Bookshelf (Part One): Work Won’t Love You Back
How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
The Ars Pandemonium Bookshelf
Thoughts and musings on mainstream business literature through my own prism of managing and leading teams of creative professionals. These are not “book reviews!” See more here.
Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
Sarah Jaffe; 2021, Bold Type Books
This book is a lot.
It’s. A. Lot.
It’s so much, in fact, that I’m going to do a two-part Bookshelf entry on it. That’s right: this opus is just Part One of my thoughts on this little number.1
Here in Part One, I’ll give some high-level critique of the book, why it appealed to me, and my general sentiment about it — the vibes. In Part Two, I’ll dive more deeply into the textual analysis and the more nuanced arguments the book puts forth. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on.
“The labor of love, in short, is a con.”
This book entered my awareness in late 2021, when I heard the author interviewed on the radio or a podcast. I now don’t remember what show it was, I’m guessing she was doing the press tour. But the interview was, frankly, revelatory. I ordered the book as soon as I could get a hold of a copy.
2021 had been a year…it was a year. I personally experienced extremes of success and tragedy in my professional life, while all around the pandemic continued wreaking havoc. A lot of things were coming together at once; I may have been uniquely receptive to the message of this book. I was ready.
“And in the finishing of this book I am trying to settle a bet with myself, it seems. Trying to love things more than my work even as I stare down a deadline and imagine the published version in my hands. I dream of someone reading these words and feeling cracked open themselves.”
I have to start with the title. Ah, the title. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced a title that so perfectly encapsulated the ethos of the book upon which it was affixed.
A title that, for me, so thoroughly clicked into focus a hazy hypothesis, a tip-of-the-tongue, corner-of-the-eye supposition I’d been harboring for years.
Work Won’t Love You Back, as a phrase, is an absolute slap across the face.2 “Oh!” you think, experiencing that title, “well…that’s true, isn’t it? Work won’t love me back. How could it?”
And before having read a single page you’re considering how many times you’ve said, “I love what I do!” Or how many times you’ve heard, “Love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
And you start wondering…”What the hell does any of that mean? Am I really the one that benefits from that? Who else might desperately need and want me to ‘love my work’? Why would I love something that won’t love me back?” And you’re off.
Five words! Five amazing words.
Now the subtitle, “How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone,” is pretty much the thesis of the book. Is it maybe just a bit hyperbolic? Well, yes and no.
On the one hand, it is obviously whatever the book-cover version of “click-bait” is.
It’s designed to grab somebody like me, somebody toying around with the notion that late-stage capitalism is maybe not the unalloyed good it’s been made out to be. That maybe those of us who have pursued careers of passion have not had quite the carefree upper-hand we thought we did.
So sure, it’s provocative. But! All that said, the book does make an awfully compelling — and non-hyperbolic — case to support that subtitle.
“Capitalist hegemony is collapsing before our eyes.”
The very first line of this book is, “I love my job.”
I think that’s important. The point of this book is not at all to suggest that we should not pursue work that we enjoy, or that we find fulfilling or meaningful. Obviously we’d all rather do that than not! The author is setting the stakes right from the beginning: she wants to be a writer, a journalist, an advocate — and she’s getting the chance to do it. I think she takes that privilege seriously.
The point of the book is, though, to describe some of the dynamics and forces — likely outside our own control — that lead to enjoyable, fulfilling, meaningful work being devalued and under-compensated. And to shine some light on who might actually be benefiting from our fulfillment or enjoyment…and its commensurate under-compensation.
So, let’s be very clear: all things said and done, the book is essentially a Marxist,3 feminist screed, a jeremiad lamenting the toxic concoction of capitalism and patriarchy that slowly inures us to the violence of giving our time, our thoughts, our expertise, our passions — our selves — over to the benefit of someone else.
If that description makes you think, “Oh boy, sounds like some try-hard liberal claptrap. I don’t have time for fucking Marxism, I have work to do,” I get it. But what I’ll say is…if you’re reading this and have any interest in what I’m trying to do with the Ars Pandemonium project, you’ll probably find something to at least think about here.
But be warned, it’s not an easy read. The writing style is dense and a little dry. But dense and dry like a funky old Cabernet, not like an overcooked brownie. It is obsessively, relentlessly researched and detailed (it has sixty pages of citations).
It’s like going down a rabbit hole with someone really smart, if a little single-minded, but not like being lectured at by a pedantic know-it-all. It’s a compelling balance. (However…I’m not sure I could have dealt with it while I had a full-time job; the cognitive dissonance might have melted my brain straight out of my ears. Check it out from the library, maybe.)
Still, I’m not necessarily drinking everything this book is pouring.
Some of that may be a defensive reaction to a radical proposition, sure. Look, there are ways that the very thesis of this book indicts pretty much my entire career. That’s not comfortable!
But it’s more than that, too. As deeply and thoroughly researched as the book is, the author still sometimes comes to conclusions that seem a little more “agitprop” than “proven hypothesis.”
Throughout the book there’s a kind of pattern: observation of phenomenon -> research into history, sociology, economics, politics -> explanation/conclusion. It usually feels, if not scholarly maybe, at least journalistic.
But occasionally, that last bit — the explanation or conclusion — feels like the first step, rather than the last.
For example, in the chapter on sports, Jaffe makes the argument that unionizing the labor of the athletes themselves is the key to a more equitable distribution of the revenue generated. Fair enough. Then she points out that there are wild inequities codified within the actual unionized ranks of athletes.
And then she seems to wave away that reality by suggesting that, well, sure it’s bad, but it would all be much worse without the unions. Okay…
The first part is well documented. But that last bit, while it feels like it’s probably right, is a counterfactual that seems unreasonable to state with such certainty. It struck an odd kind of “Q.E.D.!” tone in such an otherwise carefully reasoned argument.
Or consider this quote:
“Working-class women, in particular, are choosing to remain single even to raise children, finding that men’s job-market problems make them poor bets for long-term partners.”
That sentence is just there — no citation, no reference to studies or data. It’s from late in the book; it’s possible it is referencing some past, well supported, assertion, but I don’t remember if so, and again, it’s not cited here.
In any event, it may very well be true! But it seems like a wildly bold statement to just make, doesn’t it?
“Most artists were painting portraits and the like to make a living, not because the spirit had suddenly struck them to depict the richest man in town or his prized cow.”
But before I get ahead of myself, let me say: usually in my Bookshelf posts I pull a bunch of quotes from the text and talk about my reactions or my thinking about them.
I’ll do much more of that in Part 2 of this writeup.
But it’s quite a challenge — allow me an example to demonstrate why. Here are some quotes that I found really compelling from chapter 6, “My Studio Is the World: Art,” which examines the commercialization and professionalization of art (which hits pretty close to the heart of Ars Pandemonium):
“If the term ‘genius’ has spiritual roots, so does ‘creative.’ As cultural critic Raymond Williams noted, these words developed in tandem, with ‘creative’ at first a term for something not done by man, but by God. The shift to apply the word to art made by humans maintained the sense that, as literature scholar John Patrick Leary wrote, building on Williams, ‘creativity was a work of imagination, rather than production, of artistry rather than labor.’ This split between art and work continues to mystify the work that goes into making art.”
“The romantic image of bohemian artists living on whatever they could scrape together, carousing and painting and dancing and free-loving their way through life and the occasional radical political action, has its roots in the reality of artists in the 1800s cobbling together a living and a community. It is an image of people who reject the concept of ‘work’ as we know it. Yet that romantic image reinforces the idea of artists as gifted individuals, whose needs and desires are set apart from the rest of the world. Artists might be ‘dangerous,’ their art potentially subversive, but bohemian chic made an excellent site for ‘slumming’ by those who wanted a taste — just a taste — of radicalism with their arts purchases.”
“...a 1970 report noted that still, only one in ten painters or sculptors actually supported themselves with their art work. ‘Almost nobody could pay rent from art,’ Lucy Lippard of the AWC said. A few stars became famous and sold works for fabulous sums; the rest of the field looked on longingly from their part-time jobs and crumbling apartments. Art stars became mini-industries in themselves, hiring workers themselves in order to produce works of art. How could such artists be in solidarity with the working class?
“In [Richard] Florida’s framework, the Protestant work ethic had now fused with the ‘bohemian ethic,’ and the bohemians suddenly had the power; it was no longer necessary for workers to struggle over control of the means of production, because those means were all in their heads anyway. It’s another gloss on the artistic critique, synthesized into the revitalized, sprawling capitalism of the 1990s and 2000s. Who needs public funding when creativity is an engine of economic growth itself?”
“If artists’ work is not supported, if artists must find a way to self-sustain, then women, who remain responsible for so much caring labor, will find the odds of breaking into the mythic meritocracy stacked against them. ‘The majority of people who work in the arts will identify themselves as liberal to left-wing, often radically left-wing. This is going from the poorest artists to the highest paid curators in institutions,’ artist Kerry Guinan argued. ‘But, if this is the case that we are a field in which everyone is all left-wing values, then why are we all agreed that the art world is a piece of capitalist shit that is relying on private capital that exploits its workers, that exploits artists, relies on unpaid labor?” Guinan continued, ‘This, to me, is living proof that art cannot change the world and that is why we need to organize. Artists need to realize how little power we all actually really have and how power needs to be built. It doesn’t come naturally and it is not a divine gift you get by being an artist.’”
My goodness!
These quotes are pulled from pages 181 -197. The book is over 400 pages long!4 These aren’t even all the key highlights from that sixteen-page section, I just thought they were illustrative. The book really is that dense.
Also note that these quotes in isolation seem to make some strong assertions: that women “remain responsible for so much caring labor,” for instance. But that statement is backed up by a previous chapter, itself just as dense and meticulously researched, cited, and glossed as this one. And for the most part, the book is structured like that: it builds convincingly on itself.
I’ll also talk more about that clever and effective — if somewhat flawed — structure in Part 2.
“We need love but we also need a fucking game plan.”
To suggest that Jaffe has an agenda with the book would be an understatement akin to suggesting that the Titanic’s arrival in New York was delayed.
That’s okay! The book doesn’t make any claims to objectivity; remember, its subtitle is How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. It wears its agenda, quite literally, on its sleeve.
But it’s also worth noting what the subtitle (and thus, the agenda) is not: it’s not How to Reclaim Our Lives From the Clutches of Capitalism, nor even Ensure That Your Creative Work Is Fairly Compensated. The book is much more interested in deeply examining where we are — and exposing and explicating the problematic systems, institutions, and dynamics that got us here — than it is in offering solutions or prescriptions to fix it.
It doesn’t offer no solutions, though. Basically, it suggests one solution, over and over: organized labor. It makes some strong arguments for this approach. I just wish I could share Jaffe’s optimism for this as a solution.
Full disclosure, I have a somewhat…complicated…relationship with unions.
There’s an old adage that goes, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they aren’t.”5 That feels apt here. In theory, I am a full-hearted supporter of the labor movement, worker organization, unions, and the critical rebalancing of power between those who create and those who control the capital.
But I’ve been a dues-paying union member myself. As a professional, I’ve worked extensively — for decades — with unions and unionized professionals. I have close friends and immediate family members who are lifelong union members and advocates. And still, my personal experiences have been largely dispiriting and disillusioning.
However! There seems to be a real renaissance in labor organizing in the US right now, and I think that’s only going to be toward the good. And I understand that there are some progressive economists, workers’ rights advocates, and union activists who are proposing new approaches to labor organization.
I’m very interested in researching those further and then returning to Jaffe’s suggestions here, to see if I can find myself better aligned with them. I do see her point. I want it to work.
“If the work itself is its own reward, it is much easier for the boss to tell workers to shut up and look grateful.”
Over the years I’ve sometimes wondered if I was just a sucker for pursuing a career as a creative professional in the first place. The countless indignities of being, at least financially, under-valued sometimes added up.
But generally these would then get washed away in a river of gratitude for being able to make a living doing meaningful work I really do enjoy, their jagged little edges worn smooth by, it must be admitted, an intentional flow of looking-at-the-upside.
There are two incidents, though, that stand out for whatever reason. The second one is fairly recent, so maybe the erosion just hasn’t had its way yet, but the first has continued to create a persistent little eddy, an inconvenient turbulence in my otherwise smoothly flowing chump-acceptance river, even a decade-and-a-half after it happened.6
The first took place at some point back in probably in ‘08 or ‘09, in the depths of the financial crisis. All of the senior leadership of the studio was summoned to a meeting with HR where we were informed that, essentially, merit raises would be extremely small and bonuses would be paid pennies-on-the-dollar. We, as managers, were to communicate this to the team.
This was frustrating for plenty of reasons. But what made it infuriating was the messaging. To wit: we and the team should be grateful we have these wonderful, fulfilling, meaningful jobs, and that should be motivation enough. Money is just so much transactional drek, we were told, and we would be nothing but corrupt mercenaries if we pursued anything so base as money for our compensation.
Note! They were not suggesting that a choice was on offer: do more meaningful work for a smaller bonus, or less meaningful work for a larger one. Nope. Be glad you’ve got what you’ve got. You could be digging ditches, you ingrates.
The financial crisis meant none of us was particularly surprised by all this, nor that the CEO was making millions the whole time. But it just sat — and has continued to sit — so wrong.
The second story takes place a decade or so later, in 2020. Near the end of the year, I held an all-hands meeting for my team with the intention of doing a little year-in-review, and to celebrate the impactful work we’d done. 2020 certainly needed all the morale-boosting it could get.
As I prepped the materials for this meeting, I realized something: we’d been even more productive than we had the year before.
Remember, this meeting was happening via video conference — because we were all still under mandatory work-from-home7 guidance. In the face of everything 2020 threw at us, this amazing team had pivoted instantly and managed to continue to create impactful, high quality, often ground-breaking work, without missing a step.
I was so proud of the group, felt so humbled to lead them, and I really wanted to express that to them. I was just truly grateful.
But this other feeling nagged at me, too. The world had turned upside down, and the team had valiantly stepped up to…what? Keep the cogs of capitalism turning?
This wasn’t some kind of martyr situation, and all of us were thankful to still have jobs, for sure! Still, celebrating the achievement without at least acknowledging this rather grubby notion seemed…unhealthy, at best.
So acknowledge it I did. I just straight-up said it to the team: you all did a great job, pulled off an amazing achievement, and if you nonetheless feel a little ambivalent about it, well, me too. And here’s why.8
Anyway, when I first heard of Work Won’t Love You Back, it was those two experiences that jumped immediately to mind. The unease that had lingered from them seemed to find some place to go when I understood the project of this book.
Actually reading and processing it only made me appreciate it more, even if it is — as are all things — limited and flawed in certain key ways.
I’ll get into specific detail on all that in Part 2. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! It’s a lot!
This is 3.5k words on its own, which really stretches the viability of a Substack post. And I’ve still so much more to say!
And to elaborate: I just love that it isn’t Work Doesn’t Love You Back or Work Can’t Love You Back. Doesn’t could be debatable, Can’t might seem excusable. But Won’t feels intentional, almost aggressive. It’s the language of dysfunctional relationships. It says that your love for your work has been, is, and will continue to be, unrequited. Woof. Good stuff.
I’m actually no kind of scholar on Marxism, so I can’t really say that with any confidence. The book does reference and cite Marx, but not more often than Adam Smith, or indeed Henry Ford. It is for sure a scathing critique of certain tenets of modern capitalism, though, and clearly makes a strong argument that the relationship between workers and the value they produce is at least broken, if not fundamentally flawed. So, Marxesque? Marxish?
I can’t find a word-count for the book (why would I be able to?), but it feels like a long 400 pages, with very small print and wide margins. It. Is. A. Lot.
I’m working up a stand-alone essay about all this, but I think some condensed versions here will help put into perspective why I feel as strongly about this book as I do. Stealth essay!
Or live-at-work, as some people felt.
I do still debate whether that was a good idea: was my little existential crisis appropriate for the larger team? I don’t know; a few people expressed surprise at the sentiment, a few others thanked me, but for the most part I never heard more about it. And I let it rest with the one mention.