CHAPTER 6 Good-Enough Occupations and “Fun” Jobs

Work-Is-Work

Ginger Thi’s parents stopped supporting her in her mid-teen years. She had to make a living as best she could, and she became a secretary. When I asked the meaning of work for her, she began by questioning my implicit equation of “work” with paid work. Instead, she considered work to be “doing things in life.” There were many things she liked to do, including reading, learning about current events, cooking, gardening, doing creative projects, and communicating with friends through social media. However, she told me, “If you’re talking about going to a job from 8:30 in the morning ‘til 5:00 in the afternoon, that’s doing death for nine and a half hours so I can get money so I can live.” However, that did not mean she resigned herself to long, dull hours. She added, “But within that death I’ll find something creative and fun for me to do and believe me, I’ll make it an enjoyable day.”

For Ginger paid work is “doing death for nine and a half hours so I can get money so I can live.” That is a memorable way of expressing what Bellah, Wrzesniewski, and their colleagues call a “Job” approach to work. They describe this approach as follows: “People who have Jobs are only interested in the material benefits from work and do not seek or receive any other type of reward from it.”²⁰ The problem with this definition is that although those like Ginger may not seek any nonfinancial rewards from the work they do, they can still receive, or create, such rewards at their job. Ginger can “find something creative and fun for me to do” at her office and “make it an enjoyable day.”

I prefer the term “work-is-work” to label this approach, because that is a phrase several of my participants used. When I asked Carl Mathews, an unemployed security guard, whether work was central to his identity, he replied, “Not necessarily. Work is work. It’s a source of income. It’s not my life, it doesn’t define me.” A work-is-work approach holds that one should not expect work to have a meaning beyond providing an income. Thus, it does not matter what occupation or job one chooses, so long as one is qualified for it and the pay is sufficient.²¹

Carl’s statement “work is work” considers but dismisses the view that one’s job should be meaningful. Some of my participants were instead resigned to a work-is-work approach as their only option because they could not obtain more fulfilling jobs. La dama de abril had been a successful esthetician in Venezuela with celebrity clients before she came to the United States in her early thirties to help her sister, who had just had a baby. As is common, she came legally on a tourist visa and then stayed. When she spoke with my research assistant, Claudia C., La dama de abril had not yet regularized her status. (A year later, she finally succeeded.) Her training and license from Venezuela were not accepted in the United States, and without a green card, she could not obtain any job in the beauty industry. Nor could she pursue her other passion of being an actress, which she had done in Venezuela. She had to fall back on the limited occupations open to immigrant women without papers in the United States: she was a nanny and then began a housecleaning business.²² She did not particularly like that work or the way she was treated in those jobs, but she was able to earn a living for nearly twenty years until the Great Recession forced her clients to let her go. When Claudia C. interviewed her, she was in her early fifties and despondent: “I have been doing this for years, and I feel frustrated because I have been doing something for years that I don’t like.” La dama de abril blamed herself for listening to the standard advice she had heard from other immigrants: “What they taught me, ‘Make credit, use cards, and what’s important is having job. It doesn’t matter that you don’t like it.’ That is the first thing that people you meet here tell you. And it turns out it’s not like that.” She felt that to work as a housecleaner is “to enslave myself.” Claudia C. asked how she would feel if she were an esthetician. La dama replied, “Then it wouldn’t be a job. Then it would be something that you are doing because you like it.” For La dama de abril, a work-is-work approach was a fallback option. She had an occupational passion, but she was not able to obtain a job doing it in the United States.

In another version of a work-is-work approach, some of my participants never entertained the notion that they could choose the kind of work they did. Their assumptions were so out of sync with the way Claudia C. and I thought about finding an occupation that they led to exchanges that were almost comically misaligned. One such example was Claudia C.’s conversation with Luis Segura, who had grown up on a farm in Michoacán, Mexico. After he came to the United States in his teens, he worked as a gardener for more than thirty years. The mismatch between their ideas about entering an occupation emerged when Claudia asked Luis, “What would have been your ideal job?”

LUIS: Cutting grass, trees, all that, that’s what I know how to do. My whole life.

CLAUDIA C.: And what did you do in Mexico?

LUIS: In Mexico, in the field, cultivating corn and all that, beans, garbanzo.

CLAUDIA C.: You’ve always liked it.

LUIS: Well, there was nothing else to work in; I was living on a farm.

Claudia C. assumed that if Luis had been working on the land his whole life, then he must like doing that. She and I began with the assumption that one chooses an occupation the same way one might choose a favorite leisure pursuit. For Luis, however, you do not become a farmer because you like farming: it is just what you do if you live on a farm. Her very question, “What would have been your ideal job?” was at odds with the way Luis thought about entering an occupation.

Still, Luis was the only immigrant who used fun to talk about work, although his comment is ambiguous. In a later part of her interview, Claudia C. began asking in Spanish, “What is ‘work’ to you? What part of your life is—there are people who view work as …” At that point Luis interrupted to say, diversión (fun). It is not clear whether he meant whether working the land is fun for him, or that is how some other people view it, but in either case, he imagined that work could be fun.

Carl Mathews, the security guard who said, “Work is work,” could find fun on the job as well. He described a custodial job at the airport when he was young where the workers whiled away time with cards, dice, and dominoes: “I had so much fun because we did so much stuff that we wasn’t supposed to do, you know what I’m saying? It was like fun going to work.” Carl did not care about choosing an occupation that was personally meaningful, but he could still have fun on the job. In fact, it was because he did not view the job as relevant to his identity that he felt free to do other things to ensure that it was “fun going to work.”²³

Ginger and Carl’s ways of making their workday enjoyable are examples of one type of fun on the job, a type we could call having fun at work, rather than having fun from work. Ethnographers of work have observed creative examples of workers making fun at work to cope with boring jobs, such as routine factory work. They have described workers playing games, pulling pranks, singing to themselves, or daydreaming. One sociological observer who was also a full-time worker in a beer-bottling factory in the late 1970s and early 1980s observed a bored worker making a hand sculpture by filling a work glove with glue from his glue gun, and another coworker listening to a transistor radio hidden under his shirt against company rules.²⁴

These subversive forms of workplace fun are far from the management fad of creating a “fun culture” at work. The premise behind fun culture is simple: if managers introduce opportunities for play, then employees will be happier, and if employees are happier, they will be more productive.²⁵ How do managers make work fun? In one survey of HR managers, some of the frequently listed fun activities were recognition of birthdays and hiring anniversaries, social events like picnics and parties (Halloween parties were popular), awards banquets, games, jokes in emails and company newsletters, and friendly competitions (like, attendance and sales contests).²⁶ In the sardonically titled special journal issue, Are We Having Fun Yet? the European management theorists Bolton and Houlihan question the motives behind this North American import of “packaged fun,” which researchers have characterized as ways to distract “attention from the boring work by injecting ‘non-work’ themes into the labour process” for workers whose jobs are routinized and highly controlled. At the other end of the pay scale, packaged fun can be a tool to recruit educated workers accustomed to the wraparound services and enjoyable activities on college campuses.²⁷ Silicon Valley offices are known (or were known before the rise of teleworking and cost-cutting measures) for their ping-pong tables and fitness rooms so workers “can have their break in the office and not be that far away from their desk.”²⁸

Few of my participants said management-led amusements had made their job enjoyable. Terrance West cited company picnics and barbeques as one of the reasons he had liked working as a shipping and receiving clerk for “H Company,” a snack manufacturer, but he was an outlier. No one else brought up parties and other such social events as a factor in their work enjoyment; in fact, Anastasia Tang, an HR manager, resented compulsory after-hours office social events because they intruded on her family time. She was fired after she declined to attend a company picnic and the annual company awards dinner. Anastasia’s story illustrates the way such compulsory fun can become exclusionary.²⁹

Bolton and Houlihan distinguish management-led “packaged fun” from the “organic” ways in which workers have fun at work.³⁰ As we saw with Ginger Thi and Carl Mathews, and as we see in other examples later, organic fun at work is created by the workers.

Job seekers with a work-is-work approach are not very fussy about their next job; this attitude helps them land another position more quickly than those who have ambitions to advance in their career or who try to follow their passions. However, the downside of a work-is-work approach, as some of my participants saw it, is that they will take jobs for which they are not well suited, leading them to later quit or be fired.

Katarina Spelling adopted a work-is-work approach shortly after she married. Her husband had $98,000 in student debt, and Katarina added to that total by getting a master’s degree in public administration. She and her husband decided she should put aside her dream of trying to make a living as a singer. It was not working out, and they needed to focus on making money to pay off their loans. She saw the wisdom of that approach, recounting her conversations with her husband about it: “He’s helped me to see it. Work is work, and you are who you are, no matter (small laugh) where you work. You know, it doesn’t change. If you are a musician, you don’t stop being a musician if you work in accounting, or if you’re a painter or whatever it is, you can still be that person.” In other words, your occupation can be disconnected from the pursuits central to your identity. Katarina resolutely put aside her own preferences and applied for various office jobs, even though in her previous office jobs she had felt like “I was a flower in a closet.” When I first met Katarina, her work-is-work approach had led her to apply for a data analysis position. Although she got to the third round of interviews for that position, she wondered whether she could last in a job like that, which did not interest her at all: “Do I really want this job? And—I don’t know. I don’t know if I can answer that, because then I look at other job descriptions and I’m like, ‘Oh, I’d love to do that. I feel the passion for it,’ whereas this would be a job to pay the bills. So, hopefully I don’t get burned out in six months and hate life.”

Katarina never had the chance to find out whether this job would make her “hate life” because they offered the position to someone else. As I describe shortly, her journey took her from a work-is-work approach to a good-enough occupation.

I term “work-is-work” and the other three ways of finding an occupation as approaches, rather than orientations. Orientation may suggest a permanent disposition,³¹ but with some of my participants, the approach they took to finding an occupation changed depending on their opportunities and experiences.

For example, when I first met Jake Taylor, he was twenty-two and had been discharged from the Air Force with wounds that kept him from reenlisting. I asked him what kind of work he wanted to do, and he responded that he had acquired hydraulic expertise in the Air Force, so he figured he should start by looking for jobs in that field even though he did not particularly like it. I really enjoy my work, so it was hard for me to hear someone who was just starting out in life making plans to enter an occupation that he did not like. Instead of moving on in the interview, I asked, “Is there something else that would excite you more?” Jake replied, “I never really figured that out. I don’t know. I’d have to think about that question more.” He added, “I was never super excited about doing anything that was work. Work is work.”

Initially I thought that Jake was following the example set by his father, a mechanic who did not like his job, but Jake’s work attitudes had a more complicated explanation. Another part of the reason he had a hard time getting excited about work is that the civilian jobs he had found did not seem worthwhile compared to being in the military, where he had volunteered for search-and-rescue missions and became the leader of his squad. He explained, “After the military I would go job to job, and I was depressed about not being in the military anymore ‘cause I really liked it. So just kinda, like, after going from being something important to something that to me was meaningless, I don’t know, it’s hard to take jobs seriously like that.” He added that his civilian jobs were not ones “I was proud to be doing or anything.”

In one of Jake’s jobs, he had been a “lumper,” unloading delivery trucks at warehouses. He did not enjoy it: “They used to call us ‘lumpers’ because every time we’d be pulling a cart with about 600 pounds worth of merchandise on it, and the wheels would be all gunked up with all kinds of dirt and grime and stuff. So, you’re basically pulling this thing and the wheels are barely turning. And, when you’re pulling it from behind you […] and the cart will sometimes hit the back of your Achilles and you’d get a big old welt or lump. So, they called us lumpers, and it hurt like a son of a bitch.” Jake knew that a college degree would give him more options, but he could not afford it.

When I talked to Jake again two years later, he was completely transformed. He had learned that the GI Bill would pay for his college tuition and give him a living stipend. He was studying to be a nurse, which was the specialty he had initially wanted to pursue in the military instead of hydraulics and which required science courses that he enjoyed. He was excited about this future career: “I’ll be able to provide for my family, and I’ll be helping others. So, when it comes to how I feel about it, it’s all around the perfect job for me.” Jake wanted to be a pediatric nurse because he loves children. When he learned he could afford college, Jake went from a disengaged work-is-work approach to being excited to prepare for “the perfect job for me.”

In sum, my participants acted on a work-is-work approach to choosing a line of work for a variety of reasons and accompanied by a variety of feelings, including unquestioning acceptance, pragmatic accommodation, contemptuous dismissal, and sad resignation. In every case, however, their attitudes about work were more complex than the minimal meanings suggested by saying that they see work as “just a job.”³²

The Good-Enough Occupation

Unlike those with a work-is-work approach, most of my participants were at least somewhat selective in choosing an occupation. That does not mean that all had an occupational passion or a definite career plan. Instead, they looked for a job that they thought would be a reasonable fit for their talents, skills, values, and interests. This middle ground between the follow-your-passion and work-is-work extremes is a good-enough-occupation approach.

Luis Segura, the gardener who grew up on a farm in Mexico, participated in the interviews with another Mexican immigrant Feliciano Salas. Both were working as day laborers while they waited for the economy to recover so they could return to steady jobs. Feliciano grew up in a more urban environment than Luis, in Ciudad Guzmán in the state of Jalisco, which exposed him to a greater variety of jobs than Luis had had the opportunity to pursue. When Feliciano was young, he worked in a hardware store, but he grew to dislike being cooped up indoors. He decided, “I wanted any job other than being closed in.” Therefore, when he came to the United States, he looked for work in construction and became a roofer. For him, work was still primarily a way to earn money, but he wanted it to be enjoyable too. That was typical of those who took a good-enough occupation approach.

Natalie Harper, a grant writer, exemplifies the good-enough-occupation approach. Her work history was one she described as “stumbling along” instead of a linear career. After she obtained a master’s degree in English, she sold college textbooks for a while, but that job did not leave her enough time with the man with whom she had fallen in love. She parlayed her sales experience into a job recruiting members for a philanthropic organization. When her husband moved to a college town, she had to find a different job if they wanted to stay together. Natalie described how she ended up in grant writing: “I said, ‘What can I do?’ Well, I was an English major. I know how to write. I’m comfortable with the academic world.” Drawing on her skills as a writer, her undergraduate and graduate school jobs working for college administrators, and her previous job in philanthropy, Natalie moved into grant writing for the local college. As she put it, “So I kind of stumble along and find something.” At that time, she and her husband were living on the East Coast; when he took a job in California, she found a temporary position as a grant writer and then was offered three full-time jobs: two in higher education and one obtaining funding for children’s programs for the county. She chose the county job as most aligned with her values because it let her “better the community” by helping at-risk children. Natalie is proud of her success at that job (“we brought in over forty million dollars to various projects”), the reputation she developed as a grant expert, and the staff development programs she initiated. Yet, despite her pride in the good she was able to do at her jobs and the recognition she had received, when I asked her whether work was central to her identity, she replied, “No, it’s just that—I mean I do a good job. I’m professional. I leave it at the end of the day.” Nor did she care about her job title. After her bout of unemployment, she took a lower position at a state school so she could become vested in the state pension plan. She said, “I don’t care what you call me, as long as you pay me.”

Those with a good-enough-occupation approach weathered their job search fairly well. Unlike those with an occupational passion, these job seekers considered other occupations if they could not find work in the field of their last job. For example, one man had been a successful general contractor, but during the Great Recession there was no money for construction, so he returned to bartending, which he had done earlier in his life. Unlike those who wanted to move up in a career, these job seekers were willing to take a lower-level position if necessary, like the grant writer Natalie Harper, who did not care about her job title. Still, unlike those with a work-is-work approach, they had enjoyed their jobs and looked forward to working again, both for the paycheck and for the nonfinancial rewards.

Katarina Spelling eventually fell into a good-enough occupation. At the end of our initial interview, she mentioned in an offhand way that later that day she was going to start a part-time job as an assistant in an accounting firm. She did not have high expectations for it. As an undergraduate she had taken a job as a bank teller and frankly admitted, “I was a terrible teller.” She did not think she was good at detailed work like that. Still, she decided that a part-time job was better than nothing, so she planned to work there while she continued to apply for full-time jobs.

To Katarina’s surprise, she liked working at that accounting office. When I spoke with her again two years later, she had a toddler and was still working there. They let her do some work from home and some at the office, which was perfect for her as a new mother, and she had learned how to make data entry enjoyable by thinking of it as like playing a computer game: “I really like puzzles and Tetris, so when I’m at the accounting firm, for example, I just feel like that’s what I’m doing. I’m playing solitaire, which is one of my favorite games. I just feel like that’s what I’m doing all day.”

There were many other things Katarina found she liked about working at that accounting firm. For one, she appreciated getting out of the house and socializing with adults. The day before our follow-up interview, she had spent six hours at the office where she chatted with her coworkers and joked with one of her bosses. Even though she is Republican and they are Democrats, they got along well. Katarina discovered that that job provided satisfactions she did not get as a stay-at-home mother; she had expected to miss her baby, but she did not. As much as she loved her daughter, caring for a toddler was not as mentally stimulating as her job, and it did not give her the same sense of contributing to an enterprise and being valued.

We held this interview in the children’s section of the local library, where Katarina’s daughter ran around while we talked. As Katarina kept one eye on her daughter, she commented on what her work at the accounting firm had come to mean to her:

I think that’s probably the main reason I don’t have any postpartum depression or anything is because I had a little bit of work to do. And it wasn’t just church stuff. [Katarina did extensive volunteer work for her church.] It was like, no, you have actual work. Like numbers to crunch and reports to make and emails to answer. And having all these little favors, or whatever you want to call it, asked of me to—like run these events and stuff—has been really nice for me mentally because as much as I love this work [of caring for a child], it’s not as rewarding as having somebody need you as an adult. “I need you to do this thing for me.” And that’s what I’ve noticed. The difference between working for yourself like this [said while looking at her daughter] and working for someone else. And that makes me happy.

At that point Katarina categorized her accounting office work as a “job” rather than a long-term “career,” but two years later, Katarina became an accountant at that firm.

If Katarina had stuck to the advice to “follow your passion,” she would have been single-minded in her pursuit of a career as a singer, and she would not have invested time in any occupation that could deter her from that path. She did continue to take singing gigs on the side, but she also made the pragmatic choice to look for something else that would provide a more reliable paycheck. Although she began with a work-is-work attitude and without any commitment to remaining at the accounting firm, she discovered that she liked it. Accounting eventually became her good-enough occupation. It is not a passion, but it still provides nonfinancial satisfactions.

Many of my participants had stories of ending up in a good-enough occupation. When they needed a job, they considered their options and chose the one that was of greatest interest; fit their values, skills, and experience; had the kind of working conditions they wanted; and paid enough to meet their needs. By repeating this process, they gradually developed expertise and interest in one field, which became their good-enough occupation.

If those with a good-enough occupational approach enjoyed their job, what they appreciated are small work pleasures. These are not the deep meanings of believing that one’s job contributes to one’s life purpose or a better world. Instead, small pleasures could consist of enjoyment of the tasks and feeling competent at them, enjoyment of the physical work environment, and enjoyment of socializing on the job.³³ Those ways of enjoying work were not limited to those with a good-enough occupational approach, but they were common among them.

My participants varied in the kinds of tasks they liked. There has been interesting speculation among critical theorists about the possible adverse effects of postindustrial “immaterial labor”; that is, “labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communication,” as Michael Hardt defines it.³⁴ A potential problem with producing immaterial goods is that the results of one’s work are (by definition) intangible, which may be unsatisfying. Some of my participants agreed. Chipper Goodman, a former high school football player who was in his mid-twenties when we met, said office jobs put him to sleep. He preferred being outside doing hard physical work connected to sports and fitness, like his temporary job setting up the courses for outdoor sporting events such as mud runs and triathlons. He said, “It’s fun; I enjoy fitness and outdoors.” He also liked his work to have tangible results: “I enjoy work that I can see productivity, that I can see it happening, such as like these events. Building an eight-foot wall that’s ninety-seven feet long.” He preferred that to “doing work that I don’t see the end result.”

Others, however, found fun from immaterial labor, especially jobs that presented novel challenges.³⁵ Robert Milner, a former supply chain strategist in a cosmetics company, described what he enjoyed about his work: “One day, you’re thinking about formulas, and you’re dealing with laboratories and engineers and biochemists. And the next day, you’re dealing with the marketing department and the creative department to try to come up with a design. Real fun. I liked that.” The intellectual challenge of wrangling office software was what Celeste Rue enjoyed so much as an administrative assistant. She told me that in one of her jobs, “I would have to do a really complex sort to bring the data into an Excel spreadsheet from a different type of file, and that was fun. That was just fun, and I could sit there at my desk all day and do that.” The fact that Celeste was good at this kind of work also greatly contributed to her enjoyment of it.

Even without novel intellectual challenges, immaterial work can be satisfying. When the anthropologist David Graeber posted an online essay about “bullshit jobs” (“paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”), workers doing immaterial labor were a large share of those who wrote him saying that was a sadly accurate description of their job.³⁶ However, even if it is true that a majority of those who have “bullshit jobs” are doing immaterial labor, it does not follow that the majority of those doing immaterial labor feel they have pointless or pernicious “bullshit jobs.” Katarina Spelling did not believe that having “numbers to crunch and reports to make and emails to answer” was pointless; that work helped the firm, and it made her happy to do work that was needed.

The sensory qualities of their workplace mattered to many of my participants as well, although they differed in what environments they enjoyed. Terrance West had appreciated the occasional company picnics and barbeques when he worked as a shipping and receiving clerk for “H Company,” a candy company, but they were not the main attractions of the job. The first thing he mentioned was that he was happy to begin working there in his mid-thirties because his previous jobs had familiarized him with the tasks, such as printing bills of lading and dealing with delivery truck drivers, and he felt competent at them. The next thing he said was, “I would go to work in the morning, and the building smelled like chocolate. (laughs) […] it was nice.” He also mentioned that the building was kept air conditioned and dim to preserve the candy, making a very comfortable working environment for him. He had more profound reasons for “really loving that place”: he also valued the charitable work of the company’s founder, and he was proud that his bosses appreciated his many talents and dedication to the job. Yet, the small pleasure of a comfortable working environment contributed significantly to why he “would get up in the morning happy to go to work.”

By contrast, Chipper Goodman and Feliciano Salas would have hated being cooped up in Terrance’s dim candy warehouse. Feliciano said that he was completely “comfortable” only when he was working outdoors as a roofer.

Regardless of their approach to an occupation, many of my participants enjoyed socializing with workmates. It was everyday socializing that they appreciated, not management-led special events. Katarina Spelling enjoyed talking to coworkers and joking with her boss. Similarly, José Navarro liked the congenial interactions with his coworkers at food concession stands at Dodgers Stadium. He explained, “I like to work at Dodgers because even though there may be some work conflicts, when I get there, I greet a lot of people, and a lot of people know me, and most of them like me. I think that 80 percent of the people I greet, like me. I can feel that vibe. […] I can joke with them, and we laugh together.”

Emily Quinn used the striking metaphor of “play” to talk about the enjoyment she had derived from casual social interaction at the office. She was never able to obtain another job after she lost hers during the Great Recession:

I wanna play and they won’t let me play. They won’t let me in. They won’t let me in the door. I can’t get in. I can’t get back. I miss being in the office. It’s fun. With work I connect being—I first of all think of connecting, being with people, being friendly, feeling human. I have an opportunity to care. I have an opportunity to ask somebody “How are you doing? How did your daughter do in that water polo meet?” and have them ask about me, have somebody make a joke—you know how you’re always kidding with each other.

While she was out of work, Emily felt, “There is no connection. There’s no human interaction and I miss that.” When I asked her to draw her place in society, she drew herself alone, behind a fence. On the other side were people she described as “working, living, earning, laughing, talking, contributing” (chapter 2, figure 2.1).

Sam Lennon, who had worked mostly in service-sector jobs (sales associate, cashier, food preparation, stockroom) until she was permanently disabled with injuries, similarly commented on social interactions with coworkers as making work fun: “If you’ve got a job, and you go to work, that’s like your family there. It’s like another little world.” When I asked if she would want to work again if she could, she said, “I would. Yeah, I’m really tired of the cats. It’s fun to work.”

Social interactions have long been recognized as a source of job satisfaction,³⁷ although some worry that may be changing. Those concerns were voiced well before teleworking became common during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Aronowitz and DiFazio conclude that “the main value of having a job (besides its economic function for individuals and households), is that it once provided a ‘community.’ ” They believe, however, that “the culture of the factory and the large office is dying.”³⁸ Some cultural theorists speculate that wanting to belong to a workplace community is a futile “melancholic longing” for a departed Fordist past.³⁹

Other researchers would agree. One research summary reports, “In 1985, about half of Americans said they had a close friend at work; by 2004, this was true for only 30 percent.” The author concludes, “Now, work is a more transactional place. We go to the office to be efficient, not to form bonds.”⁴⁰ That conclusion overlooks the value of casual friendships. Workers do not need to have a close friend at work; what they want is people with whom they are friendly, a feeling of belonging somewhere, of human connection.⁴¹

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when many office workers had to work from home, one technology writer began his lengthy analysis of remote work on an upbeat note about the great productivity gains that companies were observing. His article ends, however, this way: “As much as our offices can be inefficient, productivity-killing spreaders of infectious disease, a lot of people are desperate to get back to them.” He quotes one teleworking employee “who longs to hang out with her ‘peeps. ‘You know—we’re drinking coffee, or maybe, Hey, want to take a walk? I miss that.’ ”⁴² What many (although not all) office workers want now is a mix: some days working from home, so they do not have to spend so much time commuting, and at least occasional days working at an office to feel more connected to others.⁴³

So far in this section I relayed positive stories about work, but there are negative ones as well. If interesting tasks make work fun, spirit-dulling and backbreaking tasks make it drudgery. If a comfortable workplace and pleasant social interactions with coworkers make work enjoyable, an uncomfortable workplace and unpleasant interactions can be unbearable. The kinds of jobs that are available will have an enormous effect on how one thinks about the place of work in a good life.⁴⁴

Some of my participants’ least favorite jobs were in warehouse work, which is the only job sector that was booming in the Inland Empire region of southern California in the 2010s. Amazon and many other retailers have large warehouses and fulfillment centers in that area because it has lot of undeveloped land and many workers desperate for a job.⁴⁵ I already shared Jake Taylor’s description of the miseries of being a warehouse “lumper.” Summer Carrington’s feet were injured after a temporary holiday-season job working as a picker in an Amazon warehouse. When a customer places an order, the picker is responsible for pulling the items from the shelves of the enormous warehouse. Summer said she was timed in her work, and no one was allowed to sit down except for short breaks. When I talked to her after it ended, Summer did not have anything good to say about that warehouse job other than that it provided a paycheck she needed.⁴⁶

Toxic interpersonal relations forced at least two of my participants out of jobs. In both cases, they faced racism or xenophobia. José’s sister, Isabel Navarro, also participated in this study. She was more ambitious than her brother and had worked very hard to advance in her career; however, in two jobs she was blocked by a supervisor or harassed by coworkers who were prejudiced against her because she was an immigrant from Mexico, as I explained in chapter 1. Terrance West, who is Black and gay, never obtained any support or redress when he was harassed by racist or homophobic coworkers or supervisors. He usually liked working with others, but after being goaded into leaving a job by a racist coworker, he applied to be a truck driver so he could work alone. The option for remote work during the pandemic has been a boon for those who felt they were outside the dominant social groups at work. One survey found that Black knowledge workers were more likely than white knowledge workers to prefer hybrid or remote work, a difference that could be due to a less welcoming social environment for workers of color in those positions.⁴⁷

Less visible were the ways that some of my participants’ paths into good-enough occupations were smoothed by privileges not commented on by those who had them but noticed by those who did not. For example, when Daniel Horn—a white man born in the United States—was still in college, he was invited to move into management at the restaurant chain where he was working. José Navarro, by contrast, noticed that, at one of the sports venues where he worked, Latino/a employees in food services were not offered management positions. As other researchers have found, when employers look for someone with a good “fit” to an organization’s culture, they can exhibit gender, racial, ethnic, and national origin biases.⁴⁸

There was also some assumed gender sorting in the kinds of good-enough occupations my participants fell into. After Daniel Horn worked in restaurants, he became a successful general contractor even though he had no experience in construction other than having built a tree fort as a child. I suspect that a woman with no prior experience would not have been so readily accepted as general contractor, nor did any woman we interviewed mention considering that as an occupation.

In sum, the paths to good-enough occupations were shaped not only by the job seekers’ values, interests, experience, and skills but also by the learned assumptions that led them to consider certain kinds of occupations over others, their class background and education, and the opportunities that were offered to some and withheld from others depending on their gender, race, and national origin. Still, the high fences or open gates guiding job seekers into some occupations and away from others were not limited to those with a good-enough occupational approach. They also hindered or helped those with the two occupational approaches I describe next: seeing one’s occupation as a career and seeing it as a passion.

Moving up in a Career

The opportunity to move up a career ladder presented by a job is a culturally recognized basis for choosing it. The metaphors of “moving up” and of a career “ladder” stand for advancement in title, salary, responsibilities, recognition, or other markers of status and achievement.

Titles can be an important indicator of career advancement; one interviewee was disappointed that he had only achieved the level of director or vice president in his jobs and never senior vice president. So are moves to a bigger or better-known organization. The self-employed have their own indicators of career progress, such as increases in the number of sales, customers or clients, online “followers,” subscribers, page views, and so on.

As Wrzesniewski and her coauthors explain, when someone cares about career advancement, they “mark their achievements not only through monetary gain, but through advancement within the occupational structure. This advancement often brings higher social standing, increased power within the scope of one’s occupation, and higher self-esteem.”⁴⁹ This definition was useful for my study, particularly its emphasis on self-esteem. Those with this moving-up-in-a-career approach judged themselves and felt they were judged by others by advancements in their career.

What this definition underplays is that career success can also be enjoyable. As I discussed in chapter 2, many of those who had thrown themselves into their careers did so because they found their measurable accomplishments gratifying. Some described achieving challenging goals at work as fun.

Elizabeth Montgomery, a business-to-business saleswoman who before we met had hopped from one job to another for better opportunities in her nearly thirty-year career, used the word fun so often in recounting her achievements that I had a hard time picking just one example for the list at the beginning of this chapter. Early in her career, she was a buyer for a department-store chain. She commented, “I was responsible for forty stores. And I’d never really understood the clout we had until you’d walk into a tradeshow because there were very few retailers at the time that had forty stores. So that was really, really fun.” In the early 2000s, she had the idea of venturing into internet sales when working for another company, which had never done it before: “We went from zero; we grew it five times over.” She said it was “a blast,” which is another way of saying it was fun. In her last job before I met her, she was working for a large organization and was responsible for one of its biggest territories. Although there were problems with that company, she liked the autonomy: “It was like having my own company out here. They gave you all the P & L [profit and loss statements] and just basically said, ‘Here’s what we need you to do. Here’s your expenses and go for it.’ ” She concluded, “So that was a lot of fun.”

In Elizabeth’s examples, we see three aspects of jobs that can make them fun. These three features matter not only for those who care about advancing in a career but also for others: having “clout” (influence because of one’s position or accomplishments), achieving challenging goals (such as her success when taking her company’s sales online), and having autonomy/decision-making power.

Charles Toppes, director of manufacturing at a furniture factory, was proud when he achieved a very challenging goal:

The company had a program wherein all the facilities competed for several different recognition awards, the crowning jewel of which was the factory of the year, the quality factory of the year. One of the first tasks assigned to me by the president was that this facility in all of its existence of forty something years had never even been in the top three, getting close to getting that award. Well, he didn’t want to be in the top three; he wanted to win that award. Basically, he gave me that task. He said, “Your primary task is to win this award for this company for this facility the next time around.”

It sounded impossible, like a knight’s quest in a medieval tale. I felt his excitement as Charles explained how he devised metrics to set goals and built teams to achieve them. And the outcome? “By the end of the year we pulled it off. We got factory of the year for that facility. Then not only did we get factory of the year for that facility, but we also got it the following year.” Clearly, Charles’s success at meeting this difficult challenge was very gratifying to him.

Emily Quinn, the executive secretary quoted earlier who said she wanted to “play” again, enjoyed both the clout and the decision-making power she had when she was an assistant to the head of her company: “I was always in charge of arranging everything, whatever the celebrations, the parties, the golf tournaments, all the “rah-rah” stuff, news releases, luncheons. People came to me, and it was wonderful. It was a lot of fun. It was very enjoyable.”

When I asked Elizabeth about the meaning or importance of work for her, she compared it to winning sports events. She had been a standout high school and college athlete, and she saw career successes as like athletic trophies. In both cases, “You set the goal. You go out and achieve it.” Your salary, and what you can buy with it, reflects your achievements: “The money is secondary, but yet it isn’t, ‘cause I like nice things. […] Where that [money earned] comes into play is how much do you make, to buy those things.” Money matters not only for consumption but also as a visible sign of one’s accomplishments. Max Weber observed that wealth played a similar role for early Protestants, but he thought for them it was an outward sign that they were among those destined to achieve eternal salvation. Weber observed that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, “In the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.”⁵⁰

Unemployment during a lengthy recession was especially difficult for those who had a moving-up-in-a-career approach. These job seekers were reluctant to take a salary cut or a lower position because they were signs of failure to progress in their career. Also, if they set their expected salary too low, it could signal they were not the kind of ambitious high achiever that the organization was seeking. Yet, if they held out for the salary or position that was the next step up in their career, they could be passed over by employers who had no shortage of qualified applicants willing to work for less. As their months of unemployment turned into years, their long-term unemployment became an additional liability because it suggested hidden weaknesses or that their skills were out of date. Many employers do not even consider applications from the long-term unemployed.⁵¹

Stephen Smith experienced this dilemma. He had been a regional finance director for a division of a Fortune 500 company that was hard hit by the Great Recession. Although he interviewed for many jobs, he was out of work for three years because employers thought, correctly, that he would be reluctant to take a salary cut. When we first met, Stephen spoke of compensation as “a measure of your net worth to society.” He was forced to reconsider what his compensation said about his social value because when he eventually found another job, he had to take a 25 percent cut in his base salary. He told me that he was aware that such cuts were typical after the Great Recession, but as we saw in chapter 5, his wife was not pleased with his lower salary.

Hillary Edwards erred in the opposite direction by asking for too low a salary. She had held a senior position in a bank that failed. After being out of work for three years, she was approached by an executive recruiter. He kept pressing her to state her salary requirement. She was reluctant to give a figure, but eventually she said, “Seventy-five thousand maybe. I’m looking in that area.” His response was, “That’s too low. I was really expecting for you to tell me something higher.” She did not get the job.

Those who cared about career advancement had to adjust the way they viewed themselves, and were viewed by others, after they ended a long bout of unemployment by taking a job that was a step—or several steps—below their previous position. Lisa Rose had a painful adjustment after she was laid off from her leadership position in a well-known local nonprofit organization. When we first talked, it was a year and a half after her layoff, and she had obtained only occasional short-term contract work in the interim. She was ready to lower her expectations about the kind of job she could get next, but she also had to deal with reactions from others. She said, “I told people about two positions that I was applying for, which are clearly positions that people would see as a step down or a step back, right? Not even lateral moves. And the immediate reaction”—from peers who had jobs—was, “Well, how is that possibly the next step in your career?”

Two-and-a-half years after Lisa was laid off, she settled for a much lower-status, nonexempt position, which I described in chapter 2. It was still in philanthropy, the sector she wanted to be in and where she felt she was contributing to the world with her work, but it was at an entry level position. The hardest adjustment was the way others treated her because of her lower status. She commented, “We tend to treat people like their jobs or their job titles, right?” Despite her many years of experience, she said, “I’m definitely not one of the most important people in the meeting. Like, if I’m there, sometimes it’s almost like we’re invisible.” If having clout is fun, having so little influence that one feels invisible is the opposite. Fortunately for Lisa, a few years after she was hired, the organization promoted her to an exempt position that was more commensurate with her skills and experience.

Pepper Hill had a similar experience of settling for a new job that was a rung down her career ladder after she was let go from a management-level position for a large nonprofit organization. Following a job search that lasted more than five years, during which she could find only part-time work, Pepper landed a full-time job working for a smaller nonprofit organization where she had been volunteering and working part-time. Her previous job had been with a national nonprofit organization with revenues of more than $200 million a year; her new job was with a local nonprofit with revenues of just over $1 million annually.⁵² In her previous job, she had been a director; in her new job, she had no decision-making power. In addition, her salary was much lower and (like Lisa), she had to work in a cubicle rather than an office with a window. Pepper realized that when she was younger, she used to look with disdain on someone if “they kind of went down to a different position.” She had assumed, “They’re not so good,” but “I’m now realizing that’s me. (laughs) And I’m feeling guilty for the people that I was—not mean to, but I didn’t always accept their knowledge.” Taking this lower position required redefining what mattered to her: “I have challenges with it, and I knew I would, and I’m working on it.” Still, Pepper enjoyed her new job because she shared the organization’s mission, and “I feel that my work is my way of contributing to society.”

Pepper Hill and Lisa Rose wanted to advance in their careers and also contribute to society with their work. This mixture of motives is not always recognized, either by scholars or in American society.⁵³ Caring about career advancement can carry a whiff of moral expediency, as if those who care about getting ahead in their career have no interest in doing good. Indeed, one dictionary definition of “careerism” is “the policy or practice of advancing one’s career often at the cost of one’s integrity.”⁵⁴

One of my participants implied he may have been careerist in this negative sense, and he paid for it. John Davis was a vice president of HR at a multinational corporation when, early in 2006, he was offered a higher-level position in a company that specialized in subprime mortgages. He was attracted by the opportunity to do more innovative HR work, as well as by “a substantial raise and a lofty title.” His wife did not like the values of the men he would be working for, especially after she read an interview in which the CEO bragged about encouraging his employees to spy on each other, but John wanted to give it a try. Within a few months he recognized that the company was in financial trouble, and he left before the year was out, long before its leaders were charged with fraud that helped bring about the global financial crisis in late 2007. Even though he got out quickly, John never obtained another full-time position. Although he did not say so, he may have been tainted by his association with that company. He commented, “It’s all been downhill since,” and he implied that his fate was a punishment for that bad decision, which his wife had warned him against. Toward the end of our first interview, he commented, “Things don’t just happen. They happen justly.”

Yet, even though advancing in one’s career can be in tension with wanting to make the world a better place through one’s work, the same person can care about both, as we saw with Lisa and Pepper. John, too, has strong ethical concerns, leading him to see his unemployment as a just punishment. John is Black, and in his previous jobs he had used his high-level HR positions to advocate for greater inclusion of minorities and women in the management of the companies where he worked. The world is not divided between people who have base motives for working and those with noble motives. Most people have a mix of these motivations.

Occupational Passion

Miriam Ramos is passionate about hairdressing. In telling her life story, she described her excitement as she took the classes (“I was really passionate about cosmetology and going to school”), and when we talked about the meaning of work for her, she said, “I’m fortunate that’s my passion, but for a lot of people, it’s their money. I get to have both.” Yet, after her first salon reduced her hours and then went out of business, Miriam went several years without being able to make a living from her passion. To make ends meet, she had to work as a sales associate in a discount clothing store, where she frequently clashed with one of her managers. Miriam still saw a few hairdressing clients at a different salon closer to home, and she became my hairdresser. One time when I asked her how that sales associate job was going, she simply replied, “Work is work.” End of conversation. By contrast, she never considered it “work” to cut, color, and style hair. Finally, nearly two years after she had taken the clothing store job out of desperation and about five years after she lost full-time work at her beloved first salon, she was offered a full-time position as a master stylist in a salon that she respected. Money was still tight, her father’s dementia worsened, and her relationship with her on-again, off-again boyfriend was still full of drama, but for several years Miriam was more contented than I had ever seen her. One day at her new salon, I noticed that she had a tote bag with the message, “I’ve been a hairdresser all my life. It’s what I do. It’s what I love.” It was a quote from a famous hairdresser that perfectly described Miriam.

Earl Apache Longwolf did not use the word “passion” to describe his occupation of being a welder and burner, but he too loved his field and could not imagine doing any other kind of work. The first time I met Earl, he was wearing a United Steelworkers baseball cap with a button that said, “I ♥ my fucking job.” When we entered his neighborhood convenience store, where we sat for the first interview, he was proud that the proprietor greeted him by his nickname “Steelman,” and before we settled into our interview, he showed me a photo of himself in a welder’s suit. Earl was particularly proud of his service to the country when he was hired to cut away the wreckage of the Twin Towers in New York City after 9/11.

Earl’s passion for his occupation preceded and followed that Twin Towers job and had an origin story. When Earl was six years old, his mother, father, two sisters, and brother were killed in a car crash. When he was fourteen and in foster care, his social worker asked him what he wanted to do for a living. Earl said, “ ‘If you could tell me what my father did, I would be the best at it.’ He [the social worker] said my father was a welder, burner, bender, melter, ironworker, steelworker.” Earl went on to do the same. Two years after we first met, when he was in his mid-fifties, he said he had no plans to retire soon: “I’ve got a 401(k) I haven’t touched. I’m going to stay until the thrill is gone, Claudia, because I love what I do. When you love what you do, it’s really hard to picture me retired watching TV.”

Miriam and Earl see their occupation as a passion. I define an occupational passion as having a deep attachment to one’s occupation based on the belief that it is what one is meant to do, given one’s talents or life experiences. It is close to the way some researchers describe seeing one’s occupation as a calling, which is another term some of my participants used.⁵⁵ For example, Rebecca Robinson, an administrative assistant, prided herself on setting up good systems to keep things organized and functioning smoothly in an office. When I observed, “Well, it does seem like you’re awfully good at what you do,” she agreed: “Yes, I think I’m very good at what I do. And I enjoy what I do. […] I think that is my calling.” However, “passion” was the more commonly used term.

Many critical theorists see social discourses of work as a “passion” or a “calling” as ideologies that serve to extract more labor from employees. Kathi Weeks is an influential theorist in this vein. Weeks would not be surprised that there are workers who love what they do, but she proposes that such work attachments are the product of socialization in a postindustrial capitalist society. She argues that “the new postindustrial work ethic … that characterized work as a path to individual self-expression, self-development, and creativity” is in the end like the old Protestant work ethic, promulgated to inculcate “systematic devotion to waged work.” She repeats Weber’s description of the Protestant work ethic, according to which workers are enjoined to treat their job “as if it were an absolute end in itself, a calling.”⁵⁶ To perform labor as if it were a calling means one does not really feel called to one’s occupation, but one should work with enthusiasm anyway.

Ilana Gershon is also critical of discourses of passion about work, but unlike Weeks, her account is grounded in ethnographic research. When investigating contemporary advice given to American job seekers, Gershon noticed that “passion has become such a frequently repeated word that everyone involved in hiring seems to agree that one of the most important qualifications for someone to show in an interview is an overwhelming enthusiasm for the job.” For example, one manager told her that “he would much prefer choosing the not-so-talented person to work on his project as long as he or she was passionate about the work.” When Gershon asked him why, “He laughed and said that this is what guarantees that the employee will work the long hours necessary to get the job done. He could teach the skills to someone who didn’t already know how to do a task, but he couldn’t make someone deeply committed to tasks if they didn’t feel committed from the outset.”⁵⁷ Gershon makes the insightful point that an ideology of occupational passion can supersede company loyalty, because employees who follow their passions may leave if their job no longer excites them. Still, like Weeks, Gershon emphasizes that the language of passion can be used to extract additional labor from workers who are expected to display zealous devotion. This discourse can also deflect job seekers’ attention from barriers to employment created by structural inequities: if they are having trouble finding work, it must be their own fault for not being passionate enough.⁵⁸

I share these critics’ concern with the use of productivist discourses to force people to labor in unsatisfying jobs.⁵⁹ I also share their concern with overwork. However, their criticisms do not target what my participants meant. A productivist (Protestant) work ethic and a follow-your-passion approach to an occupation are not the same. As I explained in chapter 2, a productivist work ethic calls for dedication to working, regardless of the job. It makes abstract labor an end in itself. By contrast, the follow-your-passion approach is about being drawn to a specific occupation. Miriam was a conscientious sales associate, but she had no passion for that job. It was only hairdressing that she described as her passion. Similarly, Earl took a job for a while as a forklift operator, but when the shipments stopped and he was laid off, his attitude was, “Good riddance.” Only steel work was his passion.

Furthermore, Miriam’s and Earl’s occupational passion did not blind them to exploitive work conditions. Miriam was shocked when another hairdresser reported that her boss gave her only one day off a week. Miriam commented, “The whole point of working is not just to work. It’s to have a balanced life.” She often spoke out on behalf of workers’ rights at her jobs. Earl criticized his last employer: “They want you to work to death but they treat you like dog doodoo. It was about, ‘The hell with how you feel. Do it or get out.’ ” Miriam’s and Earl’s love of their occupation was separate from their attitudes about specific employers and jobs.

Gershon’s concern is about job seekers’ requisite displays of enthusiasm and employers’ eagerness to take advantage of them. Some of my participants agreed that it was necessary to show enthusiasm if they wanted to be hired, but that was quite different from feeling they were meant to do a certain kind of work in life.

Some participants, like Earl, had occupational passions that originated in hardship and loss. Their traumatic experiences made them feel they needed to enter a certain line of work to turn their suffering into something positive. For example, Alice Joyner’s persistent effort to become a family counselor was driven by a tragedy that I cannot imagine bearing as a parent. Long before I met her, her mentally ill son killed one of his siblings. Following this horrific event—one of her children murdered by another who would then spend the rest of his life in prison—she decided to dedicate the rest of her life to helping troubled families. She got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees when she was in her seventies.

Fred Hernandez felt he had a calling from God to redeem his life by becoming a substance abuse counselor. When he was in his twenties, Fred had earned a good living as a truck driver, but his license was revoked for drunk driving. He nearly lost his life in a drunk-driving accident. The doctors and his family thought he had died, but when his brother-in-law grabbed his hand, Fred squeezed back. The doctors realized he was not dead yet and resumed their efforts to save him. Fred is sure God kept him alive “to do what I’m doing now. To help other alcoholics.” Helping others who have been driving under the influence is Fred’s way to find redemption for the many mistakes he has made in his life.

In these stories we see that an occupational passion is not a neoliberal ploy to extract work. Instead, it is driven by meaningful life experiences and skills. When I asked Alice Joyner whether her work was central to her identity, she objected to that wording: “What I do doesn’t make me who I am. Because of who I am, what I do is what I do.” In other words, she did not think that first you find work, and then it defines who you are. Instead, she saw who she was as paramount in the occupation she was determined to pursue.

Whether they saw their occupation as God’s purpose for their life, as their destiny, or simply as what they loved to do, those who had previously obtained work in the field they were passionate about persisted, often for many years, in their attempts to return to that occupation when they were out of work. They knew they could make a living doing what they felt they were meant to do in life, and they were determined to go back to it. Phoenix Rises, a special education teacher, described herself as “passionate about what I do.” When she could not find a job after being out of work for three years, she knew she should consider another field, but “I wouldn’t be happy. I could just see it—just dragging in, dragging out. It’d be like a death sentence almost.” Unlike my participants with a work-is-work, a good-enough occupation, or a moving-up-in-a career approach, those who were passionate about their field resisted changing it.

Those with an occupational passion differed from the rest of my participants in another way: surprisingly, they rarely spoke of their work as fun. It was as if that word failed to convey just how meaningful their work was for them. Having fun is only one kind of nonfinancial reward.

For example, compare the way Tom Dunn talked about a job he enjoyed in a good-enough occupation with one that became more of a passion for him. For eight years Tom was an IT personnel recruiter and consultant for health care organizations. It was challenging, well paid, and required travel to the San Francisco Bay area, which he liked. He said of that job, “It was really fun. It was really fun.” For emphasis, he added, “It was just a thrill. It was really a thrill.” After he lost his job due to a dispute with his boss, he could not find another position during the Great Recession. He was divorced, with no other source of income, and his younger sons were still at home. Bills started mounting; he stopped paying his mortgage and ignored dunning calls about his credit cards. He prayed to God, “Just show me what I need to do, and I’ll do it.” Tom got the idea of starting his own business delivering medical marijuana, and it took off. The business was not only lucrative but also deeply fulfilling because he took time to talk to his customers about their troubles. Tom was proud that “they count on me. Not just for the weed but to be their friend. To be their kind of sounding board. Maybe their counselor.” Tom did not describe that job as fun. Instead he said that job enabled him to put into practice the values he cared about: “Peace within me and my opportunities and ability to help other people.”

Similarly, before Miriam Ramos was a hairdresser, she was a visual merchandiser responsible for dressing mannequins and creating displays in a clothing store, which she described as “a really, really fun job.” By contrast, Miriam did not use the word fun when talking about hairdressing. Instead, she had statements like “For me, it truly makes me happy” and “I really find love in my work. I get love from making clients happy through customer service.”

In fact, only one of my twelve participants who had an occupational passion described a job in that field as fun. In my first interview with Tony DeLuca, he talked about his dedication to the HR field, which at that time he saw as fulfilling his “calling to touch people’s lives.” In one of his HR positions, he was director of international HR for his firm, which he described as “a lot of fun.” That international job may have been especially enjoyable because it offered opportunities to see other parts of the world. Tony also cared about advancing in his career, and rising to that level may have been fun for him because it was a high-level position. As that example illustrates, it is possible for a fun job to be in a field that people consider to be their calling or passion.⁶⁰ Nonetheless, the rest of my participants implicitly distinguished fun jobs from the deep fulfillment they felt from working in the field they loved.

As one of my participants Ralph Edwards put it, “If you ever do make a living from your passion, you’re truly blessed.” However, an occupational passion approach could be a curse for those unable to make a living from what they felt drawn to do. I have read sad examples of people who made midlife career changes to follow their passion and were subsequently unable to support themselves.⁶¹ Those lofty graduation speeches exhorting new graduates to follow their passion can lead people astray, raising unrealistic hopes that anyone can make a good living from a field about which they are passionate. “Follow your passion” downplays other ways of finding work that can pay the bills and be enjoyable or fulfilling.