I paid for my own degree with a bank loan while working full-time in my early twenties. There was no dramatic “follow your dreams” montage, no wise mentor appearing at the right time and definitely no rich relative waiting in the background to rescue me if things went wrong. It was work, classes, assignments, repayments, exhaustion and trying to convince myself that all of it would eventually make sense.
For a long time, work was not something I thought about in terms of passion or purpose. It was survival. You needed a salary because bills existed. You needed qualifications because better jobs supposedly came with them. You needed experience because every job advertisement somehow wanted three years of experience for a role that was apparently “entry level.” The whole thing felt like a game where everyone knew the rules except the people actually trying to enter it.
As I got older, though, the idea of a career became more complicated.
We are constantly told to do what we love. Find your passion. Build a meaningful career. Wake up excited to go to work. There is an entire industry built around helping people discover their “purpose,” as though somewhere deep inside all of us is a job title waiting to be uncovered.
At the same time, we are also told to be realistic.
Passion does not always pay the bills. Meaningful work is often strangely underpaid. Jobs involving care, education, community, social impact or the arts can demand enormous emotional investment while offering salaries that make you wonder whether fulfilment is supposed to cover the bills.
Then there are people who choose work primarily because it pays well. They may not love what they do. They may not feel called to it. But they are financially secure, they do not need three side hustles, and they can go home without wondering whether next month will be difficult.
So which person has made the better choice?
I am not sure that question is even fair.
Someone who chooses money is not necessarily shallow. They may be supporting parents, paying off debt, building savings, planning for a home or simply trying to create a life where an unexpected expense does not become a crisis.
Someone who chooses passion is not necessarily irresponsible either. They may have decided that spending most of their waking hours doing something they dislike is simply too high a price to pay for a larger salary.
The problem is that we judge both.
Tell people you are leaving a well-paying job because you are miserable and someone will inevitably ask, “But what about the money?”
Tell people you are staying in a job purely because the salary is good and suddenly someone will tell you life is too short to be unhappy.
Apparently adulthood is about making the correct decision while being criticised for whichever decision you make.
The contradiction becomes even stranger when we look at the way we talk about work itself.
We say money cannot buy happiness, but money determines an extraordinary number of things that affect our happiness. Where we live. Whether we can afford healthcare. Whether we can travel. Whether we can leave a bad situation. Whether we can take a break. Whether we can help someone we love. Whether one broken appliance becomes an inconvenience or an emergency.
At the same time, money cannot give back an entire decade spent exhausted.
That is where the idea of “just work hard” starts becoming uncomfortable.
There is nothing wrong with hard work. Most of us would not have gotten very far without it. But somewhere along the way, exhaustion became proof of character. We started treating busyness as though it were a personality trait and burnout as though it were an award you receive for taking adulthood seriously.
Someone works late every evening and we call them dedicated. Someone takes on another job and we call them a hustler. Someone answers emails during leave and we admire their commitment.
But if someone says, “I earn enough. I do not want a promotion. I want my evenings back,” we become suspicious.
Are they unmotivated? Do they lack ambition? Why are they “settling”?
Maybe they are not settling at all. Maybe they simply decided that their life should contain more than work.
That question has been sitting with me for a while because most adult life is structured around employment. Five days out of seven, sometimes six. Eight hours a day if you are lucky. Add travelling time, preparation, overtime and the mental residue that follows you home, and a job occupies far more of your life than the hours written in your contract.
So I understand why people want meaningful work. If something is going to consume that much of your existence, wanting it to mean something does not seem unreasonable.
But I also think we have placed too much pressure on work to fulfil every part of us.
We ask our careers to provide money, identity, purpose, community, self-esteem, growth and meaning, all at once. Then we panic when our jobs feel like jobs.
Maybe not everyone needs to be passionate about their career. Maybe some people can find meaning elsewhere: in family, friendships, faith, art, volunteering, travelling, gardening, writing, raising children, caring for animals or doing absolutely nothing productive on a Sunday afternoon.
A job does not necessarily need to be your calling.
But there is another problem with saying “a job is just a job.”
For many people, work takes up too much of life to be completely meaningless.
It is difficult to separate work from identity when people ask “What do you do?” within five minutes of meeting you. It is difficult to say your career does not matter when your income determines so much of your freedom. It is difficult to leave work at the office when exhaustion comes home with you.
And perhaps that is the uncomfortable place many adults are sitting in.
We do not necessarily want our careers to define us, but we also do not want to spend half our lives doing something that drains us. We want stability without losing meaning. We want enough money to feel safe without realising at fifty that we spent thirty years waiting for weekends. We want ambition, but we also want enough rest to actually experience the life that ambition is supposed to create.
Perhaps we are not confused at all. Perhaps modern adulthood has simply created a strange arrangement where survival, identity and purpose are all tied to the same thing: employment.
That is why the conversation around passion versus money feels incomplete.
It assumes the answer must be one or the other.
Choose passion and accept financial struggle.
Choose money and accept that work may be meaningless.
But most people are not living at either extreme. They are negotiating somewhere in the middle. They are choosing the better-paying job and keeping their passion outside work. They are taking the meaningful job while carefully managing their finances. They are changing careers at thirty-five. They are taking side jobs. They are staying in jobs they do not love because someone depends on them. They are leaving careers everyone else admired because they could no longer recognise themselves inside them.
That does not look indecisive to me.
It looks human.
I also wonder why we are so quick to judge people for the way they choose to work when so many of us are not particularly happy ourselves.
We judge the person who leaves a corporate job to open a small business because it is “risky.”
We judge the person who stays in the corporate job because they are “chasing money.”
We judge the person with three jobs because they are “obsessed with hustling.”
We judge the person who works only enough to survive because they “lack ambition.”
Perhaps the question should not be whether someone is working the way we think they should. Perhaps the better question is whether the life they are building makes sense to them.
Because there is no universal amount of ambition that makes someone successful. There is no salary at which a person suddenly becomes fulfilled. There is no job title that guarantees peace.
And maybe that is what I understand differently now than I did in my twenties.
Back then, I thought adulthood would eventually arrive at a point where everything settled. You studied, found a job, built a career, earned more money and gradually became secure. There would be some invisible finish line where you could finally look around and think, Okay. I have done it properly.
I do not think that finish line exists.
There will always be another salary bracket, another promotion, another qualification, another person doing better, another reason to convince yourself that you should be further ahead.
So perhaps the real question is not whether passion or money matters more. Maybe it is whether the life we are building leaves enough room for us to still recognise ourselves inside it.
Money matters. Stability matters. Purpose matters. Rest matters. None of them become less important simply because the others exist.
Perhaps adulthood is not about choosing one and pretending the rest do not matter. Maybe it is about understanding what enough looks like for you: enough money to feel safe, enough meaning to not feel empty, enough ambition to keep growing and enough rest to actually experience the life you are working so hard to build.
Because if all we ever do is wake up, work, come home, sleep and repeat, there has to come a point where we ask:
What, exactly, are we working for?
