EP 384: Context Clues: Do you love your work?

Is loving your work all it's cracked up to be? And is the work you love meeting your needs?

Show Notes

I grew up expecting to love what I did for a living. I was encouraged to choose a career that I was passionate about. But when I did, I bumped up against the stark reality that work I loved didn’t pay the bills. At least not in any straightforward way. In this episode, I explore the context of “doing what you love” and how it shapes the way we build our businesses or careers today.

Footnotes:

• Analysis of wages during the 90s (BLS)
• Eupsychian Management by Abraham Maslow
• Target Commercial: “Come in for workout gear, leave feeling empowered.”
• Dan Olsen on The Ezra Klein Show
• The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
• “The Passion Paradigm: Professional Adherence to and Consequences of the Ideology of ‘Do What You Love’” by Lindsay DePalma
• “Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work” by Kathi Weeks
• Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe
• More about Lou Blaser and Midlife Cues
• “To My Brothers and Sisters In The Failure Business” by Seymour Krim
• Works Progress Administration

 
 

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What is What Works?

"Work" is broken. We're overcommitted, underutilized, and out of whack. But it doesn't have to be this way. What Works is a podcast about rethinking work, business, and leadership as we navigate the 21st-century economy. When you're an entrepreneur, independent worker, or employee who doesn't want to lose yourself to the whims of late-stage capitalism, this show is for you. Host Tara McMullin covers money, management, culture, media, philosophy, and more to figure out what's working (and what's not) today. Tara offers a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to deep-dive analysis of how we work and how work shapes us.