Do What You Love. Go broke fast.

“Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is one of the most attractive pieces of advice ever given.
It is also, for a lot of people, terrible advice.

If everyone did what they loved, we would have a country full of aspiring musicians, footballers, photographers and travel bloggers wondering who was going to empty the bins.

The phrase survives because it sounds much better than the truth. And the truth is that most people work because they need money. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Somewhere along the way, work became expected to provide everything. It should be meaningful. It should reflect your values. It should fulfil your potential. You should enjoy your colleagues, believe in the company’s mission and ideally leap out of bed every Monday morning thrilled by another opportunity to grow. That is asking quite a lot from a job.

For most of history, work had a much simpler purpose. You did something useful enough that someone paid you. That money paid for your life. You might enjoy the work. You might be good at it. You might even love it. But none of those things were mandatory.

Today, there is almost an assumption that earning good money doing something you do not particularly enjoy represents some kind of personal failure.

You hear it constantly. “Life’s too short to hate your job.” “Follow your passion.” “Do what you love. ”Fine. But life is also too expensive to ignore what things pay. There are people doing work they genuinely love while struggling to afford the lives they want. There are people doing jobs they do not find remotely inspiring who earn enough to support their families, travel, buy homes and spend their free time doing the things they actually care about.

Which one has got it wrong? Neither, necessarily.

That is the problem with turning career advice into a slogan. Different people want different things.

For some, work is central to their identity. They want to build companies, lead organisations or become exceptionally good at a particular craft. They would probably do some version of it even if nobody was paying them. For others, work is important mainly because it funds the rest of their lives. They finish at five. They go home. They do not think about it until the next morning. And they are perfectly happy.

There is a growing tendency to judge this. Ambition has become confused with loving your job. If you are not passionate, you supposedly lack drive. If you care about salary, you are motivated by the wrong thing. If you leave a job for more money, you have “chosen money over purpose”, as though your landlord accepts purpose as payment.

The reality is more practical. Money matters.

Not because it makes everyone happy, but because a lack of it can make plenty of things miserable.

A job that pays well can buy freedom. It can give someone the ability to work fewer hours later, support children, help parents, travel, start a business or walk away from a bad situation. There is nothing shallow about wanting that.

The more interesting question is whether loving your work is always an advantage anyway. Doing what you love for money can change your relationship with it. Ask someone who turned a hobby into a business. The photography they loved becomes editing invoices and chasing clients. The cooking becomes managing staff and dealing with suppliers. The gaming becomes deadlines, sponsorships and audience numbers. The thing you escaped into after work becomes the reason you cannot switch off.

Passion can survive that. Sometimes it does not.

This is not an argument for spending forty years in a job you despise for a decent pension. Misery is not a career strategy. If work is making you genuinely unhappy and you have realistic options to change it, you probably should. But there is a considerable distance between loving your job and hating it. Perhaps that middle ground deserves more respect.

You can like your work without being passionate about it. You can be good at something without making it your identity. You can work somewhere because the money is good. You can leave somewhere you love because the money is not. You can have a perfectly successful career without ever discovering your “true calling”.

And, crucially, you do not need to apologise for any of it.

The best job is not necessarily the one you love most. It is the one that gives you enough of what matters to you.

That might be money. It might be freedom. It might be status, security, flexibility or purpose. Ideally, perhaps, some combination of all of them.

But if someone tells you to do what you love and the economics do not work, there is another option.

Do something you do not mind. Get paid properly. And use the money to love the rest of your life?