Back when I was a professor, I once told a student, whose dozens of internship and fellowship applications had yielded no results, that she should move somewhere fun, get any job, and figure out what interested her and what kind of work she didn’t want to do. She burst into tears. “But what’ll I tell my parents?” she said. “I want a cool job I’m passionate about!”
Those expectations are an unexpected by-product of the “concerted cultivation” that imbued so many millennial childhoods. If a child is reared as capital, with the implicit goal of creating a “valuable” asset that will make enough money to obtain or sustain the parents’ middle class status, it would make sense that they have internalized that a high salary is the only thing that actually matters about a job. There are some students who achieve just that: some doctors, most types of lawyers, maybe all consultants.
Still, we often look at anyone who articulates hope for a “well-paying” job as somehow crude, even though that understanding of work is most similar to our ancestors’, who relationship to labor was, above all else, utilitarian. A miner might have taken pride in his hard work, but mining—or farming, or ranching—was not a vocation he chose because it was cool, or because he felt “passionate” about the trade. He did it because it was what his father did, or because it was the most viable option, or because he’d been trained all his life, in one way or another, to do it.
Millennials, by contrast, have internalized the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all that childhood optimization: doing work you’re passionate about, which will naturally lead to other “better life outcomes.”
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 you 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 harsh reality of the job search lays bare the contradictions, half-truths, and poorly constructed myths that motivated millennials through childhood and college. Jobs don’t magically appear with a college education. The student loans taken out to pay for that college education can limit job choices—particularly when an entry-level salary in a field is too low to offset the minimum monthly payment and the cost of living. Health insurance is crappy or unavailable. Gig work, even doing something you love, barely pays the bills. Your high school and college resume, no matter how robust, can still be a nearly valueless currency. Most of the time, all that passion will get you is permission to be paid very little.
In 2005, Steve Jobs delivered the commencement address at Stanford University—and reaffirmed an idea the university’s millennial graduates had spent much of their lives internalizing. “Your work is going to fill a larger part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work,” Jobs said. “And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
Miya Tokumitsu, author of Do What You Love and Other Lies About Success and Happiness, sees Jobs’s speech as a crystallization of the narrative of “lovable” work: that when you love what you do, not only does the “labor” behind it disappear, but your skill, your success, your happiness, and your wealth all grow exponentially because of it.
This equation is, in itself, premised on a work-life integration poised for burnout: What you love becomes your work; your work becomes what you love. There is little delineation of the day (on the clock and off) or the self (work self versus “actual” self). There is just one long Möbius strip of a person pouring their entire self into a “lovable” job, with the expectation that doing so will bring both happiness and financial stability. As the artist Adam J. Kurtz rewrote the DWYL maxim on Twitter: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life work super fucking hard all the time with no separation and no boundaries and also take everything extremely personally.”
Within the framework of “do what you love,” any job can theoretically be lovable, so long as it’s what you, personally, love. But “lovable” jobs, at least in this moment, are visible jobs, jobs that add social and cultural cache, jobs where you work for yourself or with little direct supervision. They can be jobs that are viewed as societally altruistic (teachers, doctors, public defenders, social workers, firefighters) or jobs that are framed as cool in some way (park ranger, microbrewer, yoga instructor, museum curator) or where you have total autonomy over what you do, and when you get to do it.
They’re jobs that kids dream about, that people talk about, that earn a “Wow, what a cool job” when you bring it up in conversation. Waitressing can be a cool job if you’re doing it for the right restaurant; menial backstage work can be a cool if it’s for the right theater company. Michael, who is white and grew up middle class in Kansas City, had only the vaguest notions of what his ideal job would be: “Something where I was ‘being creative’ all day.” Rooney, who is Black and working class, conceived of a good job as “meaningful,” that she was “passionate about” and “called to.” Greta, who’s white and grew up middle class, said her favorite media texts—from Legally Blonde to Gilmore Girls—taught her that a “cool” job is one where you doggedly pursue your passion.
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 content that goes on a website, the writer essentially pays the website in free labor for the opportunity for 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.
For many companies, that’s a perfect scenario: a position that costs them little to nothing to fill, with a seemingly endless number of overqualified, incredibly motivated applicants. Which explains why, in the ostensibly robust job market of the late 2010s, companies have found themselves increasingly desperate to fill unlovable, lowly compensated jobs—especially given that many of them, no matter how basic, now require a college degree. As Amanda Mull pointed out in the Atlantic, that desperation took the form of the cool job ad, and spending more and more money on perfecting that ad (instead of, say, offering candidates better money, benefits, or flexibility1).
According to Indeed.com, between 2006 and 2013 there was a 2505 percent increase in jobs described using the words “ninja”; a 810 percent increase in “rock star,” and a 67 percent increase in “Jedi.”2 At the time of this writing, you can apply for a position as a “Customer Support Hero” at Autodesk, a “Nib Ninja” at a Pennsylvania chocolate factory, a “Wellness Warrior” at a clinic in Utah, and a “Rockstar Repair Man” for an Orlando, Florida, rental group. Most of these job ads are for entry-level positions with pay at or just above minimum wage, with few or no benefits. Some are simply freelance gigs marketed as “earning opportunities.” The shittier the work, the higher the chances it gets affixed with a “cool” job title and ad—a means of convincing the applicant that an uncool job is indeed desirable and thus worth accepting the barely livable wage.
That’s the logic of “Do what you love” in action. Of course, no worker asks their employer to value them less, but the rhetoric of “Do what you love” makes asking to be valued seem like the equivalent of unsportsmanlike conduct. Doing what you love “exposes its adherents to exploitation, justifying unpaid or underpaid work by throwing workers’ motivations back at them,” Tokumitsu argues, “when passion becomes the socially accepted motivation for working, talk of wages or responsible scheduling becomes crass.”3
Take the example of Elizabeth, who identifies as a white Latina and grew up middle class in Florida. As an undergrad, she attended the Disney College Program, which provides a hybrid internship and “study abroad” experience, only instead of a foreign country, it’s at . . . Disney. Afterward, she was desperate to find a job, any job, with the company—even one at its call center. The position was a total dead end, with no means of advancement, just the expectation that you should be grateful to have a Disney job in the first place. “At Disney, they bank on your love of the company,” she said. “I did love the company and their products, but that didn’t make the barely-above-minimum-wage pay okay.”
When a group of “passionate” workers do advocate for better pay and working conditions—by, say, joining a union—their devotion to their vocation is often called into question. (The exception are occupations that have been unionized for decades, like many firefighters and police officers.) Advocating for a union means identifying oneself first and foremost as a laborer, in solidarity with other laborers. It promotes a sort of class consciousness that so many employers have worked to negate, instead reframing “jobs” as “passions” and “workplaces” as “family.” And God forbid you talk about money with family.
It’s easy to see how a profound slippage can develop between pursuing “passion” and “overwork”: If you love your job, and it’s so fulfilling, it makes sense that you’d want to do it all the time. Some historians trace the American cult of overwork to the hiring practices of post–World War II defense industries in the Santa Clara Valley of California. During the 1950s, these companies began recruiting scientists who were, as Sara Martin puts it in her 2012 history of overwork, “single-minded, socially awkward, emotionally detached, and blessed (or cursed) with a singular, unique, laser-like focus on some particular area of obsessive interest.”4
Once hired, these scientists provided the new standard for the “good” worker. “Work wasn’t just work; it was their life’s passion,” Martin explains, “and they devoted every waking hour to it, usually to the exclusion of nonwork relationships, exercise, sleep, food, and sometimes even personal care.” Psychologists at Lockheed, one of the preeminent companies in what would become Silicon Valley, dubbed the particularly desirable worker mentality “the sci-tech personality,” Martin says, and molded their work cultures around them: Work whatever hours you want, for as long as you want, in whatever clothes you want, and we’ll make it happen. At HP, they brought engineers breakfast “so they would remember to eat”—an early iteration of the cafeterias and free meals and snacks that have come to characterize startup culture.
But it took the runaway success of In Search of Excellence—published in 1982 by two McKinsey consultants—for that particular work ethic to be nationalized and standardized. The argument of the book was straightforward: If companies could find employees like the ones working in Silicon Valley (i.e., employees willing to subsume themselves in work) they too could enjoy the newly mythologized success of the tech industry. In this way, overwork became avant-garde, fashionable, forward-thinking—while unionized protections of the forty-hour workweek became not only old fashioned and out of touch, but distinctly uncool.
And as unions—and the legislation that protected them—became unpopular, so too did worker solidarity. Instead, the quest to find and win “lovable” work created an atmosphere of ruthless competition; feeling personally passionate and fulfilled by work takes precedence over working conditions for the whole.5 “Solidarity becomes suspect when each individual views him- or herself as an independent contractor, locked in a zero-sum battle with the rest of society,” Tokumitsu explains. “Every moment he or she spends not working means someone else is getting ahead, to his or her detriment.”6
Trying to find, cultivate, and keep your dream job, then, means eschewing solidarity for more work. If a coworker insists on set work hours, or even just taking a vacation, they’re not setting healthy boundaries—they’re giving you an opportunity to show that you can work harder, better, more than them. In my newsroom, for example, reporters are given the option of taking a day or two off after covering a traumatic event, like a mass shooting. But few take that offered day, because in a job like journalism, where thousands are hungry for your job, it’s not actually an opportunity for rest—it’s a chance to distinguish yourself as someone who doesn’t require space for mental recovery.
When everyone in the workplace conceives of themselves as individual contractors in continuous competition, it creates conditions prime for burnout. One worker sets the bar for how early they can get into the office and how late they can stay; other workers try to meet or exceed it. Of course, the cumulative result of this atmosphere is rarely positive: In my case, not taking even a single day off after covering the mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, turned me into a burnout-denying sad sack reporting lump for months. And a culture of overwork does not mean better work, or more productive work—it just means more time at work, which becomes a stand-in for devotion.
Burnout occurs when all that devotion becomes untenable—but also when faith in doing what you love as the path to fulfillment, financial and otherwise, begins to falter. Still, it usually takes years, even decades, to lose a faith you’ve spent an equal amount of time internalizing. Take the case of Stephanie, who identifies as “mixed” (white and Asian) and grew up middle class in North Carolina. Stephanie admits she never even considered the possibility of not finding a job immediately after graduation. She was one of the top three students in the Literature Department, was part of the Honors Society, wrote for the newspaper, and helped edit the literary magazine. Because she didn’t have a car, and worked full-time in the summers, she couldn’t get an internship—the sort of thing that could’ve built her portfolio. That said, she assumed that her good grades and extracurriculars would carry her through.
“I performed so well academically that I sort of assumed that a job would fall into my lap,” she said. “After all, that was how everything in academics worked: I put in my end of the work and everything turned out fine. I thought that because I was a motivated, capable person with excellent writing skills, I didn’t have to worry much.”
Stephanie’s ideal job was somewhere with “a notable amount of ‘cool capital’—you know, working at Vice or another trendy/edge place. Somewhere that everyone’s heard of.” When those opportunities didn’t manifest, she told people who asked that she wanted to go into “nonprofits,” yet looking back, that desire was much more about, as she puts it, “getting social rewards for being ‘good.’” She managed to find placement with AmeriCorps—but the job environment was so awful, she quit in two months. She started waiting tables at a pizza place to pay the bills, and began applying for jobs, aiming for ten a week. She used a spreadsheet to keep track of when and where she’d applied. In the end, she submitted applications to more than 150 jobs. Only a handful even responded.
This went on for two years. Still working at the pizza place, she started drinking heavily with her coworkers, and dating a bartender who ended up being abusive. “I was low energy, hungover all the time, and, at points, suicidal,” she recalls. The only way she knew how to get out of the pizza job was to write for free in order to build her portfolio. So that’s what she started doing—and eventually, four years after graduation, landed a job at a nonprofit—for fifteen dollars an hour, no benefits, and no 401k.
These days, Stephanie’s dubious about whether her degree from a public liberal arts college was worth it. “Getting out of the service industry felt like a huge accomplishment to me,” she says. “But the more time I spent in the service industry, the more I wondered if I was egotistical or naive for wanting a directed career as badly as I did.”
As a result of this experience, she’s radically recalibrated her understanding of what a job can and should be to her. “I’ve always wanted my work to be my whole life, but now I feel like a good job is something that doesn’t require me to work more than forty hours on a regular basis, and with duties that feel challenging and interesting while still doable. I don’t want a ‘cool’ job anymore, because I think jobs that are your ‘dream’ or your ‘passion’ consume too much of one’s identity outside of work hours in a way that can be so toxic. And I don’t want to lose my identity if I lose my job, you know?”
When so many millennials entered the job market, it was either in complete shambles or in very, very slow recovery. Between December 2007 and October 2009, the unemployment rate doubled: from 5 to 10 percent. Total employment dropped by 8.6 million. And while a major nationwide recession affects nearly everyone, in some way, it especially affects those on the market for the first time. When millions of experienced workers lost their jobs, they went looking for new ones wherever they could: including the lower-paying, entry-level work where first-time job seekers generally find a foothold in the market. For millennials between sixteen and twenty-four, the unemployment rate rose from 10.8 percent in November 2007 to 19.5 percent in April 2010—a record high.7
“Millennials got bodied in the downturn,” Annie Lowrey wrote in the Atlantic. They “graduated into the worst job market in eighty years. That did not just mean a few years of high unemployment, or a couple of years living in their parents’ basements. It meant a full decade of lost wages.” The extent of the effects of this timing is only now coming into focus: A 2018 report issued by the Federal Reserve, for example, found that “millennials are less well off than members of earlier generations when they were young, with lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth.”8
No job, after all, means no ability to save—for a home, for retirement—or invest. Some millennials went back to school to weather the storm and emerged, two or six years later, with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt—and job prospects hardly improved. Those forced to move home were also forced to endure anxious discourse, from our own parents and the media, that we’d never leave: aimless and lazy, instead of weathering an economic cataclysm entirely out of our control.
It was, and remains, a bleak reality. But millennials, even those back at home in their childhood bedrooms, weren’t raised to resign themselves to market forces. We were raised to work harder to find that promised perfect job, eager to perform what Kathleen Kuehn calls “hope labor”: “un- or under-compensated work, often performed in exchange for experience and exposure in hopes that future work will follow.”9 In other words,internships, fellowships, and other quasi jobs, many of which hold dubious value yet feel compulsory for most jobs, especially, as Tokumitsu points out, “lovable” ones.
When I graduated from college in 2003, few of my friends had done internships, or even had known to seek them. Ten years later, as a professor, I fielded far more questions from advisees about how I could connect them with internships than requests to explain, say, their coursework on Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory. Because as difficult and impenetrable as Lacan’s theoretical concepts are, for most students they’re still less difficult than landing an internship.
You can just read more to understand a theory: put in more work, and incomprehension will eventually solve itself. But internships are about connections and, above all else, the willingness and ability to work for little to nothing. And if you can’t get a job without a portfolio, and you can’t build a portfolio without internships, and you can’t afford to work for free to snag those internships—then, in theory, only a certain sort of person (read: a person with means, a person with private funding from their university, a person who can take out even more loans to cover an internship while they’re in school) can afford to provide “hope labor.”
Some of us were only able to take on internships because we were living at home. Others, to make ends meet, relied on parents, or student loans, or side hustles. Many gave up the dream of finding work in their desired field entirely. But that didn’t mean the overarching idea that you should do what you love, no matter the cost, faded away.
Sofia, a white woman who grew up “privileged as fuck,” had a string of unpaid internships at small museums and Sotheby’s before graduating from a small liberal arts college with a degree in art history. But it was 2009, and a promised job at Sotheby’s suddenly evaporated. She applied for hundreds of paid and unpaid internships in New York and Chicago; she finally got a single interview with a theater company and took it, knowing that her parents could help support her, since the internship was unpaid.
She tried to get a waitressing job on the side, going door to door in Astoria, Queens, distributing her resume to every restaurant. She never heard a thing, landing a job only when a position opened up at the restaurant where a friend worked. “If I learned anything in that search, it was that networking, nepotism, and insider connections are largely the only way to get a job,” she said. “And even then, that job was an unpaid internship.”
And yet, that internship led to a paid internship, which eventually led her to a PhD program. But before she got that far, Sofia helped assist the intern coordinator at one of the museums where she worked—and gained “firsthand knowledge of how nonchalantly they exploited interns (in terms of low/no pay) because they knew how competitive the internships were.”
Each internship opportunity attracted thousands of applicants; it was harder, in certain ways, to land the internship than to get into an Ivy League school. “They knew, because they had a prestige brand, that they could do anything they wanted when it came to compensation,” Sofia said. “No one gets into the arts world for money anyway, right? You have to be passionate about it to pursue it! And they wonder why museums have such bad reputations for hiring diversity.”
In truth, there are three options to cover unpaid or underpaid work while in undergrad or graduate school: Take out student loans to cover it, work another job to subsidize it, or rely on parental support (in the form of living/eating at home, or parents footing the bill for living expenses). In a 2019 blog post, Erin Panichkul, the first in her family to go to college, wrote about how she’d taken out loans throughout her undergrad career, not just for tuition, but to cover rent, groceries, utilities, and books: first at Santa Monica Community College, then at UCLA, and finally at law school. When the prospect of the unpaid internship came up at the United Nations, she knew she had to take it—even if it meant taking out student loans (i.e., paying) to do work for free.
“Exposure does not pay bills,” Panichkul wrote, in a post entitled “Unpaid Internships Keep Women Like Me Out of the Legal Field.” “Experience doesn’t cover rent. It doesn’t pay for my transportation to get to my internship. It doesn’t feed me. But I believed the experience was so important that taking out a loan was worth it.” It’s an “unwritten rule” that the resume builders obtained through internships are essential to landing a job at a firm. Thus, it’s an “unwritten rule” that you must take on internships, no matter how little they pay, in order to get a job. “Getting paid for working should not be a luxury,” Panichkul writes. “When I was a law student, I was always so damn grateful for these opportunities that I never questioned the practice until now.”
When people follow a “calling,” money and compensation are positioned as secondary. The very idea of a “calling” stems from the early precepts of Protestantism, and the notion that every man can and should find a job through which they can best serve God. American Calvinists interpreted dedication to one’s calling—and the wealth and success that followed—as evidence of one’s status as elect. This interpretation was conducive to capitalism, the cultural theorist Max Weber argues, as it encouraged every worker to see their labor not just as broadly meaningful, but worthwhile, even sacred.
In a seminal study on zookeepers, J. Stuart Bunderson and Jeffrey A. Thompson examined the hardships endured by those who conceived of their work with animals as “a calling.” Zookeepers are highly educated but poorly paid, with an average salary of $24,640 in 2002. The majority had to take on a second job in order to make ends meet. There’s very little room for advancement, and they spend a not insignificant amount of time each day cleaning up waste and performing other “dirty work.” But they also articulated an unwillingness to consider quitting, or finding a new line of work. As Bunderson and Thompson point out, “If one feels hardwired for particular work and that destiny has led one to it, then rejecting that calling would be more than just an occupational choice; it would be a moral failure, a negligent abandonment of those who have need of one’s gifts, talents, and efforts.”10
Alex, who’s white and grew up lower-middle class, graduated from college in 2007 and started looking for a job pastoring a church. In the twelve years since he first started looking, he’s applied to over a hundred jobs. Sometimes, he works multiple jobs; others, he can’t find even one. He currently has a job with a church, but his contract ends this summer, and he doesn’t know what’s next for his family, who moved in with his parents last year to make ends meet. He’s currently looking for any job with a consistent schedule, a reasonable commute, and a clear mission or focus. “Healthcare,” he says, “would be a big plus.”
But as he continues to seek—and fails to find—work as a pastor, he finds himself cycling between anxiety and shame and depression, and all of it bumping up against the sense of “calling.” “There’s the idea that we are being led to something larger than ourselves: God, the universe, whatever,” he told me. “So when we are burnt out, or put up boundaries, there is a sense that we are somehow betraying our call by not loving every single minute of it.”
A “calling,” in other words, is often an invitation for exploitation, whether you’re a zookeeper or a teacher or a pastor. In The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change, Ellen Ruppel Shell points out that employers have even created algorithms that examine an application in order to discern “called” applicants from those simply “applying,” based on the understanding that “the former will happily tackle any task without argument or demand.”11 It doesn’t matter how many people admit that un- and underpaid internships are exclusionary and exploitative. New graduates still flock to them. A fellowship at BuzzFeed attracts thousands of applicants; a recruiter for various late-night television shows told me that for the summer of 2019, she fielded ten thousand applicants for fifty positions on two shows. The promise of hope labor is that if you can just make it in the door, it doesn’t matter how you or other hope laborers are treated. What matters is that there’s a chance that you’ll end up doing what you love, however poorly paid you will be.
Erin, who identifies as white and Middle Eastern, grew up in a rural area of California. She attended a state school, where she received a degree in global studies, and was eager to find a job in education or at a nonprofit, “doing something that would be meaningful or allow [her] to do good, but also allow [her] to travel and live abroad.” In the lead-up to graduation, she, like so many others, spent a great deal of time at the career center, attending workshops, trolling the center’s website, and checking the boxes that, in addition to a college degree, she assumed would put her on a path to a secure job.
In her first post-college search, Erin applied for “too many jobs to remember,” but only got called back for two: as a low-paid canvasser for an environmental nonprofit (think: the people who stop you on the street and ask if you “have a second for the environment today”); and as a junior financial analyst, a position for which she was deeply unqualified. She hated the idea of moving back home, but eventually realized she had no other option: “I couldn’t afford anything else without a job,” she told me.
Initially, she was ashamed—this was 2008, and, at least in her town, the broad effects of the recession had yet to manifest. But in time, nearly everyone from her class who didn’t go into STEM, or find their way to grad school, had also moved home. She spent several months job searching, fighting a growing sense of anxiety and shame, before eventually landing a part-time job at an afterschool program at the local YMCA, which “paid nothing.”
One day, Erin’s first grade teacher showed up and gave her a folder: She’d saved all of her old assignments and a collection of the best work she’d done after, all the way through eighth grade. The teacher had intended the gift as a way of showing Erin how much potential she’d always seen in her, but Erin internalized it as deep disappointment. “I had always been the smart one, and in my hometown was seen as one of those kids with a bright future,” she said. “Which is why it was such a crushing blow to move home—I was supposed to go create peace in the Middle East and here I was, back in my small town.”
The cultivation of hope—no matter how small the chances are of actually succeeding—has become a business strategy. Interns and fellows create content and provide labor at a fraction of the price of a salaried employee, but they’re just the most obvious example of hope laborers. Freelance writers are hope laborers. So are temps, hoping for that coveted “conversion to full-time.” Entire industries thrive on a surfeit of workers willing to ask for less in order to work more—so long as they can tell themselves and others that they have a job they “love.”
See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions.
Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability.
Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security.
Academic institutions are incentivized to keep adjuncts “doing what they love”—but there’s additional pressure from peers and mentors who’ve become deeply invested in the continued viability of the institution. Many senior academics with little experience of the realities of the contemporary market explicitly and implicitly advise their students that the only good job is a tenure-track academic job. When I failed to get an academic job in 2011, I felt soft but unsubtle dismay from various professors upon telling them that I had chosen to take a high school teaching job to make ends meet.
It didn’t matter that I had no other options. What mattered was that I’d fallen off the only acceptable path: staying in academia, no matter what. “We were supposed to accept the status quo because we were doing good,” Erin recalls. “When I quit teaching to work in tech—because I was literally starving!—I felt judged by my former colleagues.” If you left teaching, the idea was that you “couldn’t cut it” or were neglecting to make the work “about the students.” She felt like a traitor for not “not sucking it up.”
If and when academics find themselves disillusioned with the system, that disillusionment is often accompanied by a sprawling and stubborn sense of shame. It doesn’t matter if they followed every piece of advice on how to mold themselves into an ideal job candidate, or that the system thrived on their seemingly infinite stores of ambition and labor. What matters is that they spent a decade or more of their lives working toward what they loved—and failed to reach the finish line. That’s what happens when we don’t talk about work as work, but as pursuing a passion. It makes quitting a job that relentlessly exploited you feel like giving up on yourself, instead of what it really is: advocating, for the first time in a long time, for your own needs.
For Hiba, a Pakistani woman and first-generation American, the realities of performing that hope labor, wholly without recognition, proved too much to bear. As an undergrad, she wrote regularly for her campus newspaper and the local Muslim newspaper; when she graduated, her professors told her she’d quickly land a job at a local newspaper and eventually work her way up to something with more clout. But when she started applying for jobs—sometimes up to thirty a day, all over the United States—she heard nothing. Even though writing about Muslim issues was a passion, advisors told her to leave her experience with the Muslim newspaper off her resume to avoid bias. Still: nothing.
Eventually, Hiba landed a job as a research analyst at a technology company. The pay was decent—a salary of $38,000 a year—but the work was stultifying. She sat in a cubicle, inputting data and cold calling, and found herself “desperately bored and depressed.” One day she found out that the commencement speaker at her graduation—a guy she was sure would go on to a stellar career in journalism—sat just a few cubicles down.
But Hiba was still driven to find something in journalism: she kept sending applications, and was offered a job as an editorial assistant at a science magazine, but the pay—just $26,000—was too low to live on. She started taking night classes in Women’s Studies, and, in her words, “fell so hard” for it that she eventually completed a master’s degree. That’s what it took to finally land her much-desired cool job, at a “flashy liberal news magazine” in New York. Even though it was part-time, and she was paid just eight dollars an hour, and she’d have to live on a friend’s couch, she jumped at the opportunity.
“A part of me desperately just wanted to be known as a writer,” she said. “I wanted to be attached to a news magazines where intellectuals read things. I thought I’d bring an interesting angle, writing about the intersection of being Muslim, and a woman, and having spent three years studying and researching these topics for my graduate degree. Instead, I was exhausted, underpaid, and became extremely depressed.” Virtually no one in the office spoke to her.
Hiba had worked long enough in a job that wasn’t cool to be able to recognize just how poor the working conditions were when she got to one that was. It might not have been boring, but it wasn’t any of the other things she thought it would be. “I thought sticking it out was worth it,” she said. “But in the end, the experience was so disheartening, I had to leave.”
The fetishization of lovable work means that plain old jobs—non-ninja, non-Jedi jobs that might not be “cool” but that nonetheless offer magical powers like “stability” and “benefits”—come to feel undesirable. Within this logic, mailmen and electrician seem like our grandparents’ and parents’ jobs, the sorts of jobs with a definable start and ending, the sort of jobs that don’t subsume the worker’s identity. Maybe you don’t love it, or feel passion for installing air conditioning, but you don’t hate it. The hours are fair, the pay is decent, the training is feasible. And yet, these jobs are often coded, at least amongst the educated middle-class, as undesirable.
That’s something Samantha, who grew up upper-middle class in Connecticut, and dropped out of college before finishing her degree, still struggles with. After leaving school, she told everyone she knew that she wanted to teach and was just taking time. But what she really wanted was to become the manager at the small grocery store where she worked. Today, she still works at that grocery store, where she makes a good hourly wage and has a flexible schedule. “I still feel like it’s not enough, because it’s not something I dreamed about doing as a kid,” she explained. “But does that mean it’s not a good job? Did my grandfather dream of being a postman for thirty years? Probably not, but I bet no one begrudged him that good job.”
Millennials’ growing disillusionment with the “Do what you love” ethos, coupled with continued, steady demand for all of the unsexy services provided by those jobs, has given them a new sort of shine. Amongst my peers, I’ve noticed a generalized “come to Jesus” moment regarding job requirements and aspirations: They no longer want their dream job—they just want a job that doesn’t underpay them, overwork them, and guilt them into not advocating for themselves. After all, doing what they love burnt them to a crisp. Now they’re just doing jobs—and fundamentally reorienting their relationship to work.
Consider Erin’s new job in tech: It’s stable, she can afford to do things like pay for groceries, and unlike with adjuncting, she’s able to maintain clear boundaries between her work and nonwork life. Growing up, she thought that a good job was something where you could make a lot of money, love what you do, and do good deeds; now her definition of a good job is “whatever pays the most and allows me to disconnect after five p.m.” It’s a trajectory that feels increasingly common amongst millennials: to find a way to do what you like just fine.
Millions of millennials, regardless of class, were reared on lofty, romantic, bourgeois ideas of work. Eschewing those ideas means embracing ones that have never disappeared for many working-class employees: A good job is one that doesn’t exploit you and that you don’t hate. Jess, who’s mixed race and identifies as Black, grew up “incredibly poor” with absentee parents. When she graduated from college with a degree in African American literature, she wanted to go into marketing of some sort, but her urgent need for a job in 2009, at the height of the recession, meant working at Starbucks.
Jess would’ve moved back home with her parents, but that wasn’t an option. She took unpaid freelance work, trying to build her portfolio. At first, she just felt great about graduating and had fun as a barista, but she quickly began to feel anxious as younger friends graduated straight into jobs. These days, she does love her job—nonprofit, working for kids in foster care—in part because she never felt the compulsion to find the perfect job, even as friends around her vied for more distinctly aspirational positions. “I have a more realistic view,” she said, “because I grew up with a mom that did not have a career. She worked multiple dead-end jobs to raise her four kids alone.”
Sofia, who did all those art internships, recently completed her PhD at an Ivy League university. “I thought a good job would be doing work that made me feel like I was creating and learning more about art, at a prestigious institution with name recognition,” she admitted. “And the prestige thing didn’t go away for a lonnnnnnnng time. It wasn’t until doing my post-PhD job search that I realized that prestige has nothing to do with job satisfaction. Luckily, I had seven years of grad school, plus all those internships, to realize what parts of the work made me happy and fulfilled.”
After going on the market, she found her first permanent job with benefits. It’s not in academia, per se—but teaching history to middle school students. “It makes me really happy, pays pretty well, and leaves me feeling challenged and fulfilled every day,” says. “It’s not prestigious, but it’s awesome.”
One of the pernicious assumptions of “Do what you love” is that everyone who’s made it in America is doing what they love—and conversely, everyone who’s doing what they love has made it. If you haven’t made it, you’re doing it wrong: “Central to this myth of work-as-love is the notion that virtue (moral righteousness of character) and capital (money) are two sides of the same coin,” Tokumitsu explains. “Where there is wealth, there is hard work, and industriousness, and the individualistic dash of ingenuity that makes it possible.”
Where there is not wealth, this logic suggests, there is not hard work, or industriousness, or the individualistic dash of ingenuity. And even though this correlation has been disproven countless times, its persistence in cultural conditioning is the reason people work harder, work for less, work under shitty conditions.
When that cool, lovable job doesn’t appear, or appears and is unfeasible to maintain for someone who’s not independently wealthy, it’s easy to see how the shame accumulates. Over the last ten years, Emma, who’s white, has attempted to break in to the information science world—what the rest of us know as librarians. When she graduated with her master’s, she was offered a full-time temp job, with the understanding that it would turn permanent “if she worked hard enough.”
“It was my dream job,” Emma explained. “I thought I was the luckiest person on earth.” But the organization went through a “leadership change” and she was strung along on temp contract after temp contract, pushing herself to her psychological and physical limits. “I worked above and beyond, putting every drop of energy I had into being the most enthusiastic, invested employee,” she said. “But the new leadership did not like me, no matter how hard I tried.”
During her repeated job searches, she experienced depression, low self-worth, intense regret about her investment in education, and a generalized lack of dignity. “I questioned every aspect of my identity,” she says. “Is it the way I talk? My hair? My clothes? My weight?”
Part of the problem was misaligned expectations: when she was getting her master’s, her professors told her that she would graduate and find a full-time position, with a $45,000 minimum salary, benefits, and the ability to immediately enroll in a public service loan forgiveness program. In practice, after numerous job searches, she’s in a job outside her field for which she’s overeducated. She’s making $32,000. Still, she feels lucky, every day, that she’s one of the few in her field who’s found full-time employment.
When Emma looks back on the last ten years, she feels cynical but grateful. “It’s always been implied that if you fail to succeed, you aren’t passionate enough,” she said. “But I no longer invest in work emotionally. It isn’t worth it. I learned that every single person is expendable. None of it is fair or based on passion or merit. I don’t have the bandwidth to play that game.”
When I hear stories like Emma’s, so similar to thousands of other millennials’, I realize all over again just how aggressively, and tirelessly, so many of us worked toward that dream job. Which is why it’s so difficult for millennials to fathom the most enduring criticism of our generation: that we’re spoiled, or lazy, or entitled. Millennials did not germinate the idea that ‘lovable work’ was the ideal, nor did we cultivate it. But we did have to deal with the reality of just how frail that idea became once exposed to the real world.
When someone says millennials are lazy, I want to ask them: Which millennials? When someone says we’re entitled, I do ask them: Who taught us we should be able to do work that we love? We were told that college would be the way to a middle-class job. That wasn’t true. We were told that passion would eventually lead to profit, or at least a sustainable job where we were valued. That also wasn’t true.
Entering into adulthood has always been about modifying expectations: of what it is and what it can provide. The difference with millennials, then, is that we’ve spent between five and twenty years doing the painful work of adjusting our expectations: recalibrating our parents’ and advisors’ very reassuring understanding of what the job market was with the realities of our own experience of it, but also arriving at a wholly utilitarian vision of what a job can and should be. For many of us, it took years in shitty jobs to understand ourselves as laborers, as workers, hungry for solidarity.
For decades, millennials have been told that we’re special—every one of us filled with potential. All we needed to do was work hard enough to transform that potential into a perfect life absent all the economic worries that defined our parents. But as boomers were cultivating and optimizing their children for work, they were also further disassembling the sort of societal, economic, and workplace protections that could have made that life possible. They didn’t spoil us so much as destroy the likelihood of our ever obtaining what they had promised all that hard work was for.
Few millennials had the wisdom to understand that as we hit the job market. Instead, we believed that if opportunities didn’t arise, it was a personal problem. We acknowledged how competitive the market was, how much lower we’d set our standards, but we were also certain that if we just worked hard enough, we’d triumph—or at least find stability, or happiness, or arrive at some other nebulous goal, even if it was increasingly unclear why we were searching for it.
We fought that losing battle for years. For many, including myself, it’s hard not to feel embarrassed about it: I settled for so little because I was certain that with enough hard work, things would be different. But you can only work as an “independent contractor” at a job paying minimum wage with no benefits while shouldering a $400-a-month loan payment—even if it’s in a field you’re “passionate” about—for so many years before realizing that something’s deeply wrong. It took burning out for many of us to arrive at this point. But the new millennial refrain of “Fuck passion, pay me” feels more persuasive and powerful every day.