The Trouble with Passion

The potential for passion to be exploited—either the passion of workers who have it, or by expecting workers to perform it—was a deep-cutting finding that led to my own reckoning with my perspectives about work.

Can there be passionate production within capitalist employment that isn’t exploitative? Exploitation doesn’t just exist at the individual level, where individual workers feel exploited in their own jobs. People who are passionate about their work may genuinely not feel exploited. Yet, exploitation in the broader sense is about the reward workers i... See more

If you do what you love, the saying goes, you’ll never work a day in your life.

...I’ll admit that I had a hard time typing that with a straight face. Was it ever that simple?! In reality, tying something you love doing directly to your financial stability is logistically and emotionally fraught, to say the least.

In The Trouble with Passion , Erin demonstrates how the commodification of passion in the contemporary workplace perpetuates class inequality in college and beyond. While passion may seem, on the surface, to be highly individualistic, she details the many ways that it is actually rooted in structural positions and identities.