I joined the Upstream podcast to talk about Work Won’t Love You Back.

We’re always told that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. But what if you’re being tricked or manipulated into thinking you love what you do? Or what if your “labor of love” is actually being exploited by someone who stands to gain from your work? What does loving your work actually mean, in a system that is designed to keep you devoted to your job, by any means necessarily?

In this conversation we speak with Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, published by Bold Type Books. Sarah’s book is an examination, and critique, of the labor of love myth — an upstream journey on the nature of work. She reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work, while unpacking 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.

Upstream theme music is composed by Robert Raymond
Intermission music is “Oh My God” by Lula Wiles.
We recently launched our fall season‘s crowdfunding campaign! We hope to produce at least three documentaries, including episodes on Defunding the Police and the Sharing Economy, Pt. 2, looking at the gig-economy landscape five years after our very first documentary. We also plan on releasing dozens of interviews for our In Conversation series. Please consider chipping in any amount that you can — we couldn’t keep this project going without the generosity of folks like you. Visit upstreampodcast.org/support to contribute. Thank you!

Also, if your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship.

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