One of my biggest goals has always been to land a career that I love. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t operate under the notion that if I love what I do, I’ll never work a day in my life.

Doing what you love prioritizes self-interest in an appealing way, on its surface. Who wouldn’t want to spend their life contributing to society in a way that’s personally meaningful?

The problem isn’t pursuing work that’s meaningful to you. Pursuing passions, whether through professional or leisurely channels, is part of a meaningful life. 

The problem is that the mindset of doing what you love enables a tunnel vision that hides the exploitative nature of labor outside of the white-collar echelon.

I recently read an article by Miya Tokumitsu arguing that the “do what you love” mindset leads to the “devaluation of actual work” and even to the “dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.” 

In an interview with The Atlantic, Tokumitsu theorizes that this cultural trend emerged from post-World War II prosperity, which “gave people the opportunity to indulge themselves” and ultimately created a “culture of self” that coalesced with the “virtue strain of work.” 

In other words, work was something ideally most virtuous to society but has evolved to become more important to the individual workers themselves.

The problem with turning inwards to focus on the self is that the mantra of “do what you love” assumes a freedom of choice, and in doing so neglects the fact that there are those who are not free to choose.

Freedom of choice is but an illusion for most of America. Your freedom depends on your complex intersectional identity – your class, race, gender, ethnicity and so forth.  

Focusing on just gender, for example, shows us that women are inherently less free to choose. According to USA Today, 18 of the 25 lowest paying jobs in America are predominantly held by women. Further, “women make up 83 percent of middle-skill workers who earn $30,000 or less annually.”  

Tokumitsu argues this is the result of the lack of compensation women received for “childcare, elder care, and housework since time immemorial.” 

It’s not that women are choosing these jobs for themselves. They are bound by the tropes of their nurturing femininity, seemingly more naturally fit to work in the lower-paying hospitality and service industries.

The trope of breaking the glass ceiling embodies the barriers to workplace freedom that women face as well. Having a glass ceiling to break is a privilege in itself, as there were no women of color CEOs at Fortune 500 companies as of 2020. It is somehow a privilege for women to attempt to dismantle inequality in the workplace.

Unsurprisingly, this goes for race too. A Pew Research study found that the median hourly earnings for all white men employed in the workforce were significantly higher than those of Black and Hispanic men. 

This isn’t news to any of us. We know that workplace discrimination is real and that it clearly disadvantages and exploits historically underrepresented populations. 

What I’m getting at is that the “do what you love” mantra comes at a price. It makes our view of work self-serving, and it glorifies the supposedly meaningful jobs while casting the meaningless ones out of public consciousness. 

In bubbles of privilege, it’s too easy to forget that doing what you love presupposes the freedom to choose what to do. The freedom to move from the supposedly meaningless to the celebrated meaningful professions is blocked by the barriers of race, ethnicity, gender and class. 

Not everyone can simply do what they love. We need to recognize the inherent privilege in this statement and change our rhetoric so that it becomes more inclusive. 

Until we do so, the necessary but less socially prestigious jobs will continue to be ignored by the upper class and hence become more exploitative, as we put on our blinders and focus only on our own privileged fulfillment.