“No, you’re working at Initech because that question is bullshit to begin with.”

Beth recently noted this terrific article about the “Do What You Love” slogan, which has created a totally proactive, in-your-face new paradigm. Miya Tokumitsu offers further arguments for why DWYL is not merely useless but actively pernicious:

But by portraying Apple as a labor of his individual love, Jobs elided the labor of untold thousands in Apple’s factories, hidden from sight on the other side of the planet—the very labor that allowed Jobs to actualize his love.

[…]

One consequence of this isolation is the division that DWYL creates among workers, largely along class lines. Work becomes divided into two opposing classes: that which is lovable (creative, intellectual, socially prestigious) and that which is not (repetitive, unintellectual, undistinguished). Those in the lovable-work camp are vastly more privileged in terms of wealth, social status, education, society’s racial biases, and political clout, while comprising a small minority of the workforce.

For those forced into unlovable work, it’s a different story. Under the DWYL credo, labor that is done out of motives or needs other than love—which is, in fact, most labor—is erased. As in Jobs’ Stanford speech, unlovable but socially necessary work is banished from our consciousness.

I will start listening to powerful executives saying “DWYL!” just as soon as they commit to personally cleaning all of the restrooms at their firm’s head office and put in a few shifts a month doing the same simple task ten hours a day on an assembly line.