Passion and fear are both emotions that you are bound to experience over time. Are they linked in some way?
On the surface, there wouldn’t seem to be much in common between the emotion of passion and that of fear. One would seem to be positive, and bring about joy and interest. The other is more negative.
However, once you are passionate about something, you might very well fear it’s loss.
Imagine something, if you will, about which you are passionate. Maybe your family or friends. A sports team, perhaps, or a career.
Now think about a threat it might be taken away from you. What might you do to prevent that? What lengths might you go to keep the thing that you love, that brings meaning to your life?
The person who doesn’t care about anything doesn’t fear losing anything. They don’t, however, experience the same joy and happiness that the rest of us do.
Passion can generate fear in another way, as well. Think about a performer getting up at an open mic, or an author with a new book, or an athlete in a championship game. They care deeply about what they are doing, but are scared about presenting to the public, and how their work will be received. They fear messing up, of failing in front of everyone. Yet that fear can also drive them.
So how are the fear and passion related? And how does the experience of one inform the other? How can we prepare for them both, in a way that is productive and healthy?
Related questions: What are you passionate about? What role does fear play in your life? What is the right amount of emotion?
Passion and fear are deeply intertwined. For me, that connection is clearest in my commitment to ending homelessness — a goal, a passion — I fear is becoming harder to realize with each passing year.
I believe we can end homelessness, and I have devoted most of my career to helping make that belief a reality. To those new to housing justice advocacy, that goal may sound naïve or impossibly ambitious. But history tells a different story.
In the late 1970s, this country had enough affordable and available housing for people with the lowest incomes. Homelessness as we know it today was not yet a widespread, entrenched crisis. Then, in the early 1980s, the budget for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was cut by nearly 75 percent. Federal policy shifted away from sustained investment in affordable housing, and the government stopped making sufficient arrangements with landlords to preserve access for the lowest-income renters.
The consequences were swift and visible. Single men began turning to places of worship for help. Long-term emergency shelters emerged across the country, including in Minnesota. In 1987, the federal government allocated roughly $1 billion for emergency responses to homelessness — replacing the billions that had previously supported housing development and stability. We began funding the crisis rather than preventing it.
Over time, the steady erosion of federal investment forced more people — and eventually entire families — into homelessness. When I began working professionally in this field in 1997, between 3,000 and 4,000 “households” were experiencing homelessness each night in Minnesota. I use quotation marks because these individuals and families had no housing to hold.
Today, the structural shortfall is stark. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there are only 39 affordable and available homes for every 100 extremely low-income households that need them. The Minnesota Housing Partnership’s State Housing Profile 2026 factsheet estimates a shortage of more than 101,000 affordable and available homes for extremely low-income renters in Minnesota alone. As such, according to the Wilder Research Center, there are currently over 20,000 people who experience homelessness each night in Minnesota.
At the same time, federal capacity has been weakened. The Trump Administration significantly reduced staffing at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and challenged several of the most effective, evidence-based strategies for addressing homelessness.
My passion is to end homelessness. My fear is that we have allowed it to become normalized — that several generations now see it as an intractable feature of American life rather than the result of policy choices. When that happens, bold goals begin to sound like pipe dreams. And I fear that housing advocates, worn down by decades of scarcity, may stop aiming for what was once clearly within reach.