Work Won't Love You Back With Sarah Jaffe

Fitting the artist's life into the American dream

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TW Creative Director John Vogel interviews Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. In this episode, the two discuss the idea of the American dream, how it is used to control the working class, and how it affects working artists and their ability to live off their work. 

Sarah is a writer and reporter living in New Orleans and on the road. She is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back; Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt; and the forthcoming From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, all from Bold Type Books.

Her journalism covers the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets, and her writing has been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and many other outlets. She is a columnist for The Progressive and a contributing writer for In These Times.

Work Won’t Love You Back is a deeply reported examination of why doing what you love is a recipe for exploitation and the creation of a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.

You’re told that if you “do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Whether it’s working for “exposure” or “experience” or enduring poor treatment in the name of “being part of the family,” all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love.

In Work Won’t Love You Back, Sarah, a preeminent voice on labor, inequality, and social movements, examines this “labor of love” myth—the idea that certain work does not really constitute working and therefore should be done out of passion instead of for pay. Told through the lives and experiences of workers in various industries—from the unpaid intern to the overworked teacher, the nonprofit worker, and even the professional athlete—Sarah reveals how all of us have been tricked into buying into a new tyranny of work.

As Sarah argues, understanding the trap of the labor of love will empower us to work less and demand what our work is worth. And, once freed from those binds, we can finally figure out what actually gives us joy, pleasure, and satisfaction.

In this week’s episode, John and Sarah explore the idea of the American dream and how it is actually a lie. Sarah argues that the American dream is used to make the working class feel guilty for systems that were made to oppress them. The idea is that if you just work hard enough, you can overcome all the systems of oppression that are created to keep you down. And for artists, that means that accepting a risky career, such as one in the arts, is inherently your fault. 

This also plays into the idea that the reward of working in the arts is the work itself and not the money. Which, as Sarah says, is crap. She discusses how traveling the world and seeing how other artists are funded and encouraged to create art strengthened her opinion that we need to be funding the creation of art and not just the selling of art. 

The two also talk about artificial intelligence (AI) and the automation of the arts. Sarah references a Tweet by Matt Somerstein that states, “can we get some a.i. to pick plastic out of the ocean or do all the robots need to be screenwriters?” The arts are not what needs to be automated. There are plenty of problems that automations, algorithms, and AI can solve, but those are not what are getting funded.

Check out Sarah’s episode to hear more about her stance on automation, the American dream, and her life as a working artist.

Podcast production for this episode was provided by Sarah Tulloch and her podcast production company, CCST.