Of all the unhelpful and saccharine career aphorisms in recent times, surely the most grating is “do what you love, and you will never work a day in your life”.
Close on its heels in second place comes the quote by the late mythologist Joseph Campbell, who encouraged his students to “follow their bliss”, a comment which has been co-opted and de-contextualised by the inspirational quotes crowd and is responsible for launching a million pilgrimages of self-discovery to India.
These days, the holy grail of work is to find a job that taps our deepest talents, transforms us as people and pays the bills. Good-enough work, work we don’t hate, will simply not do; we must find a job we love, or die hustling. As US journalist Sarah Jaffe writes in her book Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone: “The idea that work should be a source of fulfilment has become common sense in our world, to the extent that saying otherwise is an act of rebellion.”
Inundated with messages about our right to deeply fulfilling work, many of us try to shoehorn our passion, that thing we love doing when we are not at work, into billable hours. In doing so we run the risk of commodifying it, of transforming the passion into a joyless chore that calcifies within the constraints of the labour model. What is joyful, creative and fun becomes hard graft. A friend of mine worked in a bookstore in his 20s and during those years he stopped reading novels as they became too closely associated with the nine-to-five. Another friend has sworn off fiction entirely because he teaches English five days a week and would prefer not to be reminded of sentences when he is at home.
Why do we do this to that which we love? Surely we enjoy our hobbies and our passions largely because they are not work? Why can’t we just let work be what it inherently is, which is to say, work?
To be fair, sometimes this relentless passion-seeking pays off. Sometimes an account manager really does need to quit her job to become a yoga instructor and she, and the world, are richer for it. Sometimes the right path really is a miraculous Venn diagram of overlapping passion and clamouring market demand. Many of us are grateful to the artists and writers who throw caution to the wind and devote their life to their passion, sans back-up plan. But to promote this path as the key to a fulfilling career is to succumb to the late-capitalist ideology that work must complete us. After all, it’s easier to labour under the illusion that the perfect job, like the perfect relationship, is out there somewhere, just waiting to receive our passions and abilities, rather than face the sobering reality that work is mostly what we make of it.
To be clear, I am not advocating that we should accept the hellishness of a toxic work culture. Nor should we put up with work that is dehumanising. There is nothing noble or edifying about sticking at a job you hate, of living for the weekends, of smiling and nodding in meetings until you lose the will to live. I’ve been in these jobs, and no amount of positive thinking, meditation or team development days were going to change my mind about it.
Thus the solution to soul-crushing work is not likely to be found in monetising our passions, but in seeking out “good-enough” work that is well-suited to our skills and personalities. It will look slightly different for each of us but for me good-enough work is defined by a measure of autonomy so I can make the work mine and thereby meaningful. Good-enough work also allows me the space to pursue my true passion: pretending to write a novel, while taking pictures of my dog in weird outfits.
So perhaps to really “follow our bliss” we should begin by seeking out jobs that don’t ask us to forfeit so much of ourselves; a career, in other words, that allows for enough mental real estate at the end of the workday for us to enjoy the passions and the people that we love and that, crucially, love us back.
• Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne freelance journalist
