Finding passion in work: Media, passion and career guides

Examining career guides, this essay seeks to understand how the notion of passionate work is presently framed as an injunction, a commonsensical good thing we should aspire to find. How does the discourse of passion respond to labor conditions after the crisis, and what are among the possibilities it forecloses? This essay contains three overtures. First, I analyze how career guides change the pain of job loss to a space of empowerment. Directing readers to the optimistic proposal that their work can be better, career guides advise that the negative effect of the present needs only to be endured by the private individual so that a better future can be produced. Second, I consider what meanings passion produced by the instruments of career guides have, thinking about its relationship to neoliberal subjectivity. Last, I examine career guides that provide a counter-discourse of passion, looking into the values it cultivates in readers.