance.
Their joy makes our acceptance feel like settling.
Because I have accepted my work. Made peace with it. Found the rhythm that makes it bearable, sometimes even pleasant. I’m competent, occasionally respected, adequately compensated. By most measures, I’ve succeeded professionally.
But I haven’t found passion. And watching someone who has—someone who lights up discussing technical challenges I’d find tedious, who voluntarily reads about their field on vacation, who seems to bring their whole alive self to work—makes my acceptance feel like defeat.
The teacher who can’t stop talking about innovative lesson plans, the programmer who codes for fun on weekends, the doctor who still gets excited about helping patients after twenty years—they possess something precious that most of us have either lost or never found.
Passionate workers have access to meaning we’re still seeking.
They’ve answered the question that haunts so many careers: why does this matter? Not financially, not practically, but existentially. Why should I care about this beyond the paycheck? What makes this worth not just my time but my investment, my energy, my full attention?
Passionate workers have answers. The architect sees beauty and function merging, creating spaces that shape human experience. The teacher watches understanding dawn in students’ eyes. The doctor witnesses healing. Their work connects to something larger than tasks and deliverables.
What connects my work to anything beyond itself? I struggle to articulate it. The metrics I meet matter to someone, somewhere, but the chain connecting my effort to meaningful impact is long and abstract. I process information so others can make decisions that might eventually affect outcomes I’ll never witness.
It’s not meaningless. But it’s not meaningful enough to generate passion.
But perhaps our jealousy reveals the possibility that passion can be cultivated rather than just discovered.
This is the uncomfortable question that passion-envy raises. Are some people simply lucky, stumbling into work that naturally excites them? Or have they cultivated enthusiasm through practice, through choosing to engage deeply rather than waiting to feel engaged?
My friend wasn’t always passionate about architecture. I remember him uncertain in college, trying different paths. The passion developed through engagement, through accumulating expertise, through finding the specific aspects of the field that resonated with his particular combination of interests and abilities.
Maybe passion isn’t found like treasure buried in predetermined locations. Maybe it’s grown like a plant, through attention and cultivation and the patient work of engagement.
What does it mean to find passion in work? Perhaps it means finding the intersection of competence and curiosity, the place where you’re skilled enough to see complexity rather than just difficulty, and curious enough to care about the problems that complexity presents.
My friend is passionate about architecture not just because buildings interest him, but because he’s developed enough expertise to see nuances that make the work intellectually engaging. The programming enthusiast isn’t excited by all code—she’s passionate about elegant solutions to difficult problems, which requires enough skill to recognize elegance.
Passion might require a foundation of competence that makes the work interesting rather than just challenging.
Are passionate workers born or made? Probably both. Some people seem naturally inclined toward certain fields, demonstrate early interest and aptitude. But even natural inclination requires cultivation. The musical prodigy still needs thousands of hours of practice to develop passion that sustains a career.
And some passion clearly develops without early indication. The accountant who discovered a love for tax law in her thirties. The engineer who became passionate about project management after years of technical work. The career-changer who found calling after decades in the wrong field.
If passion can emerge this way—cultivated rather than discovered, developed rather than innate—then perhaps it’s more accessible than we imagine. Perhaps we’re waiting for lightning to strike when we should be building the conditions that make fire possible.
And what would change if we stopped waiting to discover our passion and started creating it within whatever work we’re doing?
This feels simultaneously hopeful and unsatisfying. Hopeful because it suggests agency, because cultivating passion is within our control in ways that discovering it isn’t. Unsatisfying because it sounds like making peace with settling, like convincing yourself to love what’s in front of you rather than finding what you actually love.
But maybe that’s a false distinction. Maybe all passion, even the kind that looks like discovery, actually involves cultivation. The architect who seems naturally passionate has chosen, repeatedly, to engage deeply with his work. The teacher who still loves teaching after decades has cultivated that love through practice, through finding new aspects to care about as old enthusiasms fade.
Perhaps passion isn’t a static state you achieve but a practice you maintain—the ongoing choice to engage fully, to care about quality, to find meaning in craft even when the work itself isn’t inherently meaningful.
I don’t know if I can cultivate passion for my current work. The gap between what it is and what would excite me feels vast. But I also recognize that I’ve never tried—never invested the attention and curiosity that might reveal hidden complexity, never engaged deeply enough to develop the expertise that makes work interesting rather than just adequate.
My envy of passionate workers contains a question I’ve been avoiding: What if the difference between us isn’t that they found the right work and I didn’t, but that they chose to engage fully and I’ve chosen to hold back?
What if I’ve been waiting for work to be worthy of my passion when passion might be what makes work worthy?
This doesn’t resolve the envy. My friend’s architectural passion still highlights what my work lacks. But it shifts the question from “why don’t I have passion?” to “what would it take to cultivate it?”
Maybe passion in work isn’t about finding the perfect career but about bringing full engagement to whatever career you’re in. About developing expertise that makes the work intellectually interesting. About finding the aspects that connect to something you care about, even if the whole doesn’t.
Or maybe some work really is passion-resistant, and the wisdom is in recognizing when you’re trying to cultivate fire in rain rather than finding drier ground.
I don’t have answers. But I’m learning that envy, while uncomfortable, is instructive. It reveals what we value, what we’re missing, what might be possible if we approached work differently.
The passionate workers I envy aren’t happier in every dimension of life. They’re not without stress or struggle or frustration. But they’ve achieved something I haven’t: integration. Their professional selves and their authentic selves overlap substantially. They’re not performing a work persona; they’re being themselves in a context that values what they naturally bring.
That’s worth envying. That’s worth pursuing. Even if I never achieve the electric enthusiasm I witness in my friend, even if cultivation yields only warm interest rather than fire, it seems worth trying to close the gap between the person I am at work and the person I am everywhere else.
Because in the end, the envy reveals not just what they have but what I want: work that feels like expression rather than obligation, that engages my full attention rather than just my competent performance, that matters enough to me that talking about it doesn’t require performing enthusiasm I don’t feel.
The passionate workers have that. And watching them, I understand both why I envy them and what I might do about it.
