In the Name of Love
Elites embrace the “do what you love” mantra. But it devalues work and hurts workers.
Photo courtesy Mario de Armas/design*sponge
“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.
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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.
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