Passionate Work: Endurance after the Good Life

Renyi Hong's "Passionate Work" explores how passion can be used to build resilience and mend disappointments with work, such as gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance. It argues that the ideal of passionate work sustains a condition of cruel optimism in which passion is offered as the solution for the injustices of contemporary capitalism.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 248 pages
Publication date: 09 May 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press

Renyi Hong's theory of being "passionate about your work" is an affective project that encourages individuals to endure economically challenging situations such as unemployment, job change, repetitive and menial labor, and freelancing. It is not just a subject of aspiration but has been deployed as a means to build resilience and mend disappointments with our experiences of work. Hong traces the rise of passion in nineteenth-century management to trends like gamification, coworking, and unemployment insurance, demonstrating how passion can emerge in instances that would not typically be understood as passionate.

Gamification numbs crippling boredom by keeping call center workers in an unthinking, suspensive state, pursuing even the most banal tasks in hope of career advancement. Coworking spaces marketed toward freelancers combat loneliness and disconnection at the precise moment when middle-class sureties are profoundly threatened. Ultimately, Hong argues, the ideal of passionate work sustains a condition of cruel optimism in which passion is offered as the solution for the injustices of contemporary capitalism.

Weight: 363g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478018223