The Case for Liking, Not Loving, Your Job

There is a lot of discourse about whether you should like or love your job. Entire careers have been built on both sides of that argument. Some of the smartest people alive have completely opposite views on whether your work should pay your bills or make you happy, and whether those two things are even compatible. I have spent the last several years studying this question with probably more seriousness than it deserves, and I have landed somewhere that will either deeply relieve you or mildly offend you, depending on what you need to believe right now.

So, I’m here to shout it: it is perfectly okay to like your job. Not love it.

You cannot fake loving your job indefinitely. You think you can talk yourself into it, think yourself into it, post yourself into it, but your nervous system keeps an honest record even when you don’t.

So what if you just stopped trying? What if liking your job was actually more than enough?

For most of my twenties, I was “convinced” that I loved my job. Not because I actually did, but because I thought that was the requirement. That loving it was the proof you were doing something right, and that anything less meant you had chosen wrong, settled early, or simply lacked the ambition to find the thing that would light you up every morning.

So I performed it. I said the words: “It’s the best.” “I really love it.” “It’s so fun.” If you go looking, there are probably public records of me somewhere declaring that I “loved” working at the Museum of Ice Cream, or that I felt deep passion building my creative agency. I wasn’t lying exactly. But I wasn’t telling the truth either. I thought I had to say it, so I said it, and then I “convinced” myself it was true, and that convincing led me directly into burnout. Time and time again.

I bring this up because the discourse around loving what you do has never been louder, and the timing has never felt more tone deaf. People are stuck in jobs they hate because the alternative is quitting cold and absorbing the full financial risk, OR applying 3000 times and hoping a recruiting bot has a momentary crisis of conscience and forwards your resume to an actual human being.

There had to be a better framework. So I made one up.

Upon turning 30, I decided enough with this, and built a new framework for myself that I still live by 4 years later. My job needs to hit roughly 70% fulfillment, and that 70% needs to cover 100% of my financial life. My rent, my dinners with friends, my ability to travel, all of it. The remaining 30%, which is where my real life lives. That is where I get to pursue my passions. The passion is my creative work, the thing I would do even if it never paid. Right now, this Substack and my content on IG/TikTok is my 30%. Writing, building BURNT & Utendahl Consulting, actually means something to me. It is supplementary income at the moment. It is what I protect.

The 70% is my CMO and brand strategy work. I work with clients ranging from early-stage startups to businesses doing $300+ million in revenue, helping them build, systematize, and grow. Do I love it? No. Do I like it? YES. When your job is paying for your actual life, liking it is more than enough. I am good at it, it does not stress me out, and it funds everything else. I do not dream about it. I do not wake up on Monday with excitement in my chest about a brand audit. And I have stopped pretending that is a problem.

Elizabeth Gilbert has a framework worth knowing here. She breaks it into four categories: hobby, job, career, and vocation. A job, in her view, doesn’t have to be awesome. It doesn’t have to fulfill you emotionally. 1You just have to do it with respect. The vocation is the thing that chooses you, and she is clear that not everyone has one, and that is fine. She has also said publicly that years of encouraging people to follow their passion as the guaranteed path to happiness left a lot of people chasing a promise that was never realistic for them to begin with. Her words on the job specifically: “it doesn’t need to be awesome. You just need to have one and do it with some dignity.”

Scott Galloway goes further and is considerably less diplomatic about it. His position, from The Algebra of Wealth, is that “follow your passion” is advice only the already rich can afford to give, and that typically the person telling you this made their fortune in some unglamorous industry like iron or plumbing. (I agree!) He argues you should follow your talent instead, not your passion, and he has the data to back up why: only 20% of people under 26 can even articulate a singular passion that guides their life choices2. His actual prescription: you don’t have to love it, just don’t hate it. Get great at something people will pay for, and passion tends to follow the mastery, not the other way around. The numbers on creative fields are not comforting either: only 2% of professional actors make a living from their craft,3 and the 97th percentile of YouTube creators generates enough views to pull in roughly $15,000 a year.4 The math is not sentimental.

Both Gilbert and Galloway are pointing at the same underlying truth from different angles: the cultural mandate to love your work is a setup, and most of us were never given the conditions to actually meet it.

The conversation we rarely have honestly is about what it actually takes to pursue your passions full time, and what gets left out is privilege. When someone tells you to quit your job and bet everything on your dream, what they are often not saying is: I had savings, or family money, or a partner with stable income, or enough runway to absorb the risk of being wrong for a few years. For most people, that advice is not a strategy. It is a fantasy with a liability attached.

While, YES, I am working toward being part of that small percentage of people for whom passion and talent converge into the thing that also pays the bills. The people for whom the 30% eventually becomes the whole thing. I think about it, I build toward it, I manifest it, and I believe it is possible for me. That optimism is not performative though. It is one of the things I protect most.

I am also a realist about what that requires and who actually gets there. Most of us will not experience that reality. Not because we aren’t talented or devoted enough, but because the conditions required to make it happen, the financial runway, the timing, the market, the specific combination of privilege and luck that rarely gets talked about in the success story, are simply not equally distributed. That is not a reason to stop trying. It is a reason to stop feeling ashamed in the meantime!

So if you like your job and that is the whole story right now, that is enough. It might actually be the right arrangement for where you are. The goal is not to love every hour you sell. The goal is to like it enough that it doesn’t hollow you out, fund the 30% that belongs to you, and protect that 30% with the same ferocity you bring to everything else. Do not let the 70% bleed into it. Do not let anyone convince you that monetizing your passion is the only proof it counts.

I will be here building toward the inversion, hoping you are too. But until then, liking your job is perfectly acceptable and more than enough. For most of us, it is the whole point.

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