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"Weird Al" Yankovic, Freddie deBoer, generations, LARP, Martin Hägglund, Maya Tokomitsu, music, Ted Gioia
I have frequently been critical of the advice given by baby boomers to “do what you love and the money will follow”. After the hard experience of my generation and the ones following it, I think the word has gotten out how terrible that advice is, with books coming out with titles like Do What You Love and Other Lies. We are now at the point that Freddie deBoer can describe the critique of that advice as “endless”, and critique the critique:
There’s also the endless genre of “don’t do what you love” essays, which critique the omnipresent cultural assumption that you should do what you love. And yeah, that can be exploitative, as employers will often use that love as a means to be selfish with your pay and benefits. But what’s the alternative? Don’t try to get paid doing something you like? Do what you hate? I read Maya Tokomitsu’s book on this question, and like so much of what the socialist left publishes these days it was far more compelling as a critique of what exists than as an argument for a better alternative.
These are important questions, and I’m glad deBoer made them because I can see how the critique of the boomer advice could be misinterpreted – or given badly in the first place. (I haven’t read Tokomitsu’s book myself so I don’t know where it stands on this.)
Here’s the important clarification: As far as I can see, “do what you love”, by itself, is actually good advice. The blatant fabrication, the disastrous harm, comes in the second half of the advice I have typically received: “do what you love and the money will follow.” For most of us, it won’t. Ted Gioia has a depressing piece on the “disappearing middle-class musician”: to be a full-time musician these days typically requires that one inherit wealth, or marry someone who can provide one with a means of living. Around the time I realized I wasn’t going to have the academic career I’d trained for, I saw a friend who’d invested great time and money in a prestigious baking school to become a pastry chef – stuck working the baking section of Whole Foods grocery for $12 an hour. Right around that time, the heartbreak of my generation’s experience was expressed best by – of all people – “Weird Al” Yankovic, whose “Skipper Dan” tells the all-too-typical story of a promising actor now stuck working at Disney World. For anyone born after about 1960, “do what you love and the money will follow” has been a recipe for broken dreams.
Now so far I have done exactly what deBoer rightly objects to: providing “a critique of what exists” rather than “an argument for a better alternative.” I now want to turn to the alternative – by which I don’t mean a better socialist world, like the one Martin Hägglund describes that moves our free time from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom. I mean, sign me up for Hägglund’s world if we can figure out a way to get there, but Hägglund doesn’t give us such a way, and I have no idea how to get there either.
No, I want to do what I think deBoer is asking for and provide advice about how to live here and now, in the world as it exists. And that is why I think it’s important to say: by all means, do what you love. I think doing what you love is important if not essential for a good life, especially from a qualitative individualist perspective that values self-expression. It’s just that, in order to survive, you have to make money too – and the money will not follow.
And so, the advice I would give to young people is this: structure your life so that you have the time and money to do what you love. That’s not easy to do by any means, but it is a much more realistic goal. Making a living from doing what you love is the most obvious way to follow this advice, but in many cases it is not the best way. I congratulate deBoer on succeeding at it, yet I note even he closes another piece with “Don’t be a writer.”
In my own case, when my life was at a crossroads, I found life inspiration in a friend whose job, in his forties, was simply to deliver pizza. The pizza was not the inspiring part: what was inspiring was how clear it was that, for him, his job was not what his life was about. Rather, he wrote and ran a LARP in which, four times a year, a good hundred people would all come together telling a collective story in a post-apocalyptic setting. We would spend seventy dollars to spend the weekend in uncomfortable campsite beds just because his stories, and the shared experience of being a part of them, were so compelling. The experience of playing the LARP gave great joy to many people, including me, for years, though its staff made no money from it. I drew the lesson: this is a good way to live. You can do what you love as an avocation, neither career nor hobby.
And that is the path I have followed myself. I never grew up dreaming of being an educational technologist – I couldn’t have, since the career didn’t exist when I was a kid – but I’ve done well at it, getting promoted to management. It’s not my passion, but it is a job that I like and that I’m good at, which provides me a comfortable living, and I am happy with that. (Indeed I feel comfortable enough at it that I can admit it’s not my passion, which is not an option in many careers.) And it’s left me time to do the writing I love: not only to write this blog (for thirteen years now!) but to write some scholarly articles and, now, to write a book I’ll be sending to publishers.
Now for many people the trick with following my path, and that of my LARP-running friend, is that both of us decided not to have children. Rarely does a life leave time or energy for child-rearing, a paid job and a fulfilling avocation. So what if one does feel called to have children? Well, for many parents, raising children is doing what you love, and for many parents that is good enough. But I also think of another friend my age, a mother who has become a published writer of fantasy novels, with multiple trilogies selling well at an estabilshed press. In that, she’s probably the most successful fiction author I know – but as far as I know, even that is not enough to make a living off her writing, not with the high costs of living in metropolitan Boston. Rather, her husband has the job that pays the bills; she writes as an avocation while being a full-time mom. Her life is very different from mine. Yet we still found ways to do what we love – which in both cases was writing – while still following deBoer’s advice not to be a professional writer.
Thoughtful analysis that applies even to this rapidly aging boomer. Thank you.
You’re welcome – glad it was helpful!
I hold a pragmatist view: Do what is more useful, not less, and follow that. Wisdom says: if that course is altruistic, money may follow, all else being equal. I say: all else will not BE equal, therefore until your creativity and innovation are ramped up, you have solved only half the problem. Come on, now. Work was never imagined as fun or an object of love. Had that been the case, we would have called it play. No,circumstance and contingency led marketing and economic concerns to cosmetize work…so that more would want to do it. That entire effort was, at first, subtle. Later, it was tied up with freedom, nationalism, patriotism—especially during wartime. Sugar-coating with a capital S. Cosmetics became de rigeur survivalist behavior. Competition and complexity further fanned the flames. I have elsewhere mentioned desocialization of homo sapiens.
That outcome is visibly upon us.
“Do what you love and the money will follow” sounds like magical thinking, even more than Joseph Campbell’s version (“Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be”); Campbell at least didn’t posit any causal connection between bliss and wealth and prestige.
As much as I like bliss, what is missing from the magical-thinking slogans is any good analysis of real mechanisms or systems; instead, the space between love and money is just a black box that is assumed to reliably produce money from love, ignoring any science of the real world. How Romantic. It’s no surprise that the critiques of the Romantic advice are now “endless”.
I never bought the Romantic advice when I was young; I always wanted to know how things work, and I didn’t have time for anyone who couldn’t explain it to me or who made vague promises. (This attitude is also good protection against scammers.) Fortunately there have always been good career- and life-planning books and articles that are sufficiently analytical; I read many of them in my teens and early twenties. I remember one book by Carol Lloyd (Creating a Life Worth Living: A Practical Course in Career Design for Artists, Innovators, and Others Aspiring to a Creative Life, HarperPerennial, 1997) that was very explicit about different kinds of creativity and the different kinds of day jobs that could support the practice of non-paying creative activity: “Big Tent” jobs, “No Contest” jobs, “Counterbalance” jobs, and “Wellspring” jobs. Twenty-five years ago, Lloyd had a whole typology of ways of “doing what you love when the money won’t follow”. More recently, a number of publications have focused on business model design, helping people think very analytically and systemically about these issues.
What I have tried to do—and what I continue to try to do since there is always more to learn—is to understand as well as possible how the world (including people, including myself) works. I’ve found (unless I’m deluding myself) that the more I understand about the world, the more my conception of myself and of the world becomes more complex and (re)systematized, so my definition of “who I am” changes as does the corresponding feeling of “what I love”. Much of what I loved when I was younger has since been completely recontextualized and plays a much different role in my life now. For me, this kind of ongoing development of love is philosophy.
P.S. After writing the comment above, I found an audio interview from last year with Carol Lloyd in which she describes responses to her book Creating a Life Worth Living and what she has learned on her path in the 25 years since the book was published, including how her priorities changed when she became a parent (“My book was very much the product of someone who had no children”), and then changed again. It’s interesting how much of what she says overlaps with the “applied philosophy” themes of this blog.
I think there is much more texture here. As someone who guides people all day long (for the last 20 something years) with Jyotish, I always remind people that we all have very different karma which create very different circumstances. There is a combination called dharmakarmaadipati yoga where the 9th lord of purpose/dharma is conjunct with the 10th lord of career/karma. People with this combination fall into careers doing what they love and are fulfilled financially by their work- they do what they love and money follows. There are others with a negative relationship between these planets that struggle to do what they love, and I guide them to separate artha and dharma in their life- get a real job that gives them time to do what they love. Then there are combinations for poverty- no matter what one does, and combinations for wealth no matter what one does that can over rule either of the above combinations. And then there is a level of paraakrama that some have and others don’t, to overcome whatever stands in their way. Those people find a business coach and find a way to market whatever they focus on. In this way, no advice is good for everyone.
Above I said that “Do what you love and the money will follow” sounds like magical thinking, and I would say that astrology also sounds like magical thinking insofar as one is positing a causal connection between “astronomical phenomena and events or descriptions of personality in the human world” (quoting from Wikipedia’s article “Astrology and science”).
But leaving aside the planets, it is interesting that the astrological ideas described in the comment above are not too different from what some mainstream career counselors try to do: match people’s personality types with certain kinds of careers. This can be helpful insofar as it prompts people to think about a wider range of possibilities than they would have otherwise (Carol Lloyd discusses this briefly in the audio interview that I linked to above), but I imagine it could be harmful if one convinces people that there is a necessary relationship between their purported personality type and a given career path; in the latter case, career advice becomes a new kind of caste system.
What about loving what you do — rather than doing what you love?
There are so many Buddhist teachings on this subject. For example, one of Atisha’s Lojong (mind training) slogans is “Change your attitude and relax as it is.” What is the best way to counter resentment? Change the external environment to get rid of the object of resentment (the low paying barista job, the wife who is nagging because you are taking half the weekend to write your novel and not playing with the kids)? Or embracing the life that you have — which is your only life, that is passing so quickly?
Thanks, Jim. I think that’s a super important point. I wonder if “loving what you do” and “doing what you love” are orthogonal processes or skills. “Loving what you do” is a kind of immediate receptive attitude toward whatever is arising, and “doing what you love” is a kind of long-term planning and acting to change something, i.e., to achieve goals. Yin and yang?
The way to deepen both of these processes or skills is through inquiry into how they fit together and why they are important: Why love what’s happening (which doesn’t necessarily mean to “like” it)? Why plan and act to change something or to achieve some goal? I am never finished answering those questions. In general, the answer is probably wellbeing or eudaimonia, as Amod never tires of saying, but I suspect I’ll never reach the end of deepening my understanding of what that means.