The Text:<\/strong> \u201cDo what you love. Love what you do.\u201d<\/p>\nThe commands are framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as \u201cwell-curated.\u201d A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog, but has been pinned, tumbl\u2019d, and liked thousands of times by now.<\/p>\n
Lovingly lit and photographed, this room is styled to inspire Sehnsucht, roughly translatable from German as a pleasurable yearning for some utopian thing or place. Despite the fact that it introduces exhortations to labor into a space of leisure, the \u201cdo what you love\u201d living room?\u2014 where artful tchotchkes abound and work is not drudgery but love?\u2014 is precisely the place all those pinners and likers long to be. The diptych arrangement suggests a secular version of a medieval house altar.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s little doubt that \u201cdo what you love\u201d (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem is that it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work, including the very work it pretends to elevate?\u2014 and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Superficially, DWYL is an uplifting piece of advice, urging us to ponder what it is we most enjoy doing and then turn that activity into a wage-generating enterprise. But why should our pleasure be for profit? Who is the audience for this dictum? Who is not?<\/p>\n
By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, DWYL distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it. It is the secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn\u2019t happen to follow, it is because the worker\u2019s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.<\/p>\n
Aphorisms have numerous origins and reincarnations, but the generic and hackneyed nature of DWYL confounds precise attribution. Oxford Reference links the phrase and variants of it to Martina Navratilova and Fran\u00e7ois Rabelais, among others. The internet frequently attributes it to Confucius, locating it in a misty, Orientalized past. Oprah Winfrey and other peddlers of positivity have included it in their repertoires for decades, but the most important recent evangelist of the DWYL creed is deceased Apple CEO Steve Jobs.<\/p>\n
His graduation speech to the Stanford University class of 2005 provides as good an origin myth as any, especially since Jobs had already been beatified as the patron saint of aestheticized work well before his early death. In the speech, Jobs recounts the creation of Apple, and inserts this reflection:<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.<\/p>\n
In these four sentences, the words \u201cyou\u201d and \u201cyour\u201d appear eight times. This focus on the individual is hardly surprising coming from Jobs, who cultivated a very specific image of himself as a worker: inspired, casual, passionate?\u2014 all states agreeable with ideal romantic love. Jobs telegraphed the conflation of his besotted worker-self with his company so effectively that his black turtleneck and blue jeans became metonyms for all of Apple and the labor that maintains it.<\/p>\n
But by portraying Apple as a labor of his individual love, Jobs elided the labor of untold thousands in Apple\u2019s factories, conveniently hidden from sight on the other side of the planet?\u2014 the very labor that allowed Jobs to actualize his love.<\/p>\n
The violence of this erasure needs to be exposed. While \u201cdo what you love\u201d sounds harmless and precious, it is ultimately self-focused to the point of narcissism. Jobs\u2019 formulation of \u201cdo what you love\u201d is the depressing antithesis to Henry David Thoreau\u2019s utopian vision of labor for all. In \u201cLife Without Principle,\u201d Thoreau wrote,<\/p>\n
\u2026?it would be good economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.<\/p>\n
Admittedly, Thoreau had little feel for the proletariat (it\u2019s hard to imagine someone washing diapers for \u201cscientific, even moral ends,\u201d no matter how well-paid). But he nonetheless maintains that society has a stake in making work well-compensated and meaningful. By contrast, the twenty-first-century Jobsian view demands that we all turn inward. It absolves us of any obligation to or acknowledgment of the wider world, underscoring its fundamental betrayal of all workers, whether they consciously embrace it or not.<\/p>\n
One consequence of this isolation is the division that DWYL creates among workers, largely along class lines. Work becomes divided into two opposing classes: that which is lovable (creative, intellectual, socially prestigious) and that which is not (repetitive, unintellectual, undistinguished). Those in the lovable work camp are vastly more privileged in terms of wealth, social status, education, society\u2019s racial biases, and political clout, while comprising a small minority of the workforce.<\/p>\n
For those forced into unlovable work, it\u2019s a different story. Under the DWYL credo, labor that is done out of motives or needs other than love (which is, in fact, most labor) is not only demeaned but erased. As in Jobs\u2019 Stanford speech, unlovable but socially necessary work is banished from the spectrum of consciousness altogether.<\/p>\n
Think of the great variety of work that allowed Jobs to spend even one day as CEO: his food harvested from fields, then transported across great distances. His company\u2019s goods assembled, packaged, shipped. Apple advertisements scripted, cast, filmed. Lawsuits processed. Office wastebaskets emptied and ink cartridges filled. Job creation goes both ways. Yet with the vast majority of workers effectively invisible to elites busy in their lovable occupations, how can it be surprising that the heavy strains faced by today\u2019s workers (abysmal wages, massive child care costs, et cetera) barely register as political issues even among the liberal faction of the ruling class?<\/p>\n
In ignoring most work and reclassifying the rest as love, DWYL may be the most elegant anti-worker ideology around. Why should workers assemble and assert their class interests if there\u2019s no such thing as work?<\/p>\n
\u201cDo what you love\u201d disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is an unmerited privilege, a sign of that person\u2019s socioeconomic class. Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and cosign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can self-righteously bestow DWYL as career advice to those covetous of her success.<\/p>\n
If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves?\u2014 in fact, to loving ourselves?\u2014 what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.<\/p>\n
Yet arduous, low-wage work is what ever more Americans do and will be doing. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the two fastest-growing occupations projected until 2020 are \u201cPersonal Care Aide\u201d and \u201cHome Care Aide,\u201d with average salaries of $19,640 per year and $20,560 per year in 2010, respectively. Elevating certain types of professions to something worthy of love necessarily denigrates the labor of those who do unglamorous work that keeps society functioning, especially the crucial work of caregivers.<\/p>\n
If DWYL denigrates or makes dangerously invisible vast swaths of labor that allow many of us to live in comfort and to do what we love, it has also caused great damage to the professions it portends to celebrate, especially those jobs existing within institutional structures. Nowhere has the DWYL mantra been more devastating to its adherents than in academia. The average PhD student of the mid 2000s forwent the easy money of finance and law (now slightly less easy) to live on a meager stipend in order to pursue their passion for Norse mythology or the history of Afro-Cuban music.<\/p>\n
The reward for answering this higher calling is an academic employment marketplace in which around 41 percent of American faculty are adjunct professors?\u2014 contract instructors who usually receive low pay, no benefits, no office, no job security, and no long-term stake in the schools where they work.<\/p>\n
There are many factors that keep PhDs providing such high-skilled labor for such extremely low wages, including path dependency and the sunk costs of earning a PhD, but one of the strongest is how pervasively the DWYL doctrine is embedded in academia. Few other professions fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output. This intense identification partly explains why so many proudly left-leaning faculty remain oddly silent about the working conditions of their peers. Because academic research should be done out of pure love, the actual conditions of and compensation for this labor become afterthoughts, if they are considered at all.<\/p>\n
In \u201cAcademic Labor, the Aesthetics of Management, and the Promise of Autonomous Work,\u201d Sarah Brouillette writes of academic faculty,<\/p>\n
\u2026?our faith that our work offers non-material rewards, and is more integral to our identity than a \u201cregular\u201d job would be, makes us ideal employees when the goal of management is to extract our labor\u2019s maximum value at minimum cost.<\/p>\n
Many academics like to think they have avoided a corporate work environment and its attendant values, but Marc Bousquet notes in his essay \u201cWe Work\u201d that academia may actually provide a model for corporate management:<\/p>\n
How to emulate the academic workplace and get people to work at a high level of intellectual and emotional intensity for fifty or sixty hours a week for bartenders\u2019 wages or less? Is there any way we can get our employees to swoon over their desks, murmuring \u201cI love what I do\u201d in response to greater workloads and smaller paychecks? How can we get our workers to be like faculty and deny that they work at all? How can we adjust our corporate culture to resemble campus culture, so that our workforce will fall in love with their work too?<\/p>\n
No one is arguing that enjoyable work should be less so. But emotionally satisfying work is still work, and acknowledging it as such doesn\u2019t undermine it in any way. Refusing to acknowledge it, on the other hand, opens the door to the most vicious exploitation and harms all workers.<\/p>\n
Ironically, DWYL reinforces exploitation even within the so-called lovable professions where off-the-clock, underpaid, or unpaid labor is the new norm: reporters required to do the work of their laid-off photographers, publicists expected to Pin and Tweet on weekends, the 46?percent of the workforce expected to check their work email on sick days. Nothing makes exploitation go down easier than convincing workers that they are doing what they love.<\/p>\n
Instead of crafting a nation of self-fulfilled, happy workers, our DWYL era has seen the rise of the adjunct professor and the unpaid intern?\u2014 people persuaded to work for cheap or free, or even for a net loss of wealth. This has certainly been the case for all those interns working for college credit or those who actually purchase ultra-desirable fashion-house internships at auction. (Valentino and Balenciaga are among a handful of houses that auctioned off month-long internships. For charity, of course.) The latter is worker exploitation taken to its most extreme, and as an ongoing Pro Publica investigation reveals, the unpaid intern is an ever larger presence in the American workforce.<\/p>\n
It should be no surprise that unpaid interns abound in fields that are highly socially desirable, including fashion, media, and the arts. These industries have long been accustomed to masses of employees willing to work for social currency instead of actual wages, all in the name of love. Excluded from these opportunities, of course, is the overwhelming majority of the population: those who need to work for wages. This exclusion not only calcifies economic and professional immobility, but insulates these industries from the full diversity of voices society has to offer.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s no coincidence that the industries that rely heavily on interns?\u2014 fashion, media, and the arts?\u2014 just happen to be the feminized ones, as Madeleine Schwartz wrote in Dissent. Yet another damaging consequence of DWYL is how ruthlessly it works to extract female labor for little or no compensation. Women comprise the majority of the low-wage or unpaid workforce; as care workers, adjunct faculty, and unpaid interns, they outnumber men. What unites all of this work, whether performed by GEDs or PhDs, is the belief that wages shouldn\u2019t be the primary motivation for doing it. Women are supposed to do work because they are natural nurturers and are eager to please; after all they\u2019ve been doing uncompensated childcare, elder care, and housework since time immemorial. And talking money is unladylike anyway.<\/p>\n
The DWYL dream is, true to its American mythology, superficially democratic. PhDs can do what they love, making careers that indulge their love of the Victorian novel and writing thoughtful essays in the New York Review of Books. High school grads can also do it, building prepared food empires out of their Aunt Pearl\u2019s jam recipe. The hallowed path of the entrepreneur always offers this way out of disadvantaged beginnings, excusing the rest of us for allowing those beginnings to be as miserable as they are. In America, everyone has the opportunity to do what he or she loves and get rich.<\/p>\n
Do what you love and you\u2019ll never work a day in your life! Before succumbing to the intoxicating warmth of that promise, it\u2019s critical to ask, \u201cWho, exactly, benefits from making work feel like non-work?\u201d \u201cWhy should workers feel as if they aren\u2019t working when they are?\u201d Historian Mario Liverani reminds us that \u201cideology has the function of presenting exploitation in a favorable light to the exploited, as advantageous to the disadvantaged.\u201d<\/p>\n
In masking the very exploitative mechanisms of labor that it fuels, DWYL is, in fact, the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. It shunts aside the labor of others and disguises our own labor to ourselves. It hides the fact that if we acknowledged all of our work as work, we could set appropriate limits for it, demanding fair compensation and humane schedules that allow for family and leisure time.<\/p>\n
And if we did that, more of us could get around to doing what it is we really love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Article: In the Name of Love by Miya Tokumitsu in Jacobin. The Text: \u201cDo what you love. Love what you do.\u201d The commands are framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as \u201cwell-curated.\u201d A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog, but has been pinned, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n