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.
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