Opening of the Way

Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness Hardcover – August 11, 2015
by Miya Tokumitsu

https://www.amazon.com/Do-What-You-Love-Happiness/dp/1941393470

An obvious play on Marsha Sinetar's title

a 2004 article by Robert Reich

Robert Reich: The Gateway to the Middle Class
A degree shouldn't be the only way.

https://www.guernicamag.com/robert-reich-the-gateway-to-the-middle-class/

"Why college is necessary, but gets you nowhere."

So Robert Reich points out that there is a big catch in the idea that college is worth it. Wages for nondegree holders have dropped so sharply. Many college graduates hold jobs that don't actually require degrees, pushing non-degree holders into even lower paid work, if they can find any at all.

"Given all this," Reich writes, "a college degree is worth the cost because it at least enables a young person to tread water."

John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1930, talks about the end of the worst manifestations of the Protestant work ethic:

"
When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be a great change to the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of highest virtues.
"

Refs

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, Free Time: The Forgotten American Dream, 1996

Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (Verso, 2013), draws upon Marx's Gundrisse

Frederic Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire (Verso, 2014)

Ross Perlin, Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy (Verso, 2012)

Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (2011)