What is job love?

By Janus Boye

Hertje Brodersen is a Berlin-based design leader who was previously three years in design leadership roles at Zalando. She also joined us at the Boye Aarhus 21 conference

Do you love your job? It’s a complicated question.

If you work in digital with the term “designer” or “user experience” in your job title, there’s a promise of creativity in what you do. Often it’s also not a career path you pick to get rich fast, but rather because there’s an alluring promise of meaning and purpose.

In a member’s call back in the summer, Berlin-based design leader Hertje Brodersen took the opening question to re-evaluate what it means to love design and to work as a designer, and how to navigate the boundaries.

Is design meant to be a life-long passion project? Hertje started by framing the talk as a Meet cute. A meet cute is a scene in films, in which two people meet for the first time, typically under unusual, humorous, or cute circumstances, and go on to form a future romantic couple. Think Harry meets Sally or Han Solo meets Princess Leia. Similarly, there’s a meet-cute between love and work and to set the stage, she used some familiar quotes on the topic.

Motivational or honest?

There’s many quotes out there about unconditional job love. As Hertje said, in reality most designers don’t do it to get rich fast, it’s more often with a heavy dose of idealism. She opened her memorable quote collection with this one:

“Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life”

Widely credited to a range of people from Mark Anthony, Harvey Mackay, Arthur Szathmary and even all the way back to Confucius. To Hertje, this quote sounds as magical as love at first sight. Like unicorns and rainbows. Hertje said she had very complicated feelings about this quote and wondered if the person who actually authored it, ever had a job in his life. Let’s look at another one:

“To be successful, the first thing to do is fall in love with your work”

This one by Sister Mary Lauretta to Hertje means that you don’t need to have a calling for design, love will follow. Or in other words, success is tied to feelings. Actually, what does it even mean? Do you really need to fall in love with work?

While Hertje usually avoids Steve Jobs quotes in her presentations, she moved onto this one by the charismatic pioneer of the personal computer:

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

To her, this one sounded stressful. Almost like being on the dating app Tinder. Will the search for true love ever end?

Summarizing these motivational quotes, Hertje mentioned that they all carry the same premise and privileged idea where there’s jobs for everyone. They are also very one-sided. Can work love you back?

No, it can’t. To illustrate the point, Hertje also brought a quote from the other end of the work-love spectrum by American activist, author and journalist Sarah Jaffe, known from the book “Work Won’t Love You Back – How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone”. On the topic of work love, Sarah said:

“Loving your job is a scam designed to get you to work harder for less money and in worse conditions”

In the book, Sarah talks about the labor of love myth, where certain types of work should be motivated by passion rather than pay, including caregiving, housekeeping, teaching and also passion-driven creative work. Many designers certainly believe that their work is passion driven.

So, who do you think said it better? Steve Jobs or Sarah Jaffe? Is work a driver of fulfillment or a driver of exploitation? To help us think about it, Hertje offered the below diagram with job love in the middle.

As Hertje said, this scale provides you with a mental model, but also an important conversation to have openly as it deeply impacts our work as designers. The pandemic and other global crises have revealed cracks in the surface of what might have looked like really shiny design leadership jobs.

We then moved back in time to set the stage for what inspired capitalism.

The issue with modern work ethics

Drawing on protestant ethics, Hertje took us back almost 500 years to make the compelling point that much of our thinking on work love is deeply rooted in us and how we are raised. If you consider old-school religious thinking, the value attached to hard work in one's worldly calling, especially in the Calvinist view, were deemed signs of an individual's election, or eternal salvation.

Hertje showed this non-comprehensive empathy map of the mind that shaped capitalism some 500 years ago.

As she said, even the invention of work happened at one point, roughly around the time of Calvin. Until then people did what they needed to do to live and working for the sake of working wasn’t a thing.

It’s quite intriguing that the modern phenomenon of work is sometimes strikingly similar to back then. The modern version goes roughly like this, at least so it seems for many successful billionaires: Get up at 4am in the morning, work excruciatingly hard, deny yourself small indulgences to make you feel more virtuous and then talk about your lifestyle on social media.

American professor Noam Chomsky is known for his social criticism and was interviewed for the Ezra Klein podcast for a 2021 episode titled Noam Chomsky’s Theory of the Good Life. In the episode, he puts work in a historic perspective:

“For about 2,000 years, from the romans into the late 19th century, the idea of having a job was considered an abomination”

So, the idea of a job is actually relatively new and the idea of a purposeful job is even newer. In his book How to Find Fulfilling Work (2013), Roman Krznaric says it like this:

“The desire for fulfilling work - a job that provides a deep sense of purpose, and reflect our values, passions and personality is a modern invention. (…) We have a new age of fulfillment in which the great dream is to trade up from money to meaning”

Today, we are increasingly defined by our jobs and to many, finding the dream job is one of the biggest goals in life. When you believe that work gives you fulfillment, purpose, opportunities to experience pleasure, sense of belonging and other good things it blurs the lines between work and life, and as we have seen in the past years, it also increases the number of people with burnout and working hours go up.

Interestingly, around 100 years ago, leading economists predicted that by today, we would only be working 15 hours per week, but that’s hardly the case. Also, productivity and wages used to follow each other hand in hand until around the 1970’s, but that’s no longer the case. Might it be the “labor of love” myth that Sarah Jaffe talks about? Why are so many willing to do extra work without asking for extra pay?

Ben Tarnoff wrote in The Making of the Tech Worker Movement (2020) that both stock options and cafeterias were initially introduced as explicit anti-union measures in the 1930’s and 1940’s, long before they became the norm in today’s Silicon Valley.

Today, workers are beginning to reject drudgery and there’s a rise of employee activism. There’s been multiple walkouts at several large tech vendors, including Google, and in the beginning of 2021 this article came out: A new union at Google is just the start of employee activism in 2021.

To Hertje, it’s clear that new generations see that the promises of capitalism don’t really apply for them and they’ve started fighting back. It’s encouraging that they don’t just fight for better wages and better working hours, but they also question wrongful product launches that go against values and only prioritise profit.

So much for the reflection on how we got here. What happens, when meaning and money collide? Let’s talk about idealism.

The fragility of idealism

In the beginning of 2023, psychologist Ken Sheldon was interviewed for the Hidden Brain podcast by Shenkar Vedantam. The episode was titled Who do you want to be? and Ken raised this good point:

“We are self programming organisms. We are creating our lives via our choices, but we are not taught how to do it well. Not taught how to ask ourselves the questions that will get us the answers that we need”

As an example of how motivation can play tricks with our minds, Ken Sheldon talked about how many lawyers start out as idealists and really want to help people. Lately Ken said that he had met too many lawyers who were unhappy with their lives, in particular with where their career had taken them.

Hertje shared the below graph to illustrate how intrinsic and extrinsic motivators can make us more or less happy.

This graph also relates to what Hertje called the Burnout epidemic. Jonathan Malesic covered this in a thought-provoking 2022 article in the Guardian titled: Your work is not your god: welcome to the age of the burnout epidemic. To quote:

Burnout is characteristic of our age, because the gap between our shared ideals about work and the reality of our jobs is greater now than it was in the past”

He suggests that many of us are at the end of our ropes, because we allow work to be the thing that gives our lives the most meaning. Our ancestors might have worked to the very end of physical exhaustion, but they didn’t burnout like we do today. Perhaps there’s an inner voice that we somehow can’t hear, so we keep pushing until we can’t have it any longer.

Hertje shared the below research from 2009 to show a quantifiable link between meaningful work and burnout. The study investigated not just meaningful work, but also how much of our work has to be meaningful to reduce the risk of burnout. In short: If 20% or more of your work is spent on meaningful activities, your risk of burnout is lower.

As Hertje said this translates to just 1 day per work week which has to be meaningful. That should be possible, right? Quite different from the motivational quotes at the beginning with unconditional love for your job. When you have a bad day, life and work doesn’t come crashing down.

A final word on idealism. Hertje brought the below excerpt from a job ad for the change consulting firm NOBL Collective. Looks like meaningful work with room to breathe?

What’s design got to do with this?

Most designers are familiar with terms like crunch time and hustling culture, common euphemisms used for overly tight deadlines to make you work long and hard. While these are indicators of both ambition and purpose, they are also regularly put in place as systematic practices to exploit people, in particular designers with high intrinsic engagement and a sense of belonging in the workplace. Yet, as a designer, you can be fired each and every day.

This creates a constantly high level of anxiety and stress. In other words, many designers are stuck in a vicious circle, without time for leisure, it’s hard to find meaning outside work

A constant level of anxiety and stress related to timelines. Designers can be stuck in a vicious cycle, without time for leisure, which makes it hard to find meaning outside work and then you are truly stuck. As Hertje said, the distance between “I love my job” and “I can’t f**king take it any longer” is really narrow and then to make matters worse, you can be victim-blamed for not being committed enough if you start pushing back on the unhealthy working culture.

Hertje cited the artist Sue Ellen Zhang, who created a fun video on Tiktok that’s unfortunately no longer available, and said it like this:

“You guys ever wonder how much of a scam everything in life is? When I first went to college I was like ‘oh my good, I need to find a purpose. What am I going to do that’s going to give me such life fulfillment?’ And my answer to that was user experience design. I really thought the answer to my life was UX design. Cracked up on capitalism. Why did I say that’s my life’s purpose. That’s so stupid!”

No, designing buttons for apps is not the answer to why you are alive. Computer scientist Jeff Hammerbacher led the data team at Facebook over a decade ago and has earlier taken it one step deeper with this quote:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

Seems like a waste of good designers, right? Hertje offered the below way of looking at the myths of design work.

Mike Monteiro wrote the book “Design is a job: The necessary second edition” and in the book he talks more about the “Magical Creative” myth, kind of a merging of artists and craftspeople who are amazingly driven by creating true art. In the book, he also cuts through the myths and says, quite in the spirit of Sarah Jaffe:

“When someone tells you that design is your passion, they are about to fuck you. Design is your job. Jobs are labor. Labor gets paid”

As Hertje reminded us, many design jobs in reality also come with quite a bit of non creative work. Strategy, tactics, meetings, processes, management skills and the list goes on. Does that fit with the idea of your expectations of what a designer does?

Intrinsic motivation is both a superpower and also the cryptonite for many designers, so where do we go from here?

Design critic Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli explore design's potential as a force for positive change that gives us hope for the future in their book Design Emergency: Building a Better Future. As Alice says in the book, attitudinal designers are agents of change utilise design practices together with other disciplines, while Paola describers it as a renaissance attitude, where you combine technology, cognitive science and beauty to produce something that the world was missing. Might this be something that the robots can’t do and where we truly need designers to make the world better?

So, what is job love? Hertje’s closing advice:

”You need to answer it for yourself, but hopefully this talk provided a helpful context for you to have some upgraded thinking on the topic. Just make sure that your enthusiasm is not used against you.”

Learn more about drudgery, devotion and design

The conversation naturally continues in our peer groups and at our conferences.

If you are interested in digging deeper into the topic, here’s a few more pointers from the helpful reading list that Hertje shared:

Finally, you can also download the slides (PDF) or even lean back and enjoy the recording.