Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

Because at some level, the mandate to love your work and be happy with it has a very simple and straightforward rationale: the dictate to work more. Love and happiness, these management gurus explain, are endless reservoirs of energy, concentration, and motivation. How do we make ourselves happy and in love with our job? Here is a typical response:... See more

In a work context characterized by cost-cutting, competition, and a strict regimentation of work, such that everything, from dress codes to toilet breaks, is regulated and enforced through multiple forms of surveillance, focus on affect and interactivity in worker-management and worker-customer relations is more conducive to the interiorization of

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The potential for passion to be exploited—either the passion of workers who have it, or by expecting workers to perform it—was a deep-cutting finding that led to my own reckoning with my perspectives about work.

Unfortunately, the work that most of us spend the bulk of our days on is not work that fills up our self-actualization tank. Mostly, we work at a job to make money so we can pay for a place to live and food to eat. We work to prove that we deserve to live.