Can You Have a Passion... And a Life?

Dispatch #10 from the Human Aliveness Lab

Illustration by Mihajlo Stojanovic

This is Dispatch #10 in a series from the Human Aliveness Lab — raw, personal reflections exploring what it really means to feel alive. You can read the whole series here.

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Hi friends,

A lot of people think passion makes life feel expansive. But sometimes, it shrinks your world.

Especially when you're in deep.

If you looked at my life today, it might seem rigid from the outside. I’m up by six, at one of two coffee shops before seven. I write, work out, train jiu-jitsu, then work on the Human Aliveness Lab in the afternoons. Evenings are more training. I’m home by 8:30, scarfing food and walking my dog before falling into bed — so I can do it all again the next day.

It’s not glamorous. And it doesn’t leave a lot of room for spontaneous dinners, late-night drinks, or last-minute weekend trips.

I didn’t always live like this. I used to chase variety — travel, adventure, novelty. My life looked enviable from the outside. But I also hated my day-to-day. I was always searching for something to light me up.

Now, I’ve found things that do. But they came with a trade.

Sometimes, I miss the looser version of myself. And I feel it most in moments when friends ask me to dinner on a Tuesday night — and I have to say no, again. By then, my training gear’s packed, I’ve eaten my pre-training snack, and mentally, I’m already at the gym. There’s almost nothing that could change my mind.

This is where passion starts to feel selfish (I’ve written about this before). Or at the very least, different from the way most people live.

I once read a quote from artist Austin Kleon, who said that when it comes to life, you can only really pick two: work, family, scene.

I think about this a lot.

It’s not just about balance. It’s about reality. As Oliver Burkeman put it in Four Thousand Weeks:

“We’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”

We want to do it all — but passion requires sacrifice. And not everyone’s willing to make it.

Passion doesn’t always make life bigger. Sometimes, it makes it narrower — but deeper. It forces choices. It requires time and energy.

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But it does mean you’ll probably disappoint some people. You’ll say no more often. You’ll miss out on some things.

And still… if it matters enough to you, you’ll keep choosing it.

So no — you probably can’t have a huge passion and a perfectly balanced life. But you can have meaning. You can have depth. You can wake up knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing.

And maybe that’s enough.

See you out there,

-Krista

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