Every May, someone stands at a podium and tells 22-year-olds to “follow their passions,” and everyone cheers, and nobody mentions the tens or hundreds of thousands in debt waiting for them in the parking lot.

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“Follow your passion” is beautiful advice if you can afford it. But most graduates can’t, and they’re walking into a market that wants experience they don’t have and knows AI doesn’t want vacations or health insurance.

So these kids take the first job they can get, and that passion talk becomes a nice memory from a day when they wore a funny hat.

Now, I’m not against passion. The Daily Note is a passion project. I just prefer honesty. Something like, “Find something you’re good at that someone will pay you for,” would suffice.

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