You don’t get to do what you love until you’re good at what you hate.

You hear this cute little mantra everywhere. Do what you enjoy. Follow your passion. Don’t waste your life on things that don’t light you up. Sounds fantastic on the surface. It feels enlightened, bold, and rebellious. Imagine a world where everyone wakes up excited and energized, doing only what makes them happy. No more resentment. No more mediocrity. Just pure joy and self-expression bouncing around society like a utopia built on fun. It’s a seductive idea, mostly because it takes zero effort to fantasize about, and zero responsibility to imagine. But the moment you push this dream out of the fantasy realm and into the real one, the whole thing starts bleeding from every seam.

Because the second you try to build a living, breathing society on enjoyment alone, you smash into the first hard truth. Your enjoyment sits atop other people’s labor. You enjoy restaurants, smooth roads, working plumbing, electricity, online shopping, trash pickup, groceries, hospitals, flights, clean water, and internet. And none of that is powered by joy. It is powered by people doing tasks they tolerate for money, stability, or survival. Do you think the person hauling garbage at 5 a.m. is doing it because it fills their soul with cosmic joy? Do you think the guy repairing a sewer line in freezing rain is following his passion? The comfort you enjoy exists because millions of people do things they do not enjoy. If everyone only did what they liked, your quality of life would vanish overnight.

And let’s attack the astronaut example because it perfectly exposes the gap between fantasy and reality. People say they enjoy the idea of being an astronaut. They enjoy the status, the imagined adventure, the cinematic version of the job. They do not enjoy the actual requirements. The punishing training. The monotony. The hyper-specific disciplines. The sensory deprivation. The constant risk. The brutal elimination process. Most people love the fantasy of enjoyment, not the work required for it. Enjoyment, in the real world, has a cost. Most people don’t want to pay it. They want the badge without the burden.

Then you hit the next truth. Enjoyment is volatile. It shifts with mood, fatigue, boredom, insecurity, validation, or whatever mental storm someone is going through that day. Imagine a life where you do only what you enjoy in the moment. Your productivity goes to hell. Your growth goes to hell. Your discipline goes to hell. Enjoyment blows with the wind, and if that is your guiding star, you end up lost or stuck in a loop chasing sugar highs instead of real progress. Nothing meaningful survives if the only fuel allowed is enjoyment. Every skill, every craft, every accomplishment gets built through phases of doing things that are boring, painful, tedious, or frustrating. Enjoyment shows up later, often after competence arrives. Anyone telling you to only follow enjoyment is either lying or trying to sell you something.

And the moment you let enjoyment run the show, you create conflict. Because enjoyment is not universal. One person enjoys blasting music. Someone else enjoys silence. One enjoys waking up early. Another enjoys staying up all night. One enjoys chaotic creativity. Another enjoys a quiet routine. If everyone did only what they enjoy, every street, office, home, and neighborhood would become a war zone of competing pleasures. Humans are social, which means our enjoyment boundaries overlap and clash. Without restraint, compromise, or responsibility, enjoyment becomes selfishness disguised as self-care.

Then you look at Christmas lights. The perfect metaphor for this entire delusion. People slap up the laziest, half-dead lights possible because they feel social pressure. They don’t enjoy it. They don’t care about it. They just want to avoid being the only dark house on the block. This is not enjoyment. This is norm compliance. Humans obey culture to avoid being judged or isolated. People aren’t decorating for joy. They’re decorating to shut people up. And that alone breaks the purity of this idea. We are social animals. Enjoyment is never the only driver. Status, image, fear, belonging, obligation, guilt, convenience, and laziness all sit in the same car. Pretending that enjoyment should be the only thing steering the wheel is naive.

And here is another ugly truth anyone pushing this idea hates. Plenty of people absolutely enjoy things they are terrible at. They love painting but produce visual crimes. They love singing, but assault the ears of every life form in a one-mile radius. They love making Christmas displays but end up with a tangled ball of cold lights that looks like depression taped to a gutter. Enjoyment does not equal skill, and skill does not equal enjoyment. Competence takes work, repetition, and discipline. Enjoyment alone does not produce excellence. It barely produces adequacy.

Then comes the deepest contradiction of all. Enjoyment does not build a functioning society, but neither does misery. Humans thrive in a mix of tolerance, competence, purpose, reward, and occasional joy. The idea that enjoyment alone should be the foundation of your decisions is childish. The idea that misery alone should be the foundation is equally childish. Life is built in the messy space between pleasure and duty, between what you want and what must be done, between what feels good and what keeps the system running.

Which leads right into the final sucker punch, the part nobody wants to admit. Most people do not deserve a life in which they do only what they enjoy because they refuse to build the competence that would make that life possible. Enjoyment is a privilege you earn through skill. It is not a starter pack. It is an upgrade. People forget that the freedom to chase what you enjoy comes after years of doing what you have to do, even when you hate it. That’s the unpopular truth. Enjoyment without competence is a fantasy. Enjoyment without contribution is parasitic. Enjoyment without discipline is collapse. But sure, keep saying everyone should only do what they like. It sounds great on Instagram.