'Do what you love and love what you do' has become a New Age mantra for the under-or-misemployed. All of those who would really rather be artists or designers or writers or politicians software coders or videographers or, frankly, whatever.
Jobs are hard to come by in any field - hey, even finance - so people console themselves with the notion that they are taking unpaid internships, or being paid less than minimum wage or workers as part-timers, temps and contractors in order to, well, do what they love.
The arts, media and fashion are particularly susceptible to this siren song, but Washington, San Francisco and Hollywood are chocked full of people without paying gigs who tripled up in one bed-rooms or studios as they attempt to 'break into the business.'
The question that the following article poses is whether this has become a modern day Soma, the drug in Aldous Huxley's 1932 'Brave New World,' a feel-good pharmceutical with no side-effects, other than the individual's subjugation to the dominant socio-economic forces.
The problem the DWYL lifestyle poses for the vast majority is that they can not afford it. And for those who can, the potential time required for finding themselves is infinite so why even bother looking too hard?
This is not to say that people should always do what they hate or be forced to accept a lesser alternative. Far from it. But the data reveal that the palmy days of everyone achieving what they want if they just work hard enough and hope longingly enough have evaporated. The cost DWYL imposes on individuals, their families and society at
large is one that can be measured in wasted talent, deferred
innovations, reduced economic circumstances and disenfranchisement. And that does not appear to be a burden civilization can support for long. JL
Miya Tokumitsu commets in Slate:
“Do what you love. Love what you do.”
The command is framed and perched in a living room that can only be described
as “well-curated.” A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog
and has been pinned, tumbl’d, and liked thousands of times. Though it introduces
exhortations to labor into a space of leisure, the “do what you love” living
room is the place all those pinners and likers long to be.
There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial
work mantra for our time. The problem with DWYL, however, is that it leads not
to salvation but to the devaluation of actual work—and more importantly, the
dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.
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? And who is the audience
for this dictum?
DWYL is a 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 is an act of love. If profit
doesn’t happen to follow, presumably it is because the worker’s passion and
determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe
their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.
Aphorisms usually have numerous origins and reincarnations, but the nature of
DWYL confounds precise attribution. Oxford Reference links the phrase
and variants of it to Martina Navratilova and François 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
the notion in their repertoires for decades. Even the world of finance has
gotten in on DWYL: “If you love what you do, it’s not ‘work,’” as the co-CEO
of the private equity firm Carlyle Group put it to CNBC this week.
The most important recent evangelist of DWYL, however, was the late Apple CEO
Steve Jobs. In his graduation speech to the Stanford University Class of 2005,
Jobs recounted the creation of Apple and inserted this reflection:
You’ve 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.
In these four sentences, the words “you” and “your” appear eight times. This
focus on the individual isn’t surprising coming from Jobs, who cultivated a very
specific image of himself as a worker: inspired, casual, passionate—all states
agreeable with ideal romantic love. Jobs conflated his besotted worker-self with
his company so effectively that his black turtleneck and jeans became metonyms
for all of Apple and the labor that maintains it.
But by portraying Apple as a labor of his individual love, Jobs elided the
labor of untold thousands in Apple’s factories, hidden from sight on the other
side of the planet—the very labor that allowed Jobs to actualize his
love.
This erasure needs to be exposed. While DWYL seems harmless and precious, it
is self-focused to the point of narcissism. Jobs’ formulation of DWYL is the
depressing antithesis to Henry David Thoreau’s utopian vision of labor for all.
In “Life Without Principle,” Thoreau wrote:
… 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.
Admittedly, Thoreau had little feel for the proletariat. (It’s hard to
imagine someone washing diapers for “scientific, even moral ends,” no matter how
well paid.) But he nonetheless maintains that society has a stake in making work
well compensated and meaningful. By contrast, the 21st-century
Jobsian view asks us to turn inward. It absolves us of any obligation to, or
acknowledgment of, the wider world.
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’s racial biases, and political clout, while
comprising a small minority of the workforce.
For those forced into unlovable work, it’s 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 erased. As in Jobs’ Stanford speech, unlovable but socially
necessary work is banished from our consciousness.
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’s 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’s workers—abysmal wages,
massive child care costs, etc.—barely register as political issues even among
the liberal faction of the ruling class?
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’s no such thing as work?
* * *
“Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career
primarily for personal reward is a privilege, a sign of socioeconomic class.
Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art
school and co-sign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can bestow DWYL
as career advice upon those covetous of her success.
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, 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.
Yet arduous, low-wage work is what ever more Americans do and will be doing.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the two fastest-growing
occupations projected until 2020 are “personal care aide” and “home care
aide,” with average salaries in 2010 of $19,640 per year and $20,560 per year,
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.
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. Nowhere has the DWYL
mantra been more devastating to its adherents than in academia. The average
Ph.D. 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 his passion
for Norse mythology or the history of Afro-Cuban music.
The reward for answering this higher calling is an academic employment
marketplace in which about 41 percent of American faculty are adjunct professors—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.
There are many factors that keep Ph.D.s providing such high-skilled labor for
such low wages, including path dependency and the sunk costs of earning a Ph.D., 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. 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.
In “Academic Labor, the Aesthetics of Management, and the Promise of
Autonomous Work,” Sarah Brouillette writes of academic faculty, “[O]ur faith
that our work offers non-material rewards, and is more integral to our identity
than a ‘regular’ job would be, makes us ideal employees when the goal of
management is to extract our labor’s maximum value at minimum cost.”
Many academics like to think they have avoided a corporate work environment
and its attendant values, but Marc Bousquet notes in his essay “We Work” that academia may actually
provide a model for corporate management:
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’ wages or less? Is there any way we can get our employees to
swoon over their desks, murmuring “I love what I do” 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?
No one is arguing that enjoyable work should be less so. But emotionally
satisfying work is still work, and acknowledging it as such doesn’t undermine it
in any way. Refusing to acknowledge it, on the other hand, opens the door to
exploitation and harms all workers.
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.
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: 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 monthlong internships. For charity, of course.)
As an ongoing ProPublica investigation reveals, the unpaid
intern is an ever-larger presence in the American workforce.
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 it also insulates these industries from the full
diversity of voices society has to offer.
And it’s no coincidence that the industries that rely heavily on
interns—fashion, media, and the arts—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
Ph.D.s, is the belief that wages shouldn’t 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’ve been doing uncompensated child care, elder
care, and housework since time immemorial. And talking money is unladylike
anyway.
* * *
Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life! Before
succumbing to the intoxicating warmth of that promise, it’s critical to ask,
“Who, exactly, benefits from making work feel like nonwork?” “Why
should workers feel as if they aren’t working when they are?” In
masking the very exploitative mechanisms of labor that it fuels, DWYL is, in
fact, the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. 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.
And if we did that, more of us could get around to doing what it is we
really love.
As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance. Learn more...
0 comments:
Post a Comment