The Passion Trap
By: Elsa Figueroa
Tags: Labor, Content Creation, Working Conditions, Passion Economy, Garyvee

“I love building businesses and launching new ventures, but the only reason I value money is that I’m going to need a lot of it when I buy the New York Jets.”

-Gary Vaynerchuck, Crush It!

“…the Erotic Professional positions herself as answering a vocational ‘calling’ that seems to have barely anything to do with being paid.”

-Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes

Like many people born after the 1980s, I grew up surrounded by discourse about work and passion. The underlying thesis was that, since work occupies the majority of a regular person’s time, and work is often associated with unhappiness and discontent, the solution was to turn work into an enjoyable experience. In a capitalist system that abhors any hint at communism, it does not do to examine the reasons why work is so undesirable to so many — that would eventually lead to discussions about fair wages, a reasonable hourly schedule, shifts in working conditions. The only solution that capitalism proposed to the issue of work was the individualist solution of finding something you’re so passionate about, it doesn’t feel like work, a sentiment summed up in that old cliché “love the work you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

As a young person coming of age in the early 2000s, I wholeheartedly believed this mantra. I spent my first year in college casting about for my passion. When I finally found it in translation, it was not at all clear how I would even enter into the field. I had no connections and knew no one who even worked in it — apart from my professors, and they were not hiring. There was no way to get my foot in the door because no one could even point me to the door. My professors could not realistically provide the answer. They had both sort of fallen into the field in a time before the internet, when the industry was vastly different.

One particular memory sums up that time in my life. One of my translation classmates had been talking proudly about a project to translate encyclopedia articles her mother, a government employee, had gotten for her using her connections. At the time I worked at the now-defunct Toys R’ Us, and keenly remember a moment when, while mopping spilled soda from the floor, I felt like I was at a complete dead end compared to my luckier classmate. How would I, as a soon-to-be college graduate mopping soda off the floor at a retail store ever become a freelance translator?

After college, I entered the corporate world, when I excitedly took a job at a call center as a telephone interpreter. That seemed to be the door, back then, until it became clear that it would never lead to where I wanted. I became known around the office as a provider of translations, and so was often tasked with this additional labor. Back then, it was true of me that I was so passionate about translation that I would do it for free, but I also aspired to become a full-time translator and be remunerated for my work. Eventually, I realized that these odd in-office jobs would lead nowhere, and that people were simply taking advantage of my willingness to do the work for no additional pay. They were never going to hire me as a full-time translator. These odd jobs would never lead to me figuring out how to acquire clients on my own.

I began looking for freelance work online, only to end up in exploitative situations by underpaying rapacious agencies. As I spent three years searching in a frenzy for the way in, I realized that the tools and resources I had at hand were wholly insufficient to allow me to realize my dream.

A graduate degree emerged as the solution. There was a school in Monterey, California that specialized in translation and interpretation. My college professors spoke about it as it was well renowned within the field. I decided I would go there. A master’s degree from a prestigious translation school would probably do the trick. As it was a private school and I absolutely would never be able to realistically save up enough money to go, I decided to take the leap into massive student loan debt, after countless hopeless attempts to find scholarships and grants.