563295

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ECS0010.1177/1367549414563295European Journal of Cultural StudiesHong

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European Journal of Cultural Studies

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Finding passion in work: © The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1367549414563295
career guides ecs.sagepub.com

Renyi Hong
University of Southern California, USA

Abstract
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.

Keywords
Career guides, labor, mediapassion, neoliberal, work

In the years following the financial crisis, a cultural ‘turn to passion’ may be observed in
the sphere of work as masses of newly unemployed workers are advised by career guides
to take the opportunity to pause and consider their passions and dreams. ‘What do you
like’, ‘what makes your heart sing’ are the various therapeutic clichés offered to workers
who have to reenter a job scarce marketplace. This fixation on self-discovery is perhaps not
unusual given that career guides fall under the genre of self-help which has traditionally

Corresponding author:
Renyi Hong, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern
California, Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90001, USA.
Email: renyihon@usc.edu

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2 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

prized self-knowledge as the route to empowerment. This form of empowerment, however,

served a crucial ideological function during the crisis. As Rimke (2000) points out, by
espousing an ideology of American individualism, self-help presents social problems as
matters of individual responsibility rather than collective politics, which then helps avoid
and even naturalizes the social problems that produced the crisis in the first place.
Career guides, however, differ in a number of ways from the general overture of the
self-help genre. Often turned to in moments of unemployment, career guides are read not
just as inspirational materials, but books offering practical tips that can help readers
secure a job. The espousal of ‘passion’ as a necessary affective disposition for the job
search frames passion in two ways: it is an object readers are encouraged to find to
acquire meaning in work, and it is also something highly pragmatic to the job-hunting
process itself. As Steve Dalton (2012), writer of The 2-Hour Job Search, plainly states,
‘In my experience, those who find the job search process least stressful are the ones who
combine their aptitudes with their personal passions… When you have both passion and
knowledge, people want to hire you immediately’. Passion’s allure arises from this junc-
ture of survivalism and optimism. Promising that the job is located precisely at the site
of desire: passion soothes, empowers and even offers subjects a feeling of luminosity.
In this essay, I understand ‘passion’ as an affective structure, an optimistic orientation
toward work that both produces and makes meaningful various emotional dispositions.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the contemporary use of passion as ‘an aim or
goal pursued with zeal’, implying that passion is the active pursuit of something, real or
imagined. But the pursuit is animated here, typically not because of the object, but the
promise that the object can bring. When career guides ask readers to be passionate about
work, the underlying meaning is that finding passion in work can materialize certain
desirable outcomes, whether they be competence, success or self-fulfillment. Positioned
as a pathway leading to various wishes and fantasies, passion itself becomes an object of
desire, something that readers should find, consider and pursue.
In these terms, passion moves beyond the phenomenological, and positions itself as
an injunction, a commonsense social good we should aspire to find (Ahmed, 2010). The
latter understanding of passion, I argue, represents in the present, an emotional hegem-
ony, an affective attitude toward work that is normative. Even when career guides do not
expressly discuss passion, they forward a belief that work can produce psychological
forms of betterment. The symbolic object of passionate work need not produce feelings
of passion to have its effect. As something wanted, its mere desirability is sufficient to
intertwine with agency, and influence all kinds of routine decisions in the pursuit of a
career.
In this essay, I attempt to critically analyze what it means to find one’s passion.
Although passion often takes on a positive valence when associated to work, I argue that
it can also lead into what Berlant (2011) calls ‘cruel optimism’. An optimistic attachment
to something is cruel when the object which yields a sense of hopeful vision represents
the same thing which impairs the expansive transformation that one hopes for. The dis-
course of passion can be a kind of cruel optimism when its conveyed fantasies about
good work and good feelings become the same objects that delay and foreclose the sub-
stantive forms of transformation that the promises of passion itself requires. Such cruelty
can also be amplified when passion’s eventual failure to match to its promises becomes

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Hong 3

reason for a person to attach to this fantasy again, hoping that a different outcome will
materialize this time around. Therefore, while advice on finding passion may serve ther-
apeutic purposes, it also functions as a cultural context for privatizing social problems
and, through that, foreclose the extensive politics required to address the issues of the
economic crisis, mass unemployment and precarious, unfair labor arrangements.

Market for passion

A year after the financial crisis, the unemployment rates in the United States hit a 26-year
high of 10.2 percent (Goodman, 2009). Many nations in Europe were also shaken by the
crisis, triggering record high unemployment rates in the region (Eurostat, 2014). While
unemployment has declined in the recent years, much of the fall is offset by unemployed
populations leaving the labor force (O’Brien, 2013). As such, the financial crisis has left
a lasting impact on the labor market: not only have many people given up looking for
jobs, situations of underemployment, where people take up temporary, lowly paid jobs
for survival, have become more prevalent (Portal Seven, 2013).
The poor condition of the labor market has fuelled a demand for career advice. In
2009, the Association of American Publishers reported strong sales for career guides
despite a general fall in publishing figures. As of 2012, the self-improvement industry is
estimated to be worth $10.4 billion, and has an annual growth of 6.1% (Marketdata
Enterprises, 2012). These optimistic projections apply also to the United Kingdom,
which predicts the self-help genre to have the most potential for growth in the publishing
sector in 2014 (Groskop, 2014). Although no figures for career guides are readily avail-
able, an analysis of 1200 ‘new and popular’ listings under the category of ‘job hunting
and careers’ in online retailer Amazon.com reveals that 746 titles (62.2%) were pub-
lished after 2007. Of these, 169 titles alone were published in 2013.1 Writers of these
books range from career counselors and independent authors, to life coaches, celebrities
and motivational speakers. Supplemented with seminars, counseling sessions, boot
camps, online writing assignments, these books and materials contribute to a burgeoning
market which offers not only career advice, but one which frames it around the discourse
of passion and satisfaction in life. Analyzing a range of career guides, I explore the pur-
pose passion serves as a response toward the post-recession capitalist environment.

Affect, unemployment and neoliberal capitalism

Neoliberal capitalism, Harvey (2005) notes, arose in the 1970s with the belief that the free
market logic, characterized by the absence of government regulation, strong property
rights and free trade, holds the basis for the maximization of human well-being. Market
values are turned to here as a means of acquiring human freedom, the capacity for people
to have entrepreneurial freedoms in how they wish for their lives to proceed. In terms of
labor markets, this involves deconstructing its rigidities so that individuals can have and
exercise their ability to choose (Rose, 1999). Job security, for instance, was dismantled
under the pretext that this provides the individual with the capacity to freely choose jobs
rather than stick to only one career as a lifelong prospect. At the same time, the nature of
jobs also changed to prize autonomy and self-governance, with the emphasis that work

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4 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

can now offer psychological feelings of success (Lazzarato, 1996). Through these cultural
mechanisms, work is increasingly made to be meaningful and cater for the ‘expectation
concerning what it is to live a full life’ (Heelas, 2002: 90).
Such expectations from work are historically contingent. In the early Protestant work
ethic, Christians were asked to commit to work on the grounds of religious and moral
duty rather than love for work itself (Weber, 1905/2001). The external rewards, like
wealth and status, were more important than psychological feelings of satisfaction,
because it was the former factors that served as the marker for closeness to salvation. The
history of managerial ideologies such as welfare capitalism, Taylorism and the human
relations movement are too lengthy and rich to describe in this project (Illouz, 2008;
Mandell, 2002; Tone, 1997). However, it would be mostly accurate to claim that while
experimentations in manipulating the emotions of industrial workers began from the late
19th century, class antagonisms still made work antithetical to personal judgments of
satisfaction. The conditions that allowed for passion to take on meaning are complex, but
the rise of white collar, middle-class work and the neoliberal restructuring of the labor
market, as Liu (2004) suggests, may have a large part to play in the cause. By the 1970s,
Hall (2004), a vocational counselor, had noted a different mentality afoot, a ‘strong coun-
terculture’ of ‘post-war baby boom cohort’ who wanted ‘freedom, personal choice, and
values expression in their work’ (p. 4).
Read in the vein of a creative history of capitalism, this affective configuration of
work constitutes a new technology of extraction, a strategized attempt at squeezing more
labor power out from workers. When work is molded into a ‘lifestyle’, the temporal and
spatial boundaries of the workplace are extended, and work is made into a crucial aspect
of an individual’s identity (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Morini, 2007). The dimensions of work-
ers’ lives outside work, their personal relationship, life experiences, tastes and knowl-
edge – the entire product of human subjectivity – are incorporated into the product of
work for the purposes of corporate profit.
These changes relate also to the intensified focus on affect. Hardt and Negri (2004)
had described ‘affective labor’ as a labor form that gained prominence after the 1970s. In
creative industries, for instance, affects, like enthusiasm and positivity, had become cru-
cial not just for the expression of creativity, but also the acceptance of lengthy, high
intensity workday demands placed on workers (Harvey, 2000). Outside these industries,
many routine corporate practices, like transient teams, corporate presentations, collabo-
ration and cooperation, also require good communication and people skills, which are
dependent on affective displays (Ross, 2003).
Unemployment and the process of job hunting, in this sense, can be read as a site
where the cultural meanings of work are being adjusted, and a time/space feature that
cultivates in the would-be worker the subjectivities valued by capital. As Vercellone
(2007) notes, with the increased focus placed on the cognitive potential of the worker,
free time out of labor has taken on a more productive use. No longer a source of wasted
labor-power, free time now serves the purpose of reeducating the worker, allowing new
potentials of labor-power to emerge. To extend this proposition, a crisis of unemploy-
ment may be presented as an opportunity for the intense reschooling of massive numbers
of workers. Anxious and provided with easy access to the socialized forms of knowledge
provided by career experts, unemployment offers a powerful opening for voluntary

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Hong 5

readjustment of subjectivities. For instance, Sharone (2014) notes that career centers
often instruct job seekers to find their passion, arguing that this would influence their
interviews with hiring managers and spark an emotional connection which will land
them a job. Advice like this, provided by officially sanctioned institutions which claim to
fight unemployment, shows how unemployment can become a setting to reeducate, dis-
cipline and transform the affective relationships job seekers have with work.
This essay contains three overtures. First, I look at 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 and transformed in the private individual so that a better future can be
produced. How do career guides frame this discourse, and what are the possibilities fore-
closed, are the questions I seek to answer in this first portion.
My second section engages with Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute
to understand how passion is produced. Writings about passion have often situated them-
selves within creative professions (Arvidsson et al., 2010; Hesmondhalgh and Baker,
2011; Ross, 2003). Such a link has unwittingly narrowed passion into an affect solely
produced through creative self-expression. In fact, the autonomy which passion relies on
can be induced through a different logic and organization of freedoms – which are pos-
sibilities the instruments of career guides try to offer. Doing a comparative analysis of the
different exercises What Color Is Your Parachute had provided in its many years of
publication, I attempt to show the variegated ways passion is produced as an affective
category.
Last, I analyze four texts that provide a discourse of counter-passion. Coming against
passion during this period of massive unemployment, these career guides resonate with
the cynicism some populations may have of work. Having criticized passion, however,
these career guides offer advice that circuitously leads readers back to passion itself, rein-
forcing the common imagination that work can be a panacea to human suffering. Taking
these examples, from the affectively painful to the hopeful to the cynical, I seek to under-
stand how passion is reinstated as a common feeling amongst working populations.

Methodology
My analysis is guided by the close textual reading of 20 career guides. Career guides are
chosen as materials for analysis for three reasons. First, they are assumed to be one of the
most readily accessible, comprehensive materials that people can turn to for advice when
anxious about their careers. Second, career guides are understood to articulate an already
existing discourse circulating in the larger mediascape of radio programs, newspaper
advice columns, YouTube videos and how-to websites. Third, many authors of career
guides also directly contribute to public discourse when they brand themselves as gurus
which websites can turn to for advice.
The texts were sourced from the Amazon.com categories of ‘job-hunting & careers’
and ‘job-hunting’. I picked those which were ranked high in the ‘new and bestselling’
list, and especially favored those published after 2007. I also looked for some texts
through key words, like ‘job loss’. Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute
is the only text I did a comparative historical analysis on. Since Bolles’ text is

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6 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

republished with changes every year, I examined different editions of his book starting
from 1983 to 2013.
Each of these texts were analyzed for their discourse, with attention paid toward how
readers are guided toward finding their next job, the therapeutic advice offered, the
instruments used in uncovering skills or passions and the affective dispositions they are
told to cultivate. These points were noted and analyzed for the kinds of subjectivities
they hope to cultivate, the emotional states they produce in readers and their function in
relation to neoliberal capitalism. Lastly, I considered the ways the discourse of passion
can mutate, producing different market niches (for example, arguments against passion),
while reproducing a central ideological structure.

The labor of endurance

Bolles introduces his 2013 edition of What Color is Your Parachute with a chapter on
finding ‘hope’ where he stresses the importance of ‘attitude’. ‘I learned that I can teach
the most clever, unorthodox, and effective techniques’, he writes, ‘but a job-hunter can
undo it all if they have the wrong attitude’. As examples, he offers archetypes of right and
wrong attitudes. The person with a wrong attitude is ‘smoldering with anger’, ‘sullen,
gloomy about his future’, and feels that ‘his life as he knew it is over’. In contrast, the
person with the right attitude abounds with hope despite being ‘just as depressed about
how his life has turned out’. He ‘essentially sees his life as an adventure, and is willing
to wait patiently for the next Act to unfold’.
In these examples, Bolles shows that right and wrong attitudes are characterized by
the presence of ‘hope’, the affective disposition that allows two equally depressed work-
ers to react differently to a job loss. This depiction is interesting, for it suggests that good
attitudes rely not upon the erasure of all negativity – in fact, the person with the ‘good
attitude’ is ‘just as depressed about how his life has turned out’. What distinguishes a
person with the good attitude is the maintenance of hope that allows coping, endurance
and patience to proceed. Taking this as a starting point, I wish to analyze how passion can
exist in the ‘lowest’ category, the painful period where a disillusioned view of work is
most likely to surface. Offering a realist reaction to pain, career guides console sufferers,
but advise against these negative emotions simultaneously, unfolding a vision of ‘good
work’ where pain can dissipate.
In the discourse of endurance, the precarity of labor markets are depicted as inevita-
ble, abstracted economic occurrences that workers need to privately overcome. In 48
Days To The Work You Love, Dan Miller (2010) notes how the terminology of job loss
has become less punishing over time. ‘Nobody gets “fired” anymore’, he claims, point-
ing out that the language of being ‘fired’ has shifted to that of being ‘laid off’, ‘down-
sized’, ‘rightsized’, ‘restructured’ or ‘put in the mobility pool’. Implying that job loss has
become more institutional, and therefore, less personal, he, like Jean Baur (2011), the
writer of Eliminated! Now What? recommends readers to avoid delving into self-blame,
searching for explanations ‘why this happened to me’ (p. 6). Since layoffs are depicted
here as generalized occurrences, the precarity of neoliberal capitalism is explained away
as something that requires endurance from the individual. As Baur offers, the present
economic climate no longer offers any jobs that are ‘recession-proof’. To stay afloat in

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Hong 7

the economy, people need to be ‘resilient’ and learn ‘know how to get up off the floor
when they’re knocked down by job loss’.
Resilience is a strategy of endurance. It positions individuals to anticipate the pain
and suffering that arises from job loss, with the effect that anticipation itself becomes
mobilized as a mode of survival. Since people who suffer a job loss often encounter a
host of physical and emotional symptoms, the survival that resilience offers can take on
quite a literal meaning. But resilience may also be a means of discipline: it holds each
individual accountable for his or her own survival in the precarious job market, and in
doing so, naturalizes precarity as something that should already be emotionally antici-
pated. Those who become overly emotionally distraught over job loss are then chastised
for being unprepared, or pathologized for possessing an emotional defect. In this way,
resilience is coercively imposed, for to have any other emotional reaction to job loss is to
risk being positioned as outside the norms of an emotionally well-adjusted worker.
In many texts, this hardship of endurance is mitigated by a hopeful proposal of finding
better work. For instance, Miller tells readers to have faith in God’s promise of a calling,
and to possess the ‘boldness and confidence’ that their next job will be better. Such an
optimistic narrative may fulfill an important therapeutic purpose of making resilience
less painful and difficult. However, at the same time, this narrative can pressurize work-
ers into accepting more exploitative conditions for their next job. Like other texts, Jay C.
Levinson and David E. Perry (2011) encourage job seekers in Guerrilla Marketing For
Job Hunters 3.0 to find work that they feel strongly about. Passion, however, is used here
to reproduce a ‘can-do attitude’, a work ethic which will produce an ‘irrational emotional
connection’ with the hiring manager. A diagram shows the nature of this ‘can-do atti-
tude’. Job hunters are asked to display ‘high-energy enthusiasm for the job, regardless of
the hours worked’, to disregard financial rewards, and to show their capacity to endure
to the finish for all projects despite the demands it might have on them.
These criteria show how optimism for a more passionate job can easily translate into
a context for exploitation. It is assumed that in order to show one’s earnestness in being
passionate for the job, one has to be more open to various work stipulations, regardless
of how unfair they may be. Furthermore, this expectation is presented with no alterna-
tive. Logic goes that in the job scarce, applicant-plenty environment, attitude will become
more important as a basis for hire. Job hunters are therefore required to search out their
passion and convey them through the ‘can-do attitude’. This emotional stance is so
expected that to refuse it, or to show that you ‘just want a paycheck’, Levinson and Perry
warn, is tantamount to a ‘negative attitude’ that could exclude you from the job.
Presented as a commonsensical requirement, endurance is enacted here as a privatized
process that burdens individuals with the structural problems of inequality. While mass
unemployment is a context for shared public dissent, the discourse of endurance fore-
closes this by advising readers to move negative emotions into private settings for ther-
apy and transformation. Instead of serving as a source of diagnostics, to reveal the
problems of work, these negative public emotions are depicted as backward and stultify-
ing, something that hinders readers from getting what they want out of life (Ngai, 2005).
For instance, Martha I. Finney (2009) in Rebound repeatedly reminds readers that while
grief and anger are normal reactions to job loss, they are also emotions that need to be
dealt with privately, in the home or car, away from workplace and co-workers. To sustain

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8 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

these affective performances, techniques of endurance are weaved into the fabric of eve-
ryday life as mantras, brainwave therapies, meditation, pills and exercise. One exercise,
for example, advice readers to ‘find one short word or a quick phrase that you can focus
on, such as ‘my family comes first’ or ‘I’m okay’’ and repeat it as they are escorted out
of the workplace. Techniques for conjuring positivity are also central. Readers are asked
to visualize a moment where they felt successful and produce an ‘anchor’ for it ‘by mak-
ing a physical move… as well as screaming out a word that feels powerful’ (Hill, 2010).
These actions, like the fist pump and the shouts of ‘yes!’ which the book suggests,
become the compromised solutions to the injuries inflicted by capitalism.
The production of endurance in this situation does not relate to any form of enlight-
ened social or political understanding. It purely focuses on a change in affective experi-
ence. Baur offers an example of a client who has mastered the art of endurance. The
client who ‘cried’, felt ‘lost and hollow’ and ‘pretty worthless’ the first time she was laid
off, reacts 2 years later in her second job loss hanging out with friends, having enjoyable
conversations and eating freshly baked chocolate chip cookies (Baur, 2011: 56). While I
do not wish to trivialize the comfort offered by the familiarization of the job hunting
process, the prioritization of these affects rid the opportunity where negative public
affects may be galvanized as moments of self-reflection and political dissent. Instead,
structural problems are assigned from the institutional level to the individual, and then
displaced to simply ‘a state of mind’ (Finney, 2009: 157), just an emotional reaction
toward an abstracted, inevitable, economic outcome.
As Woodward (2009) offers, some emotions which are infrequently experienced may
feel puzzling and even unwelcome when they are first felt. The confusing nature of these
emotions may stem from the fact that they reside outside dominant emotional ideologies,
making it difficult for people to immediately understand why they feel the way they do.
Yet, this is the reason why these emotions have the most potential to illuminate larger
social problems. Time for proper self-reflection, however, is necessary for the political
potential of these emotions to surface. The advice to disregard negative emotions as
quickly as possible rids it of such a possibility. Furthermore, those who choose to try to
make sense of these emotions bump up against an emotional hegemony. Sharone (2014)
notes that it is difficult for people to articulate negative feelings about job searching
because they risk being dismissed as ‘negative’, ‘lazy’ or ‘unproductive’ for not taking
time to develop the right professional personality. In this sense, endurance serves a larger
ideological function. By encouraging people to gloss over and to see their hardships as
personal trials, endurance also diverts attention and accountability from the deep-seated
structural problems made apparent in the crisis.

From endurance to the formation of passion

In this section, I focus on Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute to understand how pas-
sion as an affective state is produced. Described as a ‘job-hunter’s bible’, the book has
been revised yearly since its initial publication in 1972, and has since sold over 10 mil-
lion copies worldwide. This text is chosen, however, not just for its distribution, but its
historical importance in making passion a cultural truism. As the Chicago Tribune noted
in 1975, at a time when most career guides had focused on the skills of workers, Bolles’

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Hong 9

method of job hunting had proselytized a more comprehensive approach, incorporating

desires and preferences as a guide for careers (Houston, 1975). In the 1983 preface, for
example, Bolles lamented about the high rates of unemployment, and then writes,

What we know for a fact is that the enthusiastic job-hunter is infinitely more likely to be the one
who finds a job than the matter-of-fact job-hunter. The more you’ve identified a job you’d
really love to do, and know what things are your greatest enthusiasms, the more you increase
your change of finding a job. (p. viii)

By the 2013 edition, passion is presented clearly as the most powerful job-hunting tech-
nique, offering an ‘86% success rate’ of finding a job.
Bolles’ confidence in this method stems from a belief in the affective possibilities that
passion can produce. Passion is depicted here as a source where positive emotions clus-
ter, of which its possession will allow for an alternate motivational structure to emerge:

After doing the homework on yourself, with a description of a job that would really excite
you, you pour much more energy into your job-search. Before your job-hunt may have felt
more like a duty than anything else. Now, with your vision, you are dying to find that. So,
you redouble your efforts, your dedication, and your determination when otherwise you
might tire and give up. Persistence becomes your middle name, for a prize worth fighting
for. (Bolles, 2013: 36)

Finding ‘that’, the object of passion, is achieved through an instrument Bolles calls
the ‘flower exercise’. Although variants of such exercises are found in many career
guides, Bolles’ instrument is the most comprehensive, and probably the most used, of all
the career guides I analyzed. Described as a means of self-discovery, it requires readers
to consider seven aspects (‘petals’) of their desires and skills. Respectively, the seven
sections are as follows: their favorite forms of expertise, workplace relations, personal
skills, workplace conditions, salary/responsibility, place(s) to live and their goal, pur-
poses and mission in life. By completing these sections, and then mapping them on a
single image, the reader receives a thorough and complex picture of what their passion
entails. The goal here, Bolles explains, ‘is to find the kind of work that matches all seven
sides of you … your dream job, where you would shine’.
Prior to 1987, however, another method, titled the ‘parachute exercise’, was used as
the key instrument of the book. While the flower exercise was present then (if in a more
rudimentary form), it was slotted into the appendix section. In the 1987 preface, Bolles
explained the move of the flower exercise into the main chapters saying that ‘the exer-
cises found within it [the flower exercise] are so essential, that in my view no conscien-
tious reader, job-hunter, or career-changer should omit doing them. But because readers
were not finishing the book, they never discovered [it]’ (p. xiii). With this shift, the
flower exercise became the key instrument of self-discovery. The parachute exercise, in
turn, was removed, leaving only a few parts scattered through the sections of later edi-
tions. The switch of exercises here provides an interesting context to observe how the
discourse of passion is produced and transformed through the instruments. Comparing
the flower and parachute exercise, I wish to demonstrate how the emergence of passion
is progressively entwined with an economic language.

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10 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

While the parachute and flower exercise differ in a number of ways, a comparison of
the recall techniques used in both provides the most telling example of their difference.
The recall techniques – titled the ‘diary’ in the parachute exercise and the ‘offline blog’
in the flower exercise – guide readers into chronicling their past to discover the skills
they possess. In the diary, readers are asked to write from a free flow of memories, focus-
ing particularly on happy thoughts – hobbies, things they did that were enjoyable, events
that filled them with pride, and the like. After writing everything down (Bolles suggests
the diary should number around 30–200 pages), readers are instructed to analyze their
diary and pick out ‘things I want to have or use for my future career’ and ‘things I want
to avoid’ from those accounts.
This process begins differently in the offline blog. There, readers need only to write
seven stories, each containing five components: the goal, the obstacle, how it was over-
come, the outcome and possible quantifiable products. After which, an extensive dia-
gram called ‘the parachute skills grid’ is used for analysis. This diagram holds a checklist
of different skills which readers are supposed to parse through and mark if the story had
described its use. 62 skills are divided between categories of ‘people’, ‘data’ and ‘things’.
In the section of data, for instance, readers provided with 24 skillsets, including ‘use my
intuition’, ‘imagine’ and ‘analyze, break down into its parts’. Each story needs to be
analyzed in the same way and readers are tasked to see ‘patterns – the transferable skills
that keep reappearing in story after story’.
The differences between these techniques, while seemingly small, are nontrivial if we
consider career guides as materials meant to develop subjectivities of ideal workers. The
offline blog, more than the diary, serves a pedagogical program where readers are edu-
cated in the language of self-economization. This effort parallels the trend in neoliberal-
ism to consider increasingly large parts of our lives in terms of market values. While both
instruments attempt to capture the positive affective memories so as to align them to the
formalisms of the market, it is the newer offline blog instrument that offers a precise set
of vocabularies that aid the reader in spinning an affectively charged economic narrative
about his or her use of skills. Questions about the obstacle faced, its breakthrough and
quantifiable outcomes help readers understand their skills in a way that fits within the
norms of the marketplace. The clear, distinctive statements of skills also help convey
competence and economic self-awareness. This connection, when understood in the
larger framework of the creation of ‘passion’, showcases how Bolles had managed to
connect emotional attachments to an economic imaginary.
Such a trend transverses the entire organization of the parachute and flower exer-
cise. The parachute exercise moves the reader through three sections: the past, present
and future, which correspond approximately to the processes of introspection, self-
reflection and futurist projection. Organized around methods, however, the parachute
fails to offer an underlying narrative to the reader. The flower exercise, on the other
hand, is organized around the petals – each describing desired elements of a career, like
the use of particular skills, workplace relations and the location where the job is situ-
ated. As the reader moves through each section, the product is transposed in terse
sentences onto a single page where an empty flower diagram is located. Filling each
petal steadily, the reader ‘blossoms’ and undergoes a teleological process of economic
‘self-discovery’. Since career guides present passion as a naturalized object residing

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Hong 11

within the individual, waiting only to be discovered, this narrative supports the under-
lying claim of self-realization.
The production of passion is also supported by a variety of other techniques in the
flower exercise. Almost all his sections rely on some form of large data gathering and
organization. In the section, where the reader is tasked to find their favorite knowledge,
for instance, Bolles immediately breaks the question down into four parts – ‘what you
know about your favorite mediums that enable you to work most confidently in that
medium’, ‘what you know from your previous jobs’, ‘what you know about, outside of
work’, ‘what fields, careers, or industries sound interesting to you’. As these prompts
illustrate, what seems at first to be a relatively straightforward question quickly expands,
prompting deeper introspection. But even then, these questions are but a guide. ‘Jot
down everything’, he instructs, every ‘bright idea’, ‘hunch’, ‘dream’ and ‘intuition’; all
aspects of a person’s experience and preference are worth capturing. Once everything is
written, then a process of organization begins. Readers are usually asked to map their
answers on a grid. In the case of knowledge, these are placed onto a table with the axes
of high–low expertise and enthusiasm. In other cases, the answers are broken into items
that are quantified in terms of priority and then placed on a chart based on scores. Finally,
answers that are the ‘best’ – those that are most attractive to the individual – are trans-
ferred to the ‘flower’ diagram in short terse points.
While Bolles’ exercise certainly does not use any form of computerized data analysis,
his technique, which prioritizes the gathering of massive information, before narrowing it
down, mimics the computerized analysis of big data to some degree. As Louis Amoore
(2011) notes, the contemporary forms of big data analysis rely upon an ‘ontology of asso-
ciation’, a means by which disaggregated data can be brought together through associa-
tional protocols for purposes of prediction. The comparison of forms reveals the associative
imaginary this exercise employs. Ideas gathered through prompts and muses now become
developed, evaluated and labeled as something central to the unique individual. These
various aspects of the individual, which had previously, perhaps, nothing at all to do with
passion, now acquire through these associations, a new meaning. Bringing a constellation
of these preferences together, Bolles suggests that the object of one’s passion is within
everybody’s reach, and that individuals need only to look within themselves to seek it out.
Crucially, whether or not readers actually believe that the flower is their ‘dream job’, this
image provides a reference to their passion, conveying the optimism that the passion may
not have yet materialized but is there. Such an organization respects the autobiographic
authenticity of the individual, and translates it into an individualized autonomy, the free-
dom to realize what is ‘inside’ and pursue it on the ‘outside’.
The overlap of the economic with the emotional and intimate references a particular
configuration of the neoliberal subjectivity. While readers are still tasked to be economi-
cally empowered and self-reliant (Ross, 2008), What Color is Your Parachute suggests
that control over one’s economic destiny ultimately resides within the intimate sphere.
Since what leads to success is the discovery of passion, and that passion is dependent on
an analysis of personal history and preferences which is available to everyone, the logical
conclusion is that nobody is excluded from the state of economic self-empowerment.
Bolles produces this fantasy by glossing over the traditional impediments to employment.
The lack of skills or education is now possible to overcome with a convincing personal

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12 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

story woven with an economic vocabulary. Therefore, the transformation of preferences

and memories into an economic narrative not only teaches readers to speak the economic
lingo required of the neoliberal subject, but it also produces the its attractions, a fantasy
that access to the abundance of economic opportunity and freedom requires only the right
feelings and mentality.

Distrust of passion
In the last section, I analyze four texts published after the financial crisis which I con-
sider to be ‘counter-passion’ texts. Timothy Ferriss’ (2009) The Four-Hour Workweek,
Michael Froenls’ (2011) The Gift of Job Loss, Jon Acuff’s (2011) Quitter and Cal
Newport’s (2012) So Good They Can’t Ignore You, are all counter-passion texts because
they express a mistrust of the narrative of passion. Locating themselves in the economic
context after the crisis, they express how passion in work has failed in reacting to the
precarity of both financial and labor conditions. Newport, the most ardent speaker against
passion, takes aim at Bolles, who he claims had spread this idea of passion, saying, ‘The
passion hypothesis is not just wrong, it’s also dangerous’. In his account, passion is
depicted as inadequate advice. It is exclusionary since many people are unable to find
work they feel passionate about, and it is also ‘dangerous’ since the injunction to seek it
may lead individuals to make bad economic decisions.
When the promise that passionate work is able to bring the good life is undeliv-
ered or distrusted, individuals may turn against passion, decrying it for its failure to
satisfy. But what exists outside it? What are the other forms of optimism individuals
can turn to? Work, according to Weeks (2011), takes on such a central role in social
life that it has become an ideology, something seen as a social necessity and a
requirement rather a social convention. The lack of alternative, substantial visions
underscore how counter-passion discourses are able to take on a circulatory reason-
ing, criticizing passion but yet lead back to it. Without a different ‘mattering map’,
to use Grossberg’s (1992) term, the absence of passion may only produce new forms
of individualistic empowerment that may produce more troubling consequences than
passion itself.
In the accounts of Ferriss and Froenls, the enemy is ‘Corporate America’ which has
soaked up the time of workers, leaving them as empty husks. Using the calamity of the
crisis as an opportunity, therefore, both authors advocate readers to rethink the lifestyles
they want. Their solution – consumption – ‘mini-retirement plans’ where individuals
take flight to foreign countries, enjoying themselves and immersing in new learning
opportunities. Directing passion for work to passion for consumption, both authors
unpack the different attitudes readers need to have. For Ferriss, this involves becoming
more efficient, and most preferably, an entrepreneur. He explains, ‘The vast majority of
people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfillment, so that is not
the goal here; to free time and automate income is’. To do both, however, an individual
needs to be trained in the basics of exploitation and entrepreneurship, to find low wage
workers to outsource mundane tasks to, to consolidate a group of friends you can take
information from and to understand workings of differential global markets. Froenls, on
the other hand, situates consumption as a route back to job-hunting, a process that

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Hong 13

produces the mental readiness for a job. As he offers, ‘I came back [from the holiday]
energized, full of optimism … I had learned new things about myself, particularly how
to handle uncertainty, how to relax in an economic crisis, and how to move forward
while others are pessimistic’.
The accusations against passion shift in Newport and Acuff, who argue that the dan-
gers of passion lie in the possibility that readers would leave their jobs and end up in dire
financial straits. Both authors, however, diverge in their beliefs of passion. Acuff antici-
pates that readers already have a passion, but the passion is their hobby, rather than their
day job. Warning readers that hobbies often don’t pay well, Acuff advocates that a more
fulfilling life may be attained through the development of a deeper affective relationship
to the day job via the hobby. He argues,

If you demonize your day job… it becomes a prison you’ll try to escape from… The truth is,
we need to learn to fall in like with a job we don’t love because it’s actually the best way to set
up your dream for success.

‘Falling in like’ summarizes the entire argument of Acuff’s, where he tries to develop
meaning in the work by asking readers to consider the different ways jobs and dreams
can benefit one another. In a similar vein, Newport criticizes what he calls ‘courage cul-
ture’ which advocates individuals to quit their jobs so as to pursue their passion.
Suggesting instead that most people who claim to have passion actually started their jobs
without passion, Newport argues that individuals need to be persistent, and build their
skills even at something which is not enjoyable. It is only through this process that indi-
viduals can earn ‘control’, the capital that underlies feelings of passion itself.
Criticizing passion, but yet leading readers back to work as a site of optimism, these
career guides showcase the deep ambivalence that lies at the heart of this discourse.
Since passion includes a complex degree of meanings, career guides can afford to dis-
trust passion but yet maintain some proximity to it. Advocating individualistic empow-
erment, counter-passion discourses attack the rhetoric of passion without changing its
status quo.
It is possible to dismiss these counter-passion discourses because they are career
guides – objects meant to spread a particular kind of knowledge. Yet, these are the same
materials people turn to when laid off, disenchanted with work or suffering, and its con-
tent has permeated into culture, sustaining a common imagined affective experience. So
when Scott Adams (2013b), the cartoonist of Dilbert recently wrote in Time that passion
is overrated, and that only people who are successful can claim to be passionate, we
immediately grasp what he is talking about – the ironies of passion. We may then read
some Dilbert and both laugh and cry at his satirical depictions of office culture. Finally
then, we might pick Adams’ (2013a) newly published self-help book, whose exact chap-
ter which disparage passion highlights the importance of energy in a career. The poverty
in counter-discourses of passion shows how passion acts as an emotional hegemony. We
may believe in passion without physically experiencing it; we may also seek for it while
being cynical about it. Passion thus accepts a variety of positions without requiring a
fundamental change in the structural inequalities that constitute our everyday lives
(Berlant, 2011).

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14 European Journal of Cultural Studies 

Conclusion
One of the goals of this essay has been to challenge the common belief that passion is an
unquestionably desirable affect. In critiquing it, however, we might also seek out what
Virno (1996) has called the ‘neutral kernel’, a space where passion might be rearticulated
for revolutionary potential. In one sense, passion is an unavoidable element in the fight
for justice. It is related to what Gramsci had called the ‘optimism of the will’, a kind of
affective empowerment that is crucial to social change. Without passion, it is difficult to
galvanize the kind of collectives and energy needed for political struggle. At the same
time, the clause that precedes it is the ‘pessimism of the intellect’. When placed together,
this phrase expresses Gramsci’s belief that clear analysis needs to be conducted before
proper social change can proceed.
Conventional articulations of passion hinder a proper understanding of the inequali-
ties that structure our lives under capitalism, with the result that passion, while affec-
tively important, comes cruel in its failure to address the substantive social changes
needed for labor conditions to improve (Berlant, 2011). In this setting, passion becomes
an apparatus of capital, something used to offer momentary solace and endurance, while
producing the subjectivities that render workers more susceptible to exploitation.
Discourses that express a distrust of passion also fail to offer a substantive, alternate
vision.
What could a politically enabled form of passion look like? In his early manuscripts,
Marx (1844) described good work as work an individual did as ‘free manifestation of life,
hence an enjoyment of life’. When work is made into something required for survival it
becomes problematic. Work now becomes an ‘alienation of life, for I work in order to
live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life’. These early suppositions which
equate good work to enjoyment are problematic in many ways, but yet they hold within
a possibility. Might passion for work be rearticulated as passion for justice? Can disap-
pointment over the unfair labor arrangements and affective requirements, evident after
the financial crisis, be used as a source of affective demand?
Career guides foreclose this affective future by making bad feelings wrong. But bad
feeling can be right in so many ways, especially as a diagnostics for the injuries of capital
(Ngai, 2005). To produce an alternate affective imaginary, the possibilities in bad feel-
ings need to be resuscitated, given an opportunity to air as a collective recognition of
pain rather than framed as a source of division needing personal transformation. This
will also mean reevaluating the things that we invest our affect into, not just the literal
enjoyment of work but the fundamental qualities of livelihood, wages, benefits, security
and autonomy. This means recognizing the material realities of our lives and the substan-
tial change that needs to happen before feelings of passion can really manifest.
In this alternate vision, passion should no longer be something just to be found within
the self. Rather, it should be recognized as always relationally intertwined with the
broader culture of work. In this way, passion for work can avoid solely being a source of
therapeutic transformation, or an individualistic form of empowerment. If work matters
for all, then one’s own preference, whatever it might be, needs also to condense and take
shape as a collective demand for social justice (Hesmondhalgh, 2010), a wanting for
substantive change to produce a society of fairer, better work.

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Hong 15

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.

Note
1. This was information collated from Amazon.com on November 2013. A total of 38,984 titles
were recorded under the ‘job hunting and careers’ category, but Amazon.com allow users to
only view 1200 titles at any one time.

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Biographical note
Renyi Hong is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism,
University of Southern California. His ideas draw from the intersections of labor, affect, and cul-
tural theory. He is currently interested in the ideological circulation of work-passion across mate-
rial culture, software, and architecture.

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