This is How We Fall Out of Love with the World
The Twilight of the American Passion Job
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I keep thinking of a conversation I had last month with Caroline O’Donoghue, the brilliant author of The Rachel Incident. We were talking about the route she took to writing the book, and the prevalence of Irish authors in pop culture. She stopped the wandering conversation in the way you do when you want someone to be very clear about how things actually work.
It’s not that Irish people have more historical trauma to mine, she said, or that Americans love Irish shit. It’s that her civilization believes art matters — and funds it accordingly, as part of public infrastructure. They believe art makes life navigable. Its actual value is beyond measure, and like a lot of invaluable things, its survival hinges on public support.
Americans, by contrast, will say that art absolutely matters — but balk at the prospect of funding it in ways other than owning it. Art is truly only valuable, in other words, when it can be a profit center.
But remember: the vast majority of art is not profitable. Neither are most of the things that make life survivable. Teaching, caring for elders, and helping people escape domestic violence, just to start. National parks require far too much staffing and maintenance to ever, realistically, be a profit center. See also: daycares and preschools and wilderness. Conservation work and disaster relief. Libraries. Science, particularly in the essential early stages. Public universities. Definitely not profitable.
And yet, they all exist — because our society at one point decided that just because something couldn’t yield a profit didn’t mean we didn’t want or need that service. We agreed to pool our money, in the form of taxes, and fund those services, hiring millions of public servants to do the everyday work of creating and maintaining a thriving society. The tacit agreement: just because you didn’t personally use a service, just because it wasn’t visible to you, didn’t mean it wasn’t necessary.
But over the years, the demand for these services outgrew the American public’s willingness to fund them — and politicians came to understand that a very effective means of garnering people’s votes was promising to decrease spending on projects citizens did not personally prioritize. Or, at least, some things: funding for the military, which is absolutely not profitable, remained robust. But funding for the arts, education, and care work — easily slashed. Why fund schools if you don’t have kids in them? Why fund art you, personally, wouldn’t choose? Or a park you don’t visit? Or research to cure a disease you don’t have? Why make it possible for other people to have good care if you, personally, at that moment, don’t need it?
Instead, each person should be able to take the money they’ve saved on taxes and pay for the stuff that matters to them: their own art, their own private schools, their own concierge doctors, their own backyards. That’s liberty. I find this type of thinking counter to pretty much everything I believe, but I also grew up in a place where a lot of people held fiercely to it, so its contours are very familiar. In short: you should only pay for what matters to you, what directly affects you, and what meshes seamlessly with your personal belief system. Everything else is waste.
But here’s the problem: no one actually wanted any of that societal infrastructure to disappear. They just didn’t want to personally pay for it. So as a society, we’ve developed a patchwork of public-private solutions to make stuff sorta public: rich people get tax breaks to create foundations that fund stuff that matters to them; middle-class people put in countless hours to cover classroom costs; non-profits provide or supplement essential services but are only able to exist because people are willing to work for very little; widely accessible student loans replace public dollars to cover tuition. People pay fewer taxes, but often pay dearly in other ways.
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Today, Americans citizens shoulder more and more of the costs — and risk — of navigating everyday life. Maybe they’re paying less in taxes, but they’re ultimately paying far more to cover private medical care, private childcare, decreasingly subsidized higher education, private art, private sports leagues, and private outdoor spaces. It might be feasible to shoulder these costs if you have two adults working for pay, or if one adult makes so much money that another adult can opt out and manage all of the responsibilities of home. But throw in one disaster, one bad decision, one layoff, one divorce, or one medical catastrophe, and the fragile structure crumbles.
We felt this fragility acutely during the pandemic and in its ongoing aftermath. What happens when we no longer have childcare? When someone can no longer work because of Long Covid? When someone dies suddenly? Or when everything gets more expensive, but wages aren’t rising at the same time, or the government is deliberately trying to keep unemployment high to address that inflation? How do we name the cause of our instability, our fear, and our discontent?
For many, the answer was clear: DEI programs, #MeToo, the existence of trans people, immigrants and refugees, and the government that failed to fully fix the problem — but never the corporations or politicians that profited from it.
When a political party is elected as convincingly as the MAGA Republicans were this past term, they often declare that they have received a mandate from the American public. And that mandate, which they made abundantly clear on the campaign trail, was to eliminate what their voters blamed for the general feeling of life being harder than it once was. Again: DEI initiatives, trans people, immigrants and refugees, any reforms around #MeToo, and the government itself. It didn’t matter if companies, even those associated with the politicians themselves, enriched themselves. For these voters, the companies were never the problem.
This is how you get Elon Musk fundamentally restructuring both the government and the checks and balances of our democracy with no pushback from Congress. Because the short-term goal is cutting costs (which will then theoretically translate into lower taxes) individuals can feel like they are indeed paying less for projects and services from which they receive no explicit and immediate benefit.
But the long-term reality is bleak. The cuts aren’t just to park rangers who staff a national moment in a corner of Nebraska or the people doing fire mitigation in Western Washington. The cuts affect the systems that make so many parts of public life work. Payroll. Bathrooms. Science before it becomes the sort of science that drug companies pay for. Data sets that make medical records function and VA prescriptions renew on time. You can call it the meat of public works, or bureaucracy, or infrastructure. It was already hobbled from years of cost-cutting measures. Now it’s just straight-up busted.
The goal, of course, is to enshittify public works to the point that they become unusable — and then sell them to the highest bidder, who can transform them into a profit center. The cascade will go something like this: wow, sure seems like this national forest is being mismanaged, probably shouldn’t be under the purview of the federal government; it would be irresponsible of us, and against the public interest, to turn down all this money from a gas company / a developer / a wealthy landowner who wants to buy it! (And if you want to see this thinking vividly manifest, I invite you to read the FB comments on this piece about forest service firings in rural Idaho)
Not having the toilets cleaned is the point. Not getting the VA prescriptions automatically filled is the point. Making public services worse is the point. Making people (further) dislike and devalue public infrastructure — the point. How else do you get millions of citizens on board with a handful of robber barons profiting off what rightfully belongs to the public?
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These cuts don’t just signal the end of public works as public good. They also signal the twilight of the passion job, better known as the jobs performed by millions of Americans, often at great personal expense and sacrifice, simply because they loved the work that they did. When you read the stories of the forest service employees who lost their jobs, that’s what you hear over and over again: I moved myself and my family across the country. I agreed to be a contingent employee for years. I didn’t make much; I spent weeks and months in the backcountry; I did physically taxing work; I dealt with understaffing and cranky visitors and unspeakable poop splatters. And I did it because I love this work.
But work won’t love you back — and passion can only sustain you for so long. One of the reasons so many of those government workers stuck with their precarious and difficult jobs was the promise of stability, and access to a government pension when they were eventually hired on full-time. That’s what a full-time public service job could offer: you might never be rich, but you’d also never be poor. You’d always have health care. You’d always be able to retire. That dream is gone for the thousands whose jobs were cut last week, and it is seriously threatened for the hundreds of thousands who remain.
These cuts also affect all of those left to pick up the slack, whose job descriptions just expanded exponentially, and who are now operating with layoff brain. They’re frantically trying to patch holes. They’re dealing with even crankier tourists. If they weren’t already, they’ll soon face a turning point: when burnout turns into demoralization, and you feel you no longer have the resources to do your job in a way that feels ethical or right.
Here’s how one national parks employee laid it out to me:
I don't think people understand how underfunded public lands agencies already were. There's always been a "do more with less" culture, and people already have a habit of doing multiple jobs; doing work above their pay grade without being compensated; working extra hours for free; etc. — "paid in sunsets" is the famous phrase — because we care about the land, about visitors, and about our colleagues.
The show must go on; visitors must be rescued; your coworkers have to get paid; etc. A big concern I have is that visitors will not see the effects of this, especially as volunteers and nonprofit friends groups step in to try and pick up the slack. Things will probably continue semi-normally, even as staff behind the scenes are stretched thinner and feel the burnout, institutional knowledge is lost, and the next generation of employees has to find work elsewhere. It's a short term band-aid, continuing on the road of privatizing / volunteer-izing public lands, and losing careers in public service and good jobs in rural areas where there aren't many to be had.
Demoralization is the goal. Overburden those who remain so they, too, quit, thereby “unburdening” the system of the dead weight of the remaining bureaucrats. Trump and Musk’s goal isn’t efficiency. It’s slowly burning the entire apparatus to the ground.
I remember the first time I realized that this was the end game. Legislators in my home state of Idaho were cutting the education budget to the bone. Soon thereafter, they started devouring the marrow — while simultaneously creating funding structures for homeschoolers and private (Christian) academies. The far right’s goal is the end of public education, full stop. It’s not that they hate teachers — teachers are welcome to teach at their private religious schools! They just won’t have pensions. Or unions. Or job protections. Or anything else that made the difficult but essential work of becoming a public teacher stable.
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Consider the passion jobs that remain. Librarians are overburdened by student debt and chronically underpaid, but that’s been true for some time. They’re also struggling to serve as librarians and de facto social workers in one of the few remaining public spaces in most communities. If even more social services are eliminated, what’s the breaking point? If the job already feels unsustainable, when does it feel impossible?
If you worked in higher ed, when do the massive funds to science funding begin to erode the already crumbling financial foundation of your institution? How long will you be able to make the case for your department, or your work, as a profit center? How many more classes will you have to teach a semester, what sorts of costs will you have to shoulder, and what pay freezes will you (continue to) endure? At what point does it become untenable?
If you work for a non-profit, particularly one that relied on any sort of public funding source, or whose mission was intricately tied to USAID or other public works, how does your organization survive? Whose jobs are mission critical? How do you ask your already tapped-out donors for more money? What other services will your community ask you to take on now that public services have atrophied? How will the job and its demands of you expand — but not your pay or benefits?
Journalists, artists, musicians, and authors already know the answer to these questions: you try to hang on, cobbling together freelance gigs, for as long as you can, and then you leave the business. You realize you can’t support a family, or that you’ll never be able to retire, or that you just can’t keep hustling the way you have — your health, both mental and physical, cannot take it. Maybe you still pack a bit of the work you loved into the corners of your week, but it is not your life’s work.
It’s difficult for me to write clearly about the end of these sorts of jobs, as I’ve denigrated them so thoroughly in my writing for so long. But here’s where I say loudly and clearly: these jobs never had to be “passion” jobs. They become passion jobs through the belief that your passion, alone, should sustain you — and that doing something that inspires you and enlivens you and serves the public good somehow requires sacrificing a living wage and stability. I don’t hate this type of work; I hate how we’ve normalized a blood sacrifice to pursue this type of work.
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So why have teaching and so many other federal jobs remained tenable when journalism and the vast majority of the arts have not? Public funding and unions. Get rid of the public funding, defang the unions, and these jobs become the new journalism and career non-profit work: available only to a select few who can shoulder the costs, which means they’re usually privileged, usually partnered, and equipped with private personal safety nets.
When that sort of change occurs across an industry, you don’t just change who can do the work, but the character of the work itself. And when a civilization is limited to work that produces profit, we don’t just lose the artistry and texture of everyday life. We distance ourselves from the values of care and generosity — and the simple but profound belief that what happens to one of us affects all of us. We become further atomized, cruel, and careless with others, incapable of planning any further than our own lifetimes. We fall out of love with the world.
When I talk about feeling all of this in our bodies — this is what we are mourning. Our personal losses and fears, absolutely. But also this grievous, heartbreaking regression, and the feeling that our once-trusted if tattered systems of protection are not only failing to protect us, but facilitating the collapse.
I know we’re all tired. But I’m not ready to give up — or fall in line as a weary liberal who just wants to live their life. Because the truth is stunning, even as those in power try to make it opaque: our lives will never be the same. The stitching of our society is being ripped out. We will survive, but we will not thrive.
The future where we’re headed is not enough for me, or you, or anyone we know, or even anyone we don’t. It will serve the few and the powerful; the rest of us, and the natural world that surrounds it, will be little more than fuel, subjugated by our own fear and enduring precarity.
Living in this country, we have been trained to want — and to work tirelessly to fulfill those desires. If we want more than that future, we have to fucking fight for it. ●
▶▶WHAT DOES FIGHTING LOOK LIKE TODAY?◀◀
First: Funding the people organizing federal workers on the front lines.
Federal Unionist Network (FUN) is an association of rank and file federal workers, a third of whom are officers and stewards at local federal unions. Since the election, the FUN has been flooded with requests from federal employees for support in fighting back against the layoffs and help organizing new unions. (You can check out this CNN clip of one FUN leader explaining the stakes, this interview with another, and more about their tactics and leverage)
This work needs an immediate $25,000 for legal support, organizing in-person gatherings, and more staff capacity. Longtime Culture Study reader Siena Chiang is co-leading the fundraising effort, which has raised $16,000 so far. My goal is for us to close that $9000 gap.
You can Venmo me at annehelen, PayPal at annehelenpetersen@gmail.com, or donate directly here. I’ll match the first $500 in donations, and will post all receipts for transparency.
Second: Writing your representatives using this very straightforward link (generated by Outdoor Alliance) to speak forcefully against cuts to public land management.
I know writing and calling feels worthless, in different ways, to both Democrats and Republicans, but this is how lawmakers come to understand an issue as important to their constituents, and it only works if it’s specific and targeted and relentless.
Third: Thirty lonely but beautiful actions you can take right now which probably won't magically catalyze a mass movement against Trump but that are still wildly important
What if you do just one?
I’ll keep posting WHAT FIGHTING LOOKS LIKE TODAY in the weeks to come; you can send ideas and links my way (annehelenpetersen at gmail) with ‘Fighting Today’ in the subject line.
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