https://www.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/steve-jobs-speech.jpg
At the Jacobin magazine website, Miya Tokumitsu write about the ideology of being “passionate” about your work, which is measured by long hours at the office and working through the weekend. She traces this ideology to Silicon Valley workplace culture, which has helped to erode the separation between work and life. Here’s an excerpt:
There are numerous reasons for the disappearance of the forty-hour workweek, but journalist Sara Robinson singles out work cultures that promote worker passion as one of them. She sees this culture taking root first in the defense and then in the tech industries in late twentieth-century California…
Passion as measured by hours has put the workweek on a course of runaway inflation, to the point at which people are actually shortening their lives and endangering others — sometimes in sudden, tragic form — in pursuit of an ever-elusive ideal of capitalistic individualism.
Why do we allow ourselves to continue like this? If, according to the “Do What You Love” ethic, the pleasure of work derives from the very act of production, what are workers doing during all of those surplus hours when they are not, well, producing or producing only poorly? Why are salaried workers lingering in the office after their work is done or when they are beyond the point of meaningful production, only making themselves less effective in the long term?
The answer clearly has nothing to do with economic rationality and everything to do with ideology. Although simple Excel charts may present the flimsiest guise of empirical, objective data about workers’ supposed passion, the truth is that passion doesn’t equal hours spent in the office, nor does it necessitate burning oneself out. Passion is all too often a cover for overwork cloaked in the rhetoric of self-fulfillment.
Image: Steve Jobs speaks during the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco in 2008. Via Jacobin.