Are you truly passionate about your job or have we forgotten what the word means?

I think we have reached Peak Passion. I saw an advertisement this year, for an accounting technicians course which asked the question of those potentially interested: “Are you passionate about accounting? Take your passion one step further with our accounting qualifications.”

Before I douse the passion, let me say I find it perfectly plausible that accounting might evoke strong feelings.

Anyone who has ever done business studies in school will remember how pleasure and pain were on two sides of a skinny coin when it came to adding up that thing where you were supposed to get the same answer in the left column and the right column.

I forget what it was called — the ledger or the Bob Cratchit or some other Dickensian name. If you got it right, joy was unconfined.

If you got it wrong, you sank further into your desk as the miasma of steaming coats on the too-hot radiator seeped in and addled your brain during the Long Dark Afternoon Double Class of the Soul.

So I’m not dissing the noble profession of accountancy. It’s a worthy skill. It separates those with knowledge from the spoofers.

Like techies, accountants have a confidence about them that says: “I’d have the solutions sketched out on the back of an envelope in the time it would take you to find a pen that works.”

I just find it hard to believe that even people who like accounting are passionate about it. Or that they should be. You need to keep a cool head when totting up the figures.

I don’t blame the people who designed the ad. Hyperbole-inflation has devalued the word passionate so much now it’s practically compulsory to use it to describe your level of interest in a job.

Anything less than this heat of intense feeling towards whatever it is you are doing implies you are lukewarm about it.

In a competitive jobs market, there is an effusiveness-arms race.

It’s not merely enough to say that you really like doing something or are really good at it, otherwise your commitment may be called into question by your colleague who pronounces themselves passionate about doing it.

One can imagine a potential employer saying: “So, you say you are an expert in cloud computing… but would you describe yourself as passionate and an evangelist for it? I need to know you’d be willing to go to jail for it or take a bullet. Anyone can be an expert but I’m looking for someone in love.”

As a result, judging from people’s social media bios, job adverts, and CVs, as such a large proportion of our workforce are passionate about what they do it’s a wonder the offices, building sites, retail outlets aren’t heaving with fiery clashes about status reports and timesheets.

I feel left out.

I don’t think I have a passion. I have things I like doing. I like Wikipedia’s random page function, frying spuds the following day, optimising my bag-packing in Lidl (ask me about that sometime, I’m actually almost passionate about it).

As the bed-springs of the workplace creak with all that passion, I have the nagging fear that this dry passionless existence means I am not able to achieve my full potential. But that’s another word loaded word — potential.

We’re all supposed to be fulfilling our potential but I prefer to leave it a bit of potential unfulfilled for the time being — like hiding toilet roll under the stairs and then forgetting about it. Or the emergency fiver in the car.

You don’t know when you’ll need it.

The explosion in ‘passionate’ as a work description can be traced to the self-improvement industry. It encourages us all to pursue our passions.

So if you can say you’re passionate about what you do — be it stacking pallets or shaping customer activation strategy to drive success going forward — then presumably you have caught up with it.

It all sounds quite emotionally draining.