How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
336 pages
English language
Published Feb. 17, 2021 by PublicAffairs.
as someone whose career path bounced around nonprofits & higher ed, man-o-man am I doing some reconsideration after enjoying this audiobook.
What I learned from this book : it's okay to not love my job. I should try expending less mental energy on this - love people, not work. This was a fascinating overview of ways in which people fight to have their work valued as work, as well as the dangers of conflating the necessity of having to work with "loving" the work you do. Emotional burnout is a thing, and if the pandemic taught me anything it's that there are truly no "essential" workers, only essential jobs.
this book delivers what it promises but was more deeply researched and expansive than I expected—rolls in labor history, ones relationship to work, social programs, etc, to paint a picture of a cultivated and toxic modern relationship to work. was a concrete way to tie in theory, history, and work malaise, though I lost a bit of interest toward the end and petered out about 3/4 of the way through
this is the through, intersectional, globe spanning short form takedown of the "do what you love" myth w/ a deep focus on how it effects the most marginalized workers.
footnoes and research could have been a little deeper but otherwise an a+ read
