I have a different take on this. "do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life" isn't a dangerous cliche, it is in fact true (note that many clich

I have a different take on this. "do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life" isn't a dangerous cliche, it is in fact true (note that many cliches are cliches because they are obvious truisms). The problem is that it has a number of caveats. One of which is that it is impossible to "do what you love" while taking direction from other people unless their goals and ideals are 100% aligned with your own, which is pretty much never the case. It doesn't matter who those people are, they could be the vulture capitalists mentioned in the post or they could just be your manager. It doesn't matter if you're able to have a beer with them at the end of the day if you have different motivations for doing the work that you're doing. The other environments mentioned, a tech giant and a high growth unicorn, are obviously composed of people playing the same pathological game. They're all publicly working towards whatever goals the company has set while privately pursuing their own. I think most of this is inescapable with the way we currently structure corporations. Even when you purposefully try to avoid this outcome it still happens. I think groups of people are able to achieve and maintain a sort of synchrony that allows them to "do what they love" together. You hear about it and sometimes are lucky enough to be there for it when different places, communities, or companies have that "golden age" where things are lined up perfectly, people are building on each other's work, and every day just seems to flow naturally. Often after the fact it gets derided as drinking the kool-aid or a reality distortion field but something happens when everyone buys in to the dream. I think we've lost a lot of that, we're too cynical and have convinced ourselves that it's not real and that's pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy since it leads to a permanent state of disillusionment. That's where we wind up just clocking in and out, doing an honest days work and narrowing our lives down to whatever is left over. You sell half your life to buy the other. In my mind that's much more dangerous than chasing your dreams.