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“I love building businesses and launching new ventures, but the only reason I value money is that I’m going to need a lot of it when I buy the New York Jets.”
-Gary Vaynerchuck, Crush It!
“…the Erotic Professional positions herself as answering a vocational ‘calling’ that seems to have barely anything to do with being paid.”
-Juno Mac and Molly Smith, Revolting Prostitutes
Like many people born after the 1980s, I grew up surrounded by discourse about work and passion. The underlying thesis was that, since work occupies the majority of a regular person’s time, and work is often associated with unhappiness and discontent, the solution was to turn work into an enjoyable experience. In a capitalist system that abhors any hint at communism, it does not do to examine the reasons why work is so undesirable to so many — that would eventually lead to discussions about fair wages, a reasonable hourly schedule, shifts in working conditions. The only solution that capitalism proposed to the issue of work was the individualist solution of finding something you’re so passionate about, it doesn’t feel like work, a sentiment summed up in that old cliché “love the work you do, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
As a young person coming of age in the early 2000s, I wholeheartedly believed this mantra. I spent my first…