The desire for the cool job that you're passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon — and, as we'll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the 'honor' of performing it. The rhetoric of 'Do what you love, and you'll never work another day in your life' is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of 'passion,' we're prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.
…The desirability of 'lovable' jobs is part of what makes them so unsustainable: so many people are competing for so few positions that compensation standards can be continuously lowered with little effect. There's always someone just as passionate to take your place. Benefits packages can be slashed or nonexistent; freelance rates can be lowered to the point of bare sustenance, especially in the arts. In many cases, instead of offering a writer money for the content that goes on a website, the writer essentially pays the website in free labor for the opportunity of a byline. At the same time, employers can raise the minimum qualifications for the job, necessitating more school, another degree, more training — even if that training may or may not be necessary — in order to even be considered.
In this way, 'cool' jobs and internships become case studies in supply-and-demand: Even if the job itself isn't ultimately fulfilling, or demands so much work at so little pay so as to extinguish whatever passion might exist, the challenge of being the one in a thousand who 'makes it work' renders the job all the more desirable.
Can't Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation (2020)
Use the link below to read a September 2020 article about North American writer and journalist ANNE HELEN PETERSEN and her book Can't Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation:
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Think About It 069: ANNE HELEN PETERSEN
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