What Are People Most Passionate About?
Passion is often dependent on a person’s life goals and values, but typically people are most passionate about loved ones and friends, work or any activity that brings about positive emotions. It often becomes a priority to spend as much time as possible with the person or thing that ignites passion.
Because people spend a large portion of their waking life working, finding a career that engages passionate feelings is important. However, turning a favorite activity—whether it involves art, business or being of service to others—into a full-time occupation can be daunting. With skill and effort, getting paid for highly-satisfying work can become a reality. Intellectual interests and the passion for discovery can motivate a person to succeed at these types of careers.
Passion derives from the Latin verb patere, which means to suffer. Passion is an intense emotion often used in the context of romantic love. Passion can bring on strong feelings and overwhelming desires that may compel a person to act in inappropriate ways that don’t comply with common sense or rational understanding. A well-known literary reference to passion is the appeal from Hamlet to “Give me that man that is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him in my heart’s core.”