"Doing the work you love" may not be happy, but may lead you to the road of exploitation and exhaustion

In 2005, Steve. In his commencement address at Stanford, Jobs reiterated an idea that millennial college graduates spent most of their lives internalizing. "Your work will take up a large part of your life, and the only way to really get satisfaction is to do what you believe is great," Jobs said. "And the only way to do great work is to love what you do." If you haven't found something you love yet, keep looking. Don't just do it. ”

Miya Tokumitsu, author of "Do What You Love and Other Lies About Success and Happiness," argues that Jobs's speech is the narrative crystallization of "lovely" work: when you love what you do, not only will the "labor" behind it disappear, but your functions, success, happiness, and wealth will multiply.

The equation itself is premised on the integration of work and life, preparing for burnout: what you love becomes your work; your work becomes what you love. The boundaries between the working day (going to and from work) or the self (the working self and the "real" self) become blurred. One pours one's whole self into a "lovely" job in the hope that doing so will bring happiness and financial stability, like a long Mesenchy circle. Like the artist Adam. Adam J. Kurtz rewrote the motto of Do What You Love: "Do what you love, and you'll always work hard, without distinctions and boundaries, and you'll see everything as extremely important."

"Cool Jobs" and "Low-Paying Jobs with No Benefits"

Under the framework of "doing what you love", as long as it is something you personally love, it can theoretically be a lovely job. But "lovely" work, at least for the time being, is tangible; can increase social and cultural cache storage; can work for itself or is rarely directly supervised. They can be thought of as social altruistic jobs (teachers, doctors, public defenders, social workers, firefighters); or in some ways considered cool jobs (national park rangers, craft beer chefs, yoga instructors, museum curators); or you can decide for yourself what to do and when to start the work.

The yearning for "cute" jobs is part of what makes them unsustainable. With so many people competing for so few jobs, salaries can be lowered without any impact, and someone will enthusiastically take your place. Benefits may be cut or cease to exist. At the same time, employers can improve their minimum qualifications for work, require a better school, another degree, more training (even if training is not necessarily required), and with these resumes, you have the opportunity to be one of the candidates considered by the employer.

In this case, "cool" jobs and internships become case studies of the relationship between supply and demand. Even if the job itself ultimately fails to fulfill one's personal ambitions, or if the job required is too much but paid too little to extinguish any enthusiasm that might exist, the challenge of being a "successful person" in the world makes the job more desirable.

According to Indeed.com survey, between 2006 and 2013, the use of the word "ninja" to describe jobs increased 25 times; the use of "rock stars" increased by 8.1 times, while the use of the word "Jedi" increased by 67%. As I write, you can apply for Autodesk's "Customer Support Hero," a Pennsylvania Chocolate Factory's Cocoa Powder Ninja, a Utah Clinic's "Healthy Samurai," and a "Rock Star Repairman" at a rental company in Orlando, Florida. These jobs are jobs for newcomers to society, and the salary is just or only a little more than the basic salary, usually with little or no benefits, and some are even just part-time performances called "money-making opportunities". The worse the job, the easier it is to be labeled and advertised for "cool" work. It's a means of convincing candidates that uncool jobs are actually worth yearning for, and that they deserve to be paid barely enough to make ends meet.

This is the logic of action of "do what you love". Of course, no worker would ask their employer to look down on themselves, but the phrase "do what you love" makes it seem unjust to ask for it to be valued. Doing what you love "exposes its followers to the fate of exploitation, rationalizing unpaid or low-wage jobs by throwing workers' motives back to them," Gong deguang argues, "When enthusiasm becomes a socially accepted motivation for work, talking about wages or work schedules becomes tacky." ”

Take Elizabeth, for example, who is a white Latino who grew up in the middle class of Florida. In college, she participated in the Disney University Program, which offers a mix of internship and "study abroad" experience, but not to study abroad, but at Disney. After that, she was eager to find a job at Disney, any job, even in the customer service center. This position has no future at all, no avenues for promotion, and just hope that you should be grateful to have a Disney job. "At Disney, they pin their hopes on your love for the company," she said. "I do love this company and their products, but that doesn't make it acceptable to barely make a salary above the minimum wage acceptable."

If work is your dream, you may consume too much identity

Burnout occurs when all giving becomes untenable, and when confidence in doing what you love as a way to achieve ambitions, financial, and other goals begins to waver. But it will still take years, even decades, to lose the belief that you spent the same amount of time decontaminating.

Stephanie, for example, considers herself "mixed-race" (white and Asian) and grew up in the middle class of North Carolina. Stephanie admits she never considered the possibility of not being able to get a job right away after graduation. She is one of the top three graduates of the Faculty of Letters, a member of the Honors Society, a contributor to newspapers, and helps edit literary magazines. Because she doesn't have a car and works full-time during the summer, she has no way to get an internship, which is something that can build her resume. In other words, she thought that her good grades and extracurricular activities would allow her to successfully pass the job search level.

"I excelled academically so well that I thought I could get a job easily," she says. After all, everything in academia works like this: I get my job done, and then everything turns out well. I think that's because I'm a self-motivated, capable, and great writing person, and I don't have to worry too much. ”

Stephanie's ideal job is someone with "a handsome amount of 'cool capital,' like you know, at Vice or some other hip-hopping company." A company that everyone has heard of." In the absence of those opportunities, she told her that she wanted to work in a "nonprofit", but in retrospect, the desire was, as she put it, to "be a 'nice guy' to be praised by society". She managed to find a job with the American Volunteers, but the working conditions were so bad that she quit after two months. She then started working as a waitress at a pizzeria to pay bills and then started looking for a job, with the goal of delivering 10 resumes a week. She used a spreadsheet to track when she applied for a job at which company. Eventually, she applied for more than 150 jobs. Only a few of them responded to her.

This went through two years. Still working in a pizzeria, she began drinking heavily with her colleagues and dating a bartender with violent tendencies. "I was in poor spirits, always hangover, and suicidal," she recalls. She knew that the only way to get herself out of her pizza parlor job was to write articles for free to accumulate her own work. So she set out, and 4 years after graduation, she finally got a job at a nonprofit agency for $15 an hour and no benefits.

As a result of this experience, she radically adjusted her understanding of what kind of work she could and should do. "I used to want my job to be all my life, but now I think a good job doesn't require me to work more than 40 hours a week on a regular basis, and the job responsibilities have to be challenging and fun, and still possible. I don't expect a "cool" job anymore because I think that if a job is your "dream" or your "passion", it will consume too much of a person's identity outside of working hours, which is very harmful. Even if I lose my job, I don't want to lose my identity with myself, can you understand that?"

If I don't love it every minute, is that still my mission in life?

A white man who grew up in a lower-middle-class family, Alex graduated from college in 2007 and began looking for a job as a church pastor. In the 12 years since he first started looking, he has applied for more than 100 jobs. Sometimes he wears several hats; other times, he can't even find a job. He currently has a church job, but his contract is about to end this summer, and he doesn't know what his family will do next. They moved into his parents' home last year to make ends meet. He is currently looking for any work that has a stable schedule, a reasonable commute, and a clear mandate or focus. "Healthcare will be a big plus," he said. ”

But as he searched and couldn't find a job as a pastor, he found himself caught up in a cycle of anxiety, shame, and melancholy, all of which ran counter to a sense of mission. "There's a belief that we're being led to something more important than ourselves: God, the universe, or whatever it is, he tells." So when we feel burned out, or when we set boundaries, we feel like we're somehow betraying our mission because I don't love it every minute. ”

In other words, "mission" is often an exploitative invitation, whether you're a zookeeper or a teacher or priest. In The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change, author Alan M. Ruper. Ellen Ruppel Shell points out that employers have created rules systems to examine applicants and distinguish between "called" candidates and applicants in general, based on the fact that "the former is willing to handle any task happily without arguing or asking for it."

No matter how many people admit that unpaid or low-paid internships are exclusive and exploitative, new graduates will still flock to the past. A BuzzFeed fellowship attracted thousands of applicants; a recruiter for multiple late-night shows told me that in the summer of 2019, she assigned ten thousand applicants to 50 positions on two shows. The promise of hope labor is that if you can squeeze through the narrow door smoothly, it doesn't matter how you or other hope laborers are treated. The important thing is that you end up having a chance to do the job you love, no matter how low the salary.