“Doing What You Love,” Obamacare Style.

Last month, Slate published an article critiquing our “Do What You Love, Love What You Do” ethic when it comes to American work. Despite striking a decidedly leftist tone (the piece was originally published in Jacobin magazine), this takedown of the “DWYL” cliche should appeal to everyone who cares about the sanctity of honest—and sometimes dull—work. This is something Marxists, Lockeans, and Calvinists can agree on.

Basically, the Steve Jobs of the world have convinced a generation of young people that “work” is only worthwhile if it fulfills your highest aspirations as a person. The DWYL mindset is great if you actually have the skills to cash-in as a fashion designer, Silicon Valley programer, or award-winning novelist. But, what if you don’t? What if your perfectly ordinary desk job pays the bills but is mind-numbingly boring? Or, worse, if you find yourself in a tedious hourly-wage job (as a member of the so-called “working class”)? If you work to put food on the table rather than to express your inner poet, is your work still worthwhile?

Higher education can help graduates avoid menial positions and to hopefully specialize in something they find stimulating. But even an employable specialty, like nursing, accounting or IT setup, is no guarantee that you’ll love spending time at the office. Unfortunately, I know of many recent college grads who were lucky enough to score a decent job after graduation but turned it down or quit because they just didn’t feel appreciated enough. Brought up in a DWYL culture, these millennials weren’t used to taking orders or having to work their way up the ladder. Now, they’re living at home and drifting. I’m not sure why that’s preferable, unless “doing what you love” means not doing much.

The DWYL mindset also seems to have infected this week’s policy debates. When the Congressional Budget Office announced that Obamacare’s perverse incentives and subsidies would cut Americans’ average work hours by up to 2%, the White House Press Office and a number of progressive journalists insisted this was a good thing. According to the spin, people who’ve been working, in part, to pay their health bills or get insurance through their employer can now reduce their hours and kick their feet up. Apparently Americans’ willingness to work long enough to earn the money and benefits they needed was a pathology that ObamaCare will help cure.

In Nancy Pelosi’s fanciful reinterpretation of the Founding Fathers, Obamacare is all about “the liberty to pursue your happiness,” especially “if you want to be a write, if you want to be a comedian, if you want to be a camera person, if you want to start a business.” Of course, given the right talents and tenacity, you could pursue those dreams in the pre-ObamaCare world; you just had to do so without insurance subsides from the federal government. Pelosi doesn’t say who is picking up the tab, but her message is that society ought to subsidize this sort of DWYL work because, otherwise, our fellow Americans would be stuck yawning and punching the clock.

Maybe Obamacare and its DWYLers really will spawn an artistic Renaissance. And maybe people stuck in less than ideal work situations really do feel a sense of relief. But all this talk about only working for love sounds an awful lot like laziness.