Why You Need To Go Ahead And Ditch The Mantra 'Do What You Love'

[FarCenter]

In ignoring most work and reclassifying the rest as love, Do What You 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.

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-you-need-to-go-ahead-and-ditch-the-mantra-do-what-you-love-2014-1

[Warpy]

1. It's a luxury that's foreign to most of us, anyway

since few of us have a whole lot of choice in what we do to pay the bills, especially in this economy.

And in any case, turning what you love into a JOB is not always wise, it sucks all the joy out of it.

[1000words]

2. Translation: Get used to a miserable low paying job ...

and be happy you even have it!

[El_Johns]

3. KR. I posted this a week ago & most of the respondents said "love what you do" was perfectly

realizable.

You know, to the person who scrubs toilets.

[jeff47]

4. There's a better reason to not do what you love

You'll stop loving it.

It will remain something you love for a time. But after a while you'll no longer love it.

Used to love computers and programming. After doing it professionally for a couple decades, I spend a lot more time in the garage building furniture.

[El_Johns]

6. +1, for sure. Doing what you love, by someone else's rules, for someone else's purposes, on

someone else's schedule, can be very un-fun.

[Wilms]

5. It's a way to sell self help books. n/t

[riderinthestorm]

7. Im married to someone who does what he loves. After 30 years he still loves it

Every day is a joy for him and he can't wait to get at it (he's a professional athlete).

Even my job as his manager + is a pretty cool gig this many years later.

Pretty much everyone in our industry (horses) that I've experienced is in it for love since most don't make it to our financial level. They do it because they love it.

I think that's probably true for virtually anyone who works with animals.

YMMV

[liberal_at_heart]

8. I encourage both my children to pursue careers in fields they love. My daughter

is going to college to become a veterinarian. My son wants to either own his own ice cream shop or be an astrophysicist. My husband worked his way up from customer service to engineer at a wireless telcom company. He loved that job. I want to go back to college so I can become a biologist. I see nothing wrong with encouraging people to follow their dreams. That does not mean that people who do other things are less than those who get to follow their dreams. Both of my brothers are truck drivers. They work damn hard, and deserve respect for how hard they work. One of my brothers gets paid what he is worth. The other doesn't, but I have never for a second thought less of either of them or anybody else for the work that they do.

[lumberjack_jeff]

9. By all means, do what you love.

But you finance it by selling the hours of your life as profitably as possible.

The only purpose of employment is compensation.

[bhikkhu]

10. I went into a decent trade, which I never loved, so I could afford to do the things I love

And its worked out pretty well. I have done most of what I set out to do in life, I've been able to travel and work in various parts of the country, raise a family, put some money away, potentially retire at some point, and then do even more of what I love to do. Of course, it was pretty crooked path, but prudence and determination kept things on track in the long run.

I never trusted "the system" enough (especially when I was younger) to imagine that I could just do what I loved and everything else would work itself out.