Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

An examination of why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.

“An indispensable guide to the broader dynamics of work in the contemporary moment.” —Nation

You’re told that if you “do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”

In Work Won’t Love You Back, Sarah Jaffe, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this “labor of love” myth—the idea that certain work is not really work and therefore should be done out of passion instead of for pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries, Jaffe reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work. Once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.