"Do what you love, love what you do"

What are your thoughts about the issues discussed in this article?

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/

i fully agree w/that article

just read the first few paragraphs but assuming it doesn't go in any surprising direction seems like a pretty obv marxist fisking of the idiom?

I think I do too. A relatively minor aspect of this that isn't discussed in the article are the impacts of the pressure to decide what you love/what your passion is and commit to it. Like you can't just like painting or making video games or whatever, you have to LOVE IT.
xpost

But yeah I guess the author is focusing more on the labor implications.

xp agreed, and after 30 years i feel pretty confident saying i don't generally have "love" feelings about stuff like that.

It's not a completely new phenomenon: it used to be what you had a vocation or 'calling' to do, and even the term 'professional' used to imply some sort of sense of status and reward of prestige that was distinct from pure monetary gain.

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life! Before succumbing to the intoxicating warmth of that promise, it’s critical to ask, “Who, exactly, benefits from making work feel like non-work?” “Why should workers feel as if they aren’t working when they are?” Historian Mario Liverani reminds us that “ideology has the function of presenting exploitation in a favorable light to the exploited, as advantageous to the disadvantaged.”

In masking the very exploitative mechanisms of labor that it fuels, DWYL is, in fact, the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. It shunts aside the labor of others and disguises our own labor to ourselves. It hides the fact that if we acknowledged all of our work as work, we could set appropriate limits for it, demanding fair compensation and humane schedules that allow for family and leisure time.

this is for sure otm, but there's something to be said for initiatives designed to disguise the phenomenon of labor. if it is inherently displeasure and painful (which it is for most everyone, and certainly fits the adamic curse) we should endeavor to make it less painful if possible - better wages, fewer hours, more protection in the workforce, labor laws, etc. the bigger problem w/ DWYL is that ideologically it does nothing to mitigate pain of labor for like 99% of society. it's kinda only good for brainwashing the bourgeois who might otherwise become sympathetic class-allies if they weren't confused about what work is.

I read that article a while back and think it's basically right although I don't know if I'd describe the phenomenon exactly the same way. Since most of us don't even ever get to the stage of having the illusion that we love what we do, I think most people are one step further removed, laboring under the illusion that there is a better tomorrow in which we *will* love what we do, if we can only figure out to get there, and that if we haven't figured it out yet it's probably our own fault.

Mordy OTM with this:

it's kinda only good for brainwashing the bourgeois who might otherwise become sympathetic class-allies if they weren't confused about what work is.

It's not a completely new phenomenon: it used to be what you had a vocation or 'calling' to do, and even the term 'professional' used to imply some sort of sense of status and reward of prestige that was distinct from pure monetary gain.

― Sausage Party (Bob Six), Tuesday, May 20, 2014 4:04 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sure, and I would guess it served the same fuction then it does now, with a slightly different mechanism. The professional gets semi-hollow rewards like status goods (often higher-esteem versions of the same consumer goods everyone else has) imagined "respect", and all kinds of pomp and circumstance of professionalism -- ceremonies, awards, dinners, meetings, membership in societies, etc.

it's funny that between economic leftists + protestant work ethics there is antagonism towards DWYL coming from both sides of american political ideologies. i could imagine a marxist + political christian agreeing that DWYL is some serious bullshit.