Why Every Human Being Should Have a Passion Project
Passion projects are more than hobbies. They’re structure, identity, and sanity... especially when your job disappears. Here's why you should start one now.
Let’s talk about your job. You know, that 9-to-5 emotional car wash you enter every morning like a damp Labradoodle freshly rinsed in career anxiety. Maybe you genuinely enjoy it. Maybe you just appreciate the steady income and tolerable coworkers who haven’t yet discovered your burner LinkedIn account. Or maybe you were ceremoniously thanked for your “years of service” with a company-branded mug and promptly escorted out with a severance packet and a sympathetic hug from someone in HR.
Whatever your situation, the moral of this story is broadcast loud and clear:
You. Need. A. Passion. Project.
Not someday. Not when you finally have “more time.” Now. Yesterday. Ten years ago, if possible. And not because it’ll make you rich, famous, or self-actualized. But because it’s psychological insurance. When your job, your title, or your LinkedIn vanity metrics get wiped out, your passion project is what whispers, “You still exist.”
And unlike HR, it won’t promise “ongoing support” before quietly revoking your email access at 4:59 p.m. on a Friday.
Work Isn’t (Just) About Work. It’s Group Therapy.
Work isn’t just about work. Social psychologist Marie Jahoda figured this out back in the 1980s, when she observed that jobs are secretly handing out psychological nutrients the way shady gyms hand out free trials. She said work doesn’t just give us a paycheck. It gives us structure, status, purpose, and just enough interaction to keep us from speaking to the toaster.
She called them the “latent benefits” of employment. These are the things we don’t notice until we lose them. You get:
Time structure, so you know when to pretend to be busy.
Status, so you can answer the dreaded “what do you do?” question without dissolving into vapor.
Social contact, even if it’s forced water cooler chit-chat about printer settings.
Collective purpose, no matter how dubious.
Activity, so anything to avoid stillness and introspection.
When employment is ripped away, so is this entire cocktail of barely acknowledged mental scaffolding. Suddenly, you’re free. And deeply disoriented.
But your passion project? It’s a stealth substitute. It sneaks those benefits back in through the side door. You get:
Structure (because you schedule it)
Status (because you’re doing something interesting)
Purpose (even if it’s building a food review blog)
Progress (because you actually improve over time).
So when the job ends, you’re not starting from zero. You’ve already got something weird and wonderful in motion. And honestly, that might be the most meaningful thing you’ve ever made.
Your Side Project Is Cheaper Than Therapy (But Shouldn’t Replace It)
A passion project is not a second job in disguise. If your pottery hobby now includes Q3 revenue goals, biweekly stakeholder updates, and a branding consultant, congratulations. You’ve gentrified your joy.
This is not that. Passion projects exist in opposition to hustle culture, not as its hipster cousin. No one is suggesting you scale your sourdough habit or pitch your embroidery Etsy to a venture capitalist. That’s how we ended up with people trying to monetize their personalities on LinkedIn in the first place.
Enter Robert Vallerand, a psychologist who studies passion without trying to sell you a course on it. He outlines two types:
Harmonious passion: you love it, it fits your life, everyone’s happy.
Obsessive passion: you love it, but it slowly consumes you, alienates your loved ones, and turns you into a burnt out motivational poster.
You want the first one. The kind that slides gently into your routine, not the kind that colonizes your weekends and starts holding board meetings in your head.
And yes, science agrees. In Behavioral Activation therapy the instruction is simple: do stuff that brings mastery or pleasure. A good passion project? Does both. Which means you’re now hacking your brain into wellness using nothing but curiosity, and commitment.
Put it in your calendar. Protect it. Don’t over-scope it. It doesn’t need to become a business or a brand or a side hustle with an LLC. It just needs to remind you that you can still make things that don’t suck.
Your Side Project Is Cheaper Than Therapy (But Shouldn’t Replace It)
A passion project is not a second job in disguise. If your pottery hobby now includes Q3 revenue goals, biweekly stakeholder updates, and a branding consultant, congratulations. You’ve gentrified your joy.
This is not that. Passion projects exist in opposition to hustle culture, not as its hipster cousin. No one is suggesting you scale your sourdough habit or pitch your embroidery Etsy to a venture capitalist. That’s how we ended up with people trying to monetize their personalities on LinkedIn in the first place.
Enter Robert Vallerand, a psychologist who studies passion without trying to sell you a course on it. He outlines two types:
Harmonious passion: you love it, it fits your life, everyone’s happy.
Obsessive passion: you love it, but it slowly consumes you, alienates your loved ones, and turns you into a burnt out motivational poster.
You want the first one. The kind that slides gently into your routine, not the kind that colonizes your weekends and starts holding board meetings in your head.
And yes, science agrees. In Behavioral Activation therapy the instruction is simple: do stuff that brings mastery or pleasure. A good passion project? Does both. Which means you’re now hacking your brain into wellness using nothing but curiosity, and commitment.
Put it in your calendar. Protect it. Don’t over-scope it. It doesn’t need to become a business or a brand or a side hustle with an LLC. It just needs to remind you that you can still make things that don’t suck.
When the Job Goes, the Project Stays and So Does Your Sanity
Being laid off is capitalism’s way of breaking up with you via group email. One day you’re drafting Q3 goals while browsing standing desk accessories, the next you’re spiraling through “funemployment” Reddit, Inc. threads and panic-calculating how long you can survive on canned lentils.
Which is why having a passion project already in motion is the equivalent of keeping a spare parachute. When the corporate scaffolding crumbles, you don’t plummet. You float awkwardly, but intact, into something that still belongs to you.
Psychologists call this self-continuity: the idea that you are still you, even if a giant part of your day just vanished. Passion projects protect that continuity. They remind you that you’re more than your last performance review or the words “former” in front of your job title.
And while you’re at it, your passion project quietly checks off the full DRAMMA lineup of psychological needs:
Detachment from the chaos
Relaxation, however temporary
Autonomy, because no one’s requesting revisions
Mastery, as you improve at something real
Meaning, even if no one else understands it
Affiliation, even if it’s just a stranger who says “this slaps”
So when your role gets “sunset,” and the world starts spinning, you’re still tethered to something real. Doesn’t matter what. It’s still structure, still growth, still you.
Even If You Like Your Job, You’re Still a Fool Without a Side Project
Let’s imagine, against all statistical odds and lived experience, that your job is actually great. The team clicks, your manager seems to know what empathy is, and you occasionally say things like “I’m actually excited for this quarter.” How nice for you.
You’re still not safe.
Because no matter how excellent your current professional utopia is, the winds shift.
New leadership arrives.
Budgets vanish.
Someone decides your department needs “realignment,”
Sometimes the shift is driven by macro forces. Other times it’s just an MBA, looking at your two decades of infrastructure knowledge and saying, “Can’t we just migrate this to Firebase?”
The point is, certainty is temporary. So your best move is to have something of your own quietly in progress. A side project is a hedge against identity erosion. It gives you something no employer owns, measures, or can revoke access to during a surprise 9 a.m. calendar invite titled “Quick Chat.”
Even better, it’s one of the few places where you’re allowed to be bad at something. There’s no quarterly review for your attempt at making a video essay about the history of Indonesia. It doesn’t have to scale. It just has to be yours.
And if one day it turns into something bigger? Great. But even if it doesn’t, you’ll have kept a part of yourself alive that isn’t tied to deliverables, feedback cycles, or “visibility.” You’ll have proof that not every productive hour needs to be optimized, branded, or monetized.
We like to believe we’re tougher than we are. That our identities are too nuanced, too spiritual, too enlightened to be dented by something as vulgar as a job title. Yet the moment the payroll pipeline dries up, most of us discover we’ve been wearing our occupations like full-body costumes. Strip that away and the silence feels louder than you thought possible.
The truth is simple. Jobs are temporary. They are hats. They can be swapped, lost, stolen, or burned during corporate restructuring. What you cannot afford to lose is the skeleton. The skeleton is the enduring structure that holds you up when external scaffolding collapses. It's built from the things you make, the projects you nurture, and the passions you claim as your own.
A passion project is not a side hustle. It doesn’t need to trend on TikTok or pay the mortgage. It just needs to remind you that you are more than quarterly targets and LinkedIn endorsements. It is proof of humanity in a culture that keeps trying to industrialize your personality.
So start something. Keep building. Because when the hat inevitably blows away, your skeleton will still be standing. And you will still be you.
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we help our clients build a career narrative that actually reflects who they are. Contact us if you're interested in designing a future-proof career path.