Yall Might Enjoy This

[masaraksh]

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http://www.slate.com/articles/techn...n_omnipresent_mantra_that_s_bad_for_work.html

 

[RogueUnicorn]

you're joining an elite profession, it's ok to be a bit elite in your thinking.

 

[Lya]

So your point is....?

 

[hydrographer]

"DWYL is a secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment." ...contrived much

 

[masaraksh]

So your point is....?

I just think its a neat article. Especially since a lot of my friends are in academia.

 

[Narmerguy]

I wasn't sure where the author was going in the beginning, but then it got a lot better. Here's a rather lengthy excerpt that I thought could speak to a lot of the research-minded folk on SDN.

If DWYL denigrates or makes dangerously invisible vast swaths of labor that allow many of us to live in comfort and to do what we love, it has also caused great damage to the professions it portends to celebrate. Nowhere has the DWYL mantra been more devastating to its adherents than in academia. The average Ph.D. student of the mid-2000s forwent the easy money of finance and law (now slightly less easy) to live on a meager stipend in order to pursue his passion for Norse mythology or the history of Afro-Cuban music.

The reward for answering this higher calling is an academic employment marketplace in which about 41 percent of American faculty are adjunct professors—contract instructors who usually receive low pay, no benefits, no office, no job security, and no long-term stake in the schools where they work.

There are many factors that keep Ph.D.s providing such high-skilled labor for such low wages, including path dependency and the sunk costs of earning a Ph.D., but one of the strongest is how pervasively the DWYL doctrine is embedded in academia. Few other professions fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output. Because academic research should be done out of pure love, the actual conditions of and compensation for this labor become afterthoughts, if they are considered at all.

In “Academic Labor, the Aesthetics of Management, and the Promise of Autonomous Work,” Sarah Brouillette writes of academic faculty, “[O]ur faith that our work offers non-material rewards, and is more integral to our identity than a ‘regular’ job would be, makes us ideal employees when the goal of management is to extract our labor’s maximum value at minimum cost.”

Many academics like to think they have avoided a corporate work environment and its attendant values, but Marc Bousquet notes in his essay “We Work” that academia may actually provide a model for corporate management:

How to emulate the academic workplace and get people to work at a high level of intellectual and emotional intensity for fifty or sixty hours a week for bartenders’ wages or less? Is there any way we can get our employees to swoon over their desks, murmuring “I love what I do” in response to greater workloads and smaller paychecks? How can we get our workers to be like faculty and deny that they work at all? How can we adjust our corporate culture to resemble campus culture, so that our workforce will fall in love with their work too?​

No one is arguing that enjoyable work should be less so. But emotionally satisfying work is still work, and acknowledging it as such doesn’t undermine it in any way. Refusing to acknowledge it, on the other hand, opens the door to exploitation and harms all workers.

Nice read OP, thanks!

 

[DrCharlemagne]

I find the author's assumption that "repetitive, unintellectual, undistinguished" is necessarily unloveable (seriously, most lab-tech work falls under the scope of that description). I also think the contrast they try to draw between Thoureau and Jobs isn't as stark as the thesis demands. I would think the ideal community Thoreau is envisioning is one where everyone's contributions, even emptying waste bins and refilling ink cartridges, is deemed "lovable" because worthwhile humans are performing the task and are compensated for their contributions equitably. There could be an interesting discussion about the gap between the ideal and the reality, but the author just seems satisfied to judge those who are attempting to make their work days more bearable by finding grace in their work. I don't think DWYL as an ethos erases arduous, low-income work, nor does it preclude securing financial reward for work completed. I think the author highlights many issues in the work force, but I can't swallow the attempt to lay this at the feat of a simple, inspirational phrase.

 

[Reckoner]

So the author over-intellectualizes a simple cliche to set up a bizarre and non-existent causal relationship (If I pursue a career I love I suddenly become narcissistic and blind to the suffering of day laborers???), vilifies the "elites" while making elitist assumptions (apparently it's impossible for the poor to love what they do), and tops it off with a token reference to gender inequality.

Yep, sounds like a Slate article.

Her point about academia is pretty spot on, though.

 

[BlueLabel]

So the author over-intellectualizes a simple cliche to set up a bizarre and non-existent causal relationship (If I pursue a career I love I suddenly become narcissistic and blind to the suffering of day laborers???), vilifies the "elites" while making elitist assumptions (apparently it's impossible for the poor to love what they do), and tops it off with a token reference to gender inequality.

Yep, sounds like a Slate article.

Her point about academia is pretty spot on, though.

/thread

 

[SunsFun]

Some of the points made in the article went over my head but overall I have always said that Do What You Love is a meaningless cliché. I feel sorry for of the kids of our entitled generation expecting to find true passion, love, and devotion while waking up for work every day of their lives for years to come. They are in for a huge disappointment.

 

[boboyahoo]

Some of the points made in the article went over my head but overall I have always said that Do What You Love is a meaningless cliché. I feel sorry for of the kids of our entitled generation expecting to find true passion, love, and devotion while waking up for work every day of their lives for years to come. They are in for a huge disappointment.

hahahahhaa, laughing right now. As soon as I figured out that this saying is used mainly for freshmen that come in knowing nothing about grad school/professional school, I headed off to a more secure major. Life only gives you lemons if you plant the right tree and provide the proper resources. High school students need to know that it isn't the school you go to but what you do at the school that matters most! If high school was slow poke days, then make college accelerated, don't get stuck in the "do what your love scheme". Do what is practical and on the side look for what you truly love...you may just come back full circles realizing that you were on the right path. The cliche doesn't mean that you become carefree and explore endlessly. Also advisors know nothing about anything so take their words with a grain of salt unless they have a good reputation for being helpful. They just make you more carefree than you were before until you have 2 years left before graduation and then they are at your head about how you can graduate in 5 yrs vs. 4. They act more as psychologists than helpful guides. Nowadays it's all about handing brochures and handing out website addresses.