In a much-quoted commencement address at Stanford University in 2006, the late Apple executive Steve Jobs famously advised the graduating students to find passion in their post-college lives. “You’ve got to find what you love,” he advised the graduates. “And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.” An appealing sentiment, perhaps, but a misleading one: in an era of increasing inequality, wage stagnation, the Uber-fication of work, most people cannot expect to love their jobs.
Inequality, automation, and the drudgery of work are, of course, nothing new. But Jobs’ advice typifies the language of contemporary capitalism, which celebrates the autonomy and spiritual fulfillment we have long tended to locate outside the market—in church, in romance, in childhood. Think, for example, of the creativity that is linked as often to businessmen nowadays as it is to visual artists or poets; the entrepreneurs, the vanquishing heroes of the business section; or the thought leader, originally an honorific for religious figures and now affixed to more Linkedin bios that one could likely count.
The language of contemporary business is distinctive in another sense. In its artsy abstraction and fuzzy religiosity, the vernacular of contemporary capitalism is a language of evasion. These keywords are words we use when we really mean something else: what are most leaders, after all, but someone else’s “boss”?
