The Financial Times previewed Work Won’t Love You Back in its January Recommended Reading list. They write:
Many of us will have slumped in a festive haze in front of Bridgerton, the Netflix series set in Regency England. It tells the story of wealthy families whose principal preoccupations are balls, marriage and sex. Once the rich were the leisured class, now they valorise working long hours.
In her latest book Sarah Jaffe, a journalist, documents the importance of work to identity and emotional lives. Work Won’t Love You Back unpicks the growing cult of work as a passion. If you do what you love, goes the mantra, you never work a day. This ethos posits co-workers as family. One video-game company, described in the book, brands itself a “fampany”.
Security, the author writes, “has been traded for fulfilment . . . the compulsion to be happy at work . . . is always a demand for emotional work from the worker. Work, after all, has no feelings. Capitalism cannot love. This new work ethic, in which work is expected to give us something like self-actualisation, cannot help but fail.”
The pandemic has exposed this myth, making the book a timely read.
Read the whole thing at the FT