LOVE IT? DON’T MAKE IT A HABIT
How often have we heard the phrase: do something you love and you will never work a day in your life? While the sentiment behind that sentence is nice and makes us go all warm and fuzzy, it turns out that there is something more to it. As the people at the Happiness Project in the University of Southern California say, the reason we think we love something is because we don’t do it for a living, and because we have the luxury of choosing when we do it.
Turn the scales, make your ‘passion’ into a daily activity of routine, and the happiness that you experience will evaporate. This applies to everything, apparently, even to ‘fun’ things like going to the beach. If you make a habit out of going to the beach every day, the fun aspect of it will evaporate quickly. So if you think those lifeguards have the best life, think again.
Researchers at the Happiness Project say that human beings are naturally habit-forming creatures, and that our feelings become weaker and they evaporate as we form our habits. You lose the pleasure of the experience because it’s not an experience any more. It’s just something you do every day. It is therefore nor abnormal to find people who flit from one profession to another to ‘find their passion’. Very often they say that the ‘passion dies’.
This is not just them being fickle. It’s just them being human.
