I was listening to a podcast in my car the other day because it’s the only distraction I’ve found that helps me avoid tearing all the skin off my body as I crawl home from work at 12 mph (literally. I live 12 miles from work and it can take me one, full hour to get home).

On that particular night it was an episode of KCRW’s The Treatment – my favorite of the several I now have in rotation. This salted-butter voiced man named Elvis Mitchell (former NY Times film critic) interviews luminaries of the pop culture and film worlds about their creative process. This particular episode featured writer/director/actor Lena Dunham.

Lena Dunham is a film phenom. The year after she graduated from college (like, three years ago) Lena wrote, directed, and starred in a film called TINY FURNITURE – a pitch-perfect window into those painful months after graduation that received major critical and popular acclaim. Since then she’s teamed up with Judd Apatow (yes, there’s only one) to write a pilot for HBO called GIRLS – a comedy about that same phase of post-grad life. We should see that premiere soon, but it’s already the talk of this town.

You can hear Lena’s entire interview on The Treatment online, but the part that most caught my ear slash mind was this interesting tangent she went into about passion-careers versus careers of any other variety.

Lena explained that she was raised in Manhattan by artist parents who were fortunate enough to make their art their career. They didn’t have j-o-b jobs; they had professions that had been their life dreams to pursue, and those professions supported themselves and their family. Growing up in that environment made Lena conditioned to view work in that light, she said. It wasn’t work vs. life it was work as life, work for life, working to enhance every element of living. Lena’s parents raised her in that same spirit, teaching her by example to find something she loved and build a life of work around that passion. (note: my parents lived and did the same)

It wasn’t until she went to college and met friends whose parents didn’t approach work in that same way (perhaps because they couldn’t, perhaps because they didn’t want to), Lena explains, that she realized how different a life in pursuit of your passions is from a life in which work is something you do just to make money.

That’s simplifying the very poignant point she was making. Probably best to give your own listen.

But my point in bringing this up is that in my six-months-on-the-dot in Los Angeles I’ve realized how different a place can be when most of its inhabitants treat work as the passion of their life versus treating work as a means to afford their life.

L.A. is a place you come to be a director/writer/producer/dancer/actor/stylist/editor/star. Those aren’t jobs, they’re things.

There are people here – hundreds of thousands of them – who are doing a job to earn a paycheck to get by from week to week. Maybe they’re script readers who want to be script writers, production assistants who want to be producers, musicians who dream of scoring movies, or stylists who actually aspire to act. What I mean is that not everyone in L.A. is living the dream they moved here to pursue, and not everyone here ends up pursuing what it is they originally dreamed. But you don’t come to Hollywood to reflect on your 9-5 and say, “well, it pays the bills.” The traffic is way too miserable for that.

I used to debate the idea of work/life balance with a good friend of mine who truly did not desire to have a career combined with a passion. He wanted to do a job that made him good, stable money; that he was skilled at; that he could tolerate – but the idea of turning a passion into a career, of spending a life in pursuit of one goal was not for him. In fact, he thought it was a very dangerous way of living.

I’m not sure whether or not he’s right, but I am sure he would hate L.A.

It is difficult to describe how living in a city full of passion-players feels. When I lived in New York I met people with that same work-and-life-are-one mentality, but there were just as many if not more people who went to the office, enjoyed what the did, made their salary, and called it a day. They had passions too, but they were separate from what they did at work.

That – for the most part – is not the case here. People eat/sleep/live/breathe what they do here to a degree that’s earned this town more than one bad reputation. I can tell you based on a very brief six months that most of those reputations are true. Having a dream and taking that dream to a place where so many before it have come true can lead to some pretty intense stuff. That’s why L.A. attracts some narcissists, some fame mongers, and a power-hungry empire climber or 20 who will do anyone and anything to make it to the top. Like my friend says, it can very dangerous to organize your life around one, major passion. And it can be very, very scary for a someone who decided to make that life shift six plus months ago.

But so far I find L.A. to be like the environment in which Lena Dunham grew up. Now that I’m surrounded by people who’ve taken the same giant leap of faith that I have I feel like I can’t let them down. I feel like we raise each other to a certain level of persistence, commitment and hard work. When everyone else at the party is pursuing ten side projects to get them closer to their goal you want to rise to that same level of gumption and initiative. You don’t have to apologize for being a little anti-social while you finish your pilot, people get it. You don’t have to worry about bringing work conversation into your weekend plans, people want it. And you don’t have to feel like everyone is thinking, “come on kid – just get a real job and stop with this whole crazy dream.” People here aren’t really about stopping.

Here in L.A. the more crazy dreamers pursuing their passions the less crazy an individual passion pursuer feels. And isn’t that what we’re all after anyway? Finding that one place where we don’t feel crazy for wanting to do whatever it is we want to do.

After six months in L.A. I’ve decided that I feel the opposite of crazy or foolish or dangerous. I can’t say that word is comfortable (quite yet), and I know it isn’t confident (there’s a chance it may never be), so I guess the best way to explain is to say that I feel “right.”

So thanks Lena Dunham. You raised an excellent point. But now my question is, how do you feel in L.A. And do want to go get coffee in West Hollywood so we can talk about it?