How the hell did “doing what you love” become just another form of exploitation?
This week’s dive looks at how capitalism found yet another vein to tap — how it learned to turn creativity, optimism, and ambition into raw material marked for extraction. I like the term Passion Hustling: the idea that if you just love the work hard enough, the work will love you back. Spoiler — it won’t.

As you can see, emotional investment is positively correlated until about it ranks a 4.5-5 on a scale of one to 10- it starts to plateau at 4.5 and tapers sharply by 5, after which “Overall Life Satisfaction” scores rapidly become increasingly less predictable and non-linear. This sudden shift is almost certainly due to burnout and worker exploitation under the pretense of “giving it your all” or “going above and beyond” or any of several other sayings designed to inculcate a sense of duty to one’s employer due to the emotional attachment you have to the work itself. Once it becomes a financial obligation to perform well at work, and an emotional dimension is overlayed onto the worker-boss relationship, the overly emotionally invested worker becomes easy pickin’s for bosses trying to squeeze another dime or two out of them each hour.

Remember when there was still a little oxygen in the room? When you could squint and picture yourself five or ten years ahead, maybe a little more stable, maybe even proud of something?

“I could be my own boss,” I told myself. “No more taking orders from some micro-managing tyrant in a polo shirt.”

Anyone who’s ever felt their dignity melt away under fluorescent lighting knows the impulse. I jumped from a dead-end kitchen job into freelance writing, chasing the myth of freedom. Within months, I had six bosses instead of one, all of them sending polite little tyrannies via passive-aggressive email.

The emerging class of tech monopolizers and venture capital marauders seized our ambitions, bundled them together and breaking them into sequestered microeconomies run entirely on the backs of gig workers and small-scale producers. Once they’d stripped the soul out of our favorite pursuits in the name of market viability, they sold our ultra-processed dreams back to us in the form of “content strategy,” “personal branding,” “side hustle culture,” and the ubiquitous motto of the gigworking platform marketer: “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Every ad promised liberation; every invoice reminded me I’d simply traded one leash for another.

Ask any kid about their dream job - astronaut, firefighter, singer, something that sounds like a poster on a guidance-counselor wall. Nobody says “remote content contractor with no benefits.” But that’s where the dream ends up if you play along long enough.

The economy they want doesn’t just need capable workers; it needs believers. “Do what you love,” they said. It wasn’t advice - it was a gambit: would the suckers really fall for it? Well, I sure did. The notion that love should justify exploitation has been described as a quiet cruelty. Perhaps so, but it’s only quiet because the lover never asserts themselves and presents their oppressor with the only appropriate ultimatum: Change how you do things and respect who you ask to do them, or do them without me. That’s a virtually impossible argument to make when everyone else in your labor pool is as emisserated and desperate as you are and you know someone will fill your spot before your chair even gets cold.

What has been termed the “passion economy” is just capitalism in a new outfit - a flexible, algorithm-friendly costume. It swapped cubicles for Discord servers and convinced us that gig work was freedom. Sociologist Alex J. Wood put it perfectly: “Flexibility for labor has meant flexibility for capital - the flexibility to pay less, offer less, and demand more.”

Today’s “hustle culture” is feudalism with push notifications. The new lords don’t own land; they own platforms. Google, Youtube, Spotify, Uber, DoorDash, eBay, Fiverr, Amazon - each a newly enclosed space that used to be part of the commons they’ve bricked around to make a private garden where gigworkers and small-time producers have to pay for the platform infrastructure through service fees and build markets from scratch for the C-suite to take advantage of with their signature sickening smiles.

Big Tech promised us autonomy, but what it really sells is isolation. We compete with each other so efficiently that no one remembers who the landlord is. And every time we post, deliver, or design, someone upstairs takes their tithe — automated, invisible, and mercilessly consistent. We’re classified as “independent contractors,” sure, but every freelancer is absolutely dependent on five-star ratings, anticipating the whims of opaquely described algorithms, and apps that drop us like an infant with a TBI when we don’t provide enough ROI for the server space we take up. Call it what it is: algorithmic serfdom.

Even art isn’t safe. The same systems that scraped our labor now scrape our creativity, turning “content” into data and data into ad revenue. Hobby, passion, vocation - all flattened into “content.” Love something enough and the machine will find a way to bill it. You can build a following, sure, but you can’t own it. The serfs don’t own the soil anymore; they rent their relevance from the feed.

Here’s a dangerous idea: maybe not everything has to make money. Maybe the most subversive act left is doing things for free because you want to.

Joy that isn’t for sale is joy they can’t tax. Paint, write, fix, organize - not for exposure, not for a portfolio, not for “brand synergy.” Just because it reminds you what it feels like to be alive and unmeasured.

The goal isn’t to escape work entirely (though I’d recommend trying that out too) but to starve the myth that passion equals profitability. Meaning doesn’t come from unceasing production; it comes from individuality within the context of a supportive community, a balance between leisure and labor, and rejecting exhaustion as a source of value.

If there’s a revolution to be had, it probably starts there. It’s about damn time.

Love doesn’t obligate service. It inspires it. Don’t let profits become your love language; easier said than done. It’s a daily struggle against the “vile maxim” of capitalism: All for me and none for thee.

Fuck “passion hustling”, put some of that hustle into compassion instead.