“No literary form captures the pathologies of contemporary American work quite like the humble—honored, grateful, blessed—LinkedIn post,” Anna Wiener writes. In the right light, the social network can appear as “a lavish psychoanalytic corpus,” bursting with naked ambition, status-seeking, brownnosing, corporate shilling, and self-promotion. LinkedIn’s style of sanitized professional chatter is of a piece with mantras like “do what you love,” “follow your passion,” “bring your whole self to work,” and “make a life, not just a living.”

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“No literary form captures the pathologies of contemporary American work quite like the humble—honored, grateful, blessed—LinkedIn post,” Anna Wiener writes. In the right light, the social network can appear as “a lavish psychoanalytic corpus,” bursting with naked ambition, status-seeking, brownnosing, corporate shilling, and self-promotion. LinkedIn’s style of sanitized professional chatter is of a piece with mantras like “do what you love,” “follow your passion,” “bring your whole self to work,” and “make a life, not just a living.”
This discourse around work can seem like a distinctly modern phenomenon, but a new book argues that the imperative to imbue work with personal significance is part of a long-standing national preoccupation with entrepreneurialism. In “Make Your Own Job,” Erik Baker tracks the evolution of “the entrepreneurial work ethic”: an orientation that is highly individualistic and competitive, and that operates on the level of personality. It is present in the pervasive compulsion to work harder, longer hours and to feel adrift or even “devoid of purpose” when there isn’t enough work—or the “right” work—to do.
The entrepreneurial work ethic addresses a central tension of American capitalism: most people need to work to earn a living, but well-paid, stable, and fulfilling jobs are hard to find. In times of intensifying economic inequality, when many of the jobs on offer are precarious, underpaid, and spiritually deadening, the prospect of becoming your own boss holds a lot of appeal. But the result is too many people working much too hard because there’s just not enough work. Entrepreneurialism, Baker writes, is cyclical, and benefits from “ritual amnesia.” The perpetuation of the entrepreneurial work ethic depends on proponents “denouncing the quality of the work that capitalism has given us to date and in the next breath asking for more.” But what, if anything, could come after it? Read more.

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