YOUR LIFE'S WORK' BY EDA GÜNAYDIN

February 26, 2020

In her wonderful book Do What You Love and Other Lies about Success and Happiness, Miya Tokumitsu argues that we are increasingly advised to convert our passions into jobs, to eke profit out of our few pleasures. Turning one’s hobby into a side hustle is a millennial rite of passage.This pressure doubles as a demand for intimacy, a demand that we yield privacy. Because our hobbies are usually creative—whatever that means—they induce more personal investment than, say, data entry or answering phones, jobs which usually don’t ask for you to inject a slice of yourself into them. In fact, those jobs are degraded as being for the working classes, for that reason. Those occupations, performed by nameless and faceless individuals toiling in the Global South, are antithetical to The Individual, who is unique and special and someone, and deserves to feel that way. Everyone should work in the creative industries, if they can…