I know exactly one person who chose his life on purpose. Apparently, he wanted to be a pilot since he was three or four, and today he is one. Everyone else I know is what they are by sheer luck. There are a few who, later in life, figured out what they wanted to be and worked really hard to become that.

Take a developer I know. He did not set out to write JavaScript. I am not sure anyone sets out to write JavaScript. He went into an apprenticeship, and JavaScript was what he got dealt. It could have been the first job he landed, and years later it is simply what he does, because it became what he does. By the time it may have made sense to try other languages, he stopped looking.

You could tell yourself he just did not have options, and move on. So take another friend of mine, a surgeon, who had every option there is. He finished top of his year. He could have selected the lucrative ones, plastics and orthopedics, the fields that turn into money and something close to normal hours.

He chose the specialty his mentor happened to practice because he was the best teacher and he wanted to be near him. That was the whole of it. Someone who did things the way he thought they should be done.

After ten years, he realized he was chasing an image, and it got him on a path with fewer options. It does not help him realize it now, because he cannot get out. He is good enough for plastics or orthopedics even today. But the way back is a decade of retraining he is never going to do, so the door has closed on him. He picked his corner at twenty-something for reasons that had nothing to do with the corner, and the corner is where he stays.

And that is almost everyone I know. We like to talk about careers as though we selected them, like we had options in front of us and we chose exactly this one we are living.

But mostly there was whatever was nearest when we needed money, and then there was the raise that made leaving expensive, the skill that got specific enough to trap us, then life happened.

I used to find that comfortable enough to look at, in the way it is always comfortable to notice other people sleepwalking. It is less comfortable now, because now I am the one trying to choose.

I have the itch to build something of my own, to make money that does not come from an employer’s pocket. So I am trying things, hunting for the angle that catches, a solution that gets something rolling. And the fear that has started following me around is what if the thing I find is only a quick win. What if it works well enough and early enough that I grab it and hold on, and it becomes another thing I despise down the line.

The only way out I can see is passion, and here is the trouble with that. Passion is not a thing you feel in advance and then go and get. You cannot sit on a couch and decide, “this is my passion.” The pilot knew at three, and the pilot is a freak of nature, and building your life on the assumption that you will simply know is building it on the rarest case there is. For the rest of us, it goes the other way around. You try a thing, and it beats you, and you come back to it anyway, and you fail at it again, and you are still there. That is the only test I have any faith in. Passion is not what excites you. It is what you keep doing after it has stopped being exciting and started being hard, the thing you cannot make yourself quit even when quitting would be the reasonable move.

Which means I cannot select for it. There is no way to hold an idea up to the light and check it for passion before I commit, because the passion only shows up when the thing fails and refuses to leave. Which makes my position even harder, as I have to pick something, throw myself at it hard enough to fail properly, and then watch what I do next. If I walk away, it’s a quick win and I was right to go. If I cannot walk away, it might have been the thing all along.

And I will not know which is for years. There is a real chance I get it wrong the same way the developer did, and only notice at fifty that being proud of my choice was the same inertia that drove everyone else at the same point. The difference between a trap and a calling can’t be seen at the start. It might only be the answer to one slow question: whether you are still there after it has broken your heart a few times, and even then whether you stayed because you loved it or because, one more time, leaving had simply gotten too expensive.