Boss tells employee they "lack passion" for not responding to messages at 10 pm, despite them having not received a raise for 3 years: 'I make $19/hr'

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Dec 8, 2025 12:00 PM EST

Being constantly connected is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you can work in ways that were never possible before. But this comes at the cost of being always available, always exposed. Never nurturing, resting… disconnecting.

There's this expectation, too, that you're always passionate about what you're doing. It'll come up in meetings and performance reviews. Employers discuss it as if it were the secret key to success. And there is a point to this. Passion is, after all, an incredible thing, an intrinsic motivator. A belief that what you're doing is important. But there are those employers out there who know this and seek to weaponize it, distorting it as a replacement for proper.

Here's the rub: When you have a passionate workforce, you can get away with paying them less for longer hours. Their passion for the work more or less subsidizes their motivation for the work, where motivation from proper compensation is lacking.

But, as with our constant exposure, nothing saps passion like being constantly, continuously, endlessly exposed to something. Working long hours in unsustainable ways, and even working when you're not. It's like being pushed up against fine-grained sandpaper, slowly wearing away and removing the defining features of everything that made you so impassioned in the first place.

And as soon as productivity dips, the questions and demands will start. They'll demand specifically that you're "passionate" as if anyone has ever been passionate about something after being told to be.

What they should be doing is doing things to nurture the things that lead to passion, fostering organic buy-in by making the . But these types of things aren't easy and are going to take some real investment and a real concerted effort to pull off. As so many of us do, they take the easier route instead and just rely on burning through the reserves of passion that their employees walk through the door with. And then when those employees are all out of passion and burn out, they just replace them with new ones and resume milking that passion all over again.

via Austin Distel austindistel

_{The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}
"boss told me I "lack passion" because I won't answer slack messages at 10pm"

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