Right now I’m reading two books that couldn’t be more different in their outlook on what it means to be fully human and to seek a living.
Who’s right? Both of them, a little. Reading them together is teaching me more than reading either alone.
From Work Won’t Love You Back, by Sarah Jaffe:
The compulsion to be happy at work…is always a demand for emotional work from the worker. Work, after all, has no feelings. Capitalism cannot love. This new work ethic, in which work is expected to give us something like self-actualization, cannot help but fail. Most jobs will not make us happy, and even the ones that do will often be a source of deep frustration…
From Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work As A Pilgrimage of Identity, by David Whyte
To have a firm persuasion in our work — to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time — is one of the great triumphs of human existence. We do feel, when we have work that is challenging and enlarging and that seems to be doing something for others, as if, in Blake’s words, we could move mountains…
