I’m like totally passionate about life.

Boy oh boy, the bar has really been lowered on being passionate. This is what happens when you make something compulsory. Remember a few years back when everyone except Stephen Hawking was reading The Secret and thought you had to think positively all the time or else the universe would turn on you and poison your dogs or raid your petty cash box. Well now, everyone is talking and walking passion speak.

 “Live your inner passion and the rest will take care of itself,” says Oprah, Uriah Heep Mountain Schemer and that Nobel Laureate of Schmaltz – Paulo Coelho. Bullshit I say. The truth is that almost no-one is paid to do what they are passionate about. If they were, Atlantic Seaboard estate agents would be handing out their cards backstage at the Intimate Theatre or giving out promotional hand jobs at jam sessions in Obs. I grew up passionately wanting to be an international rugby player but I wasn’t big or aggressive enough and I passed like a male hairdresser. Luckily I didn’t combine my passion with too much persistence – that’s when gullible individuals really start haemorrhaging dreams.

Here’s Paulo on reaching passionately for your dreams, "There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure." Very deep P-Dawg. Where does this guy get his information - Forrest Gump seminars? And all along I thought it was nature’s cruel distribution of talent and poverty that were major sticking points for the dreamers of this world. But wait, if what the Oracle of Mt. Platitude says is true, I’ll just have to listen to a few Anthony Robbins tapes before I’m ready to head off to Hollywood to awaken my giant within Penelope Cruz. 

 When writing a rant like mine, most people tell you that, “According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word I want to define means such and such.” They might even fling in some etymology to sound clever and say, “You might be interested to know that fwumppage comes from the Latin words feume: to jizz and pagere: nonchalantly.” I hate it when people do this.

We all have a working knowledge of what passion is and we all know we are using the word too much. We are using it too much for the same reason that teenagers in search of coolness wear mesh and foam baseball caps when only fifteen years ago this brand of head-joy was donned by Klansmen after their meetings. Even rough girls prefer mesh caps to weirdo suits. That is to say, we copy role models. Oprah pretends to love Dostoevsky, so do the ladies of Graaff-Reinett.  

Someone started this passion fad. I don’t know if it was one person like Rhonda Byrne who transformed weight loss into the daftest theory of cosmology (The Secret) since Genesis told us that God made H₂O before he made light. (Modern chemistry acknowledges that you need light to fuse hydrogen and helium to make oxygen.) But Oprah punted The Secret and, instantly, hundreds of millions of women worldwide swallowed it whole without a moment of critical thought. And why was that? Well I can hazard a guess. Stripped of its feeble physics and selective quotations, the book claimed that you can have the things you want if you really – one might say passionately - want them and then it skipped out the hard work bit. That sounds nice. Wealth, love and satisfaction for the price of a well-maintained dream board and some daily manifesting or manuring or whatever you had to do. This was better than prayer because God is so mysterious he very seldom answers and even Santa has a good conduct clause.

Ok, so everyone is being passionate about their passion and everyone who doesn’t feel like they are following their passion is envious of those who are and wishes they could stop being the H.R. manager at Dop System Papsak Wholesalers in Paarl and go on the road with Die Antwoord. What is so appealing about this fad passion that makes someone say something as ridiculous as, “I’m passionate about sun downers on Camps Bay beach,” or, “I’m passionate about Swiss chocolate?” These really are non sequiturs. Almost everyone likes these things. If the net has been cast that wide, I suppose I am passionate about orgasms and free drinks at weddings. I think that what appeals to people about this wider definition of passion, outside the fact that it is fashionable, is that it seems, like the implicit promise in The Secret, to do a magic act on good old blood, sweat and tears.

You don’t hear a lot about the passion involved in working ruinous hours at an investment bank, nor how passionately the traders deal with the stress and tension that come with the job. It is very hard work. But these are the people who come calling on the estate agents for houses in Clifton one day. Perhaps when they have retired and reconciled with the first family they sacrificed to career, they can finally indulge their passion for remote location fly fishing, which is also likely to involve hard work and dedication before any satisfaction or reward makes an appearance.

Passion is the leveraging of talent through incredible sacrifice, not downloading free anarchist material and putting out a shitty strumming album every three years from your Kalk Bay bedsit while bathing in the undeserved kudos of ordinary people who have hobbies and dreams but have accepted they will never be a Beethoven, Hemingway, Clapton or Izzard.