Loving what you do doesn’t guarantee happiness at work

From an early age, Sarah Jaffe remembers being asked to describe her dream job. There were several iterations—from the implausible “veterinarian in space” to the slightly more attainable “writer.” Whatever her target, parents and educators alike told her that if she could get paid to do something she loved, she’d be both successful and happy.

When she found herself working as a journalist (the dream!), she realized she was “still broke and still stressed and still freelancing on the side” to make ends meet. Loving her work was not making her happy.

In her book, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, Jaffe offers a message that flies in the face of C-suite hand-wringing over so-called quiet quitting. Jaffe argues that workers, particularly those in fields that recruit on the promise of purpose, are often unfairly expected to make sacrifices—taking unpaid internships, working long hours, or accepting low wages—to do what they love, and that pursuing a job for passion often leads to being exploited.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Which professions are told to love what they do and be grateful for what they get?

You hear about teachers going on strike, and everybody’s like, “Well, you didn’t get into [teaching] for the money”...Or nurses, or doctors…‘You did [this career] because you care about people. What do you mean you’re asking for more for yourself?’ When the Google union was announced, the first thing everybody said was, ‘Unions are for coal miners. You have a great job, how dare you?’ This [mentality] has really crept into so many industries…[even] the ones that nobody would expect you to love.

Are employees starting to question this mindset around work?

We certainly, as a society, are seeing actual pushback—from quit rates to unionization, union drives, and strikes. But it’s still down from 50–60 years ago, to say nothing of 100 years ago. But we are seeing in real numbers people refusing to accept the crappy conditions that they’ve been dealt.

You write that this culture leads to people being “underpaid, overstretched, and devalued,” giving the example of the video game industry, where offices are set up to seemingly encourage employees to stay at work. How might HR’s “perks” contribute to workers feeling overstretched?

Why do you give employees perks? Because you want to keep good employees. Well, what do you want to keep good employees doing? Working a lot. It’s not just that you want to keep good employees because you like having them around.

The [video game] industry has a term for this intense overwork: “crunch.”...They work 100-hour weeks leading up to [deadlines]...There’s this culture of hiring young, mostly men right out of school, and the company essentially sets it[self] up as something between their mom and their wife…So, the company feeds you. The company advertises its home-cooked meal on Fridays or orders you pizza if you stay past 7pm. The company is going to do all these things for you. And in turn, what they expect for you to do is work.

Where do you see solutions?

The basic concept of exploitation will only be fixed if you overthrow the capitalist mode of production. Barring that, which is not immediately likely, this is what unions are for. This is what organizing is for, this is also what labor law is for. This is what overtime pay is for…This is what all these things are for is to try to lessen the misery of work in various ways.