By Dick Meyer/Tribune News Service/Washington


There is way too much passion in our midst. I don’t mean the passion of love and romance. There’s never enough of that. And not the passion of creativity, intellect and art. There’s a deficit of that.
I mean the passion of commencement addresses, resumes and Twitter bios.
I mean passion as in the advice thousands of college grads hear every spring to “follow your passion”. I mean the passions that people stick on their social media profiles and job applications.
If you don’t have a passion these days, or you are not “obsessed” with something quirky and so uniquely “you”, well, you’re lame.
This is not good. It’s a kind of mass-market narcissism. It’s also lousy advice.
“Follow your passion,” is on one level just a harmless variation of hackneyed old cliches. “This above all: to thine own self be true,” Polonius said to his son, Hamlet. March to your own drummer. Do what you love, etc.
Chances are if you need to hear such counsel from others, it’s useless.
But in the nomenclature of early 21st-century America individualism, the concept of passion has a special place. Passion has become an emblem of “thine own self”,
If it is not prominently displayed, like a brand label, a young person is at risk of appearing uncool, uninformed, uninteresting or unemployable. A passion is an essential accessory to a well-coiffed “personal brand”.
Americans love brands and the easy way they sort us. In virtual America, branding demands special techniques.
One’s identity on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram has to be curated, literally. Consciously or not, people (not just young people) groom what they show the world; they tend to pick the pictures, quips and references that make them look good.
A perfect exterior, of course, is never matched by a perfect interior, but it is easy to forget that online.
Surf around Twitter: Passionate Yogi, Passionate dancer or “Passionate Politiquette” - whatever that is.
There are at least nine Twitter accounts devoted to passion mentoring. People are passionate about artisanal soap, the perfect dill pickle, Jerry Lewis movies or the history of dental floss. One young lady is “Passionate about SEO, SEM, Social, performance mktg & analytics”. Really? Whatever.
Millennials tend to say they are “obsessed” by things - selfies, vintage argyle or cotton candy. These claims appear on resumes, usually at the bottom: “I have completed two half-marathons and am passionate about rainforests, Play-Doh sculpture and UConn hoops (Go Huskies!).”
Sometimes passions are genuine, deep and enduring. Too often they are phony.
That is partly why, on a practical level, “follow your passion” is lousy career advice.
Most people don’t actually have a deep and enduring passion upon which to sensibly build a vocation. Most people don’t have a fixed and definite knowledge of what they want to be when they grow up, even most grown-ups. Those who do are lucky ducks.
But there is no metaphysical or biological structure that matches every human being with a specific profession, skill, career, passion or obsession. Most of us are “passionate” about different things at different stages in our lives. Many of us are only passionate about people - partners, family, children, friends - and not things.
And contrary to the modern mantra, we all are not “great at something”. Becoming great at something involves drudgery, sacrifice and failure; it is not simply a matter of finding your drummer and marching. In fact, the word passion comes from the Latin word for suffer.
We of the baby boom, of the “Me Decade”, of the culture of narcissism, seem to have told our children, students and kin something very different. “You are special, you can be anything you want and you get to choose.”
This has created great expectations and great pressures. Having a passion has become a burden.
I have begun to hear more young people confess (and confess is the right word) that they really don’t have a “passion” for any special career. This feels to them like a failure or a flaw.
In a world so full of options, it is difficult enough to choose a life path that seems sensible, that you might be good at, that might be interesting, secure, useful and even important. A passion requirement becomes another perfectionist credential, another accoutrement on a well-groomed, attractively curated, high-achieving, self-styled existential resume. It is too much.
It is OK to just like bowling; you don’t have to be passionate about it.
It is great if you have a passion that matches a job and it is also great if you grab an opportunity you didn’t see coming. It is OK to be passionate about people and not a career.
It is OK to dump the whole passion thing, obsessively.

♦ Dick Meyer is Chief Washington Correspondent for the Scripps Washington Bureau and DecodeDC (www.newsnet5.com/decodedc). Readers may send him e-mail at dick.meyer@scripps.com