“We’ve been told that you can self-fulfill only through work, but people are beginning to see there are other aspects of life as important or more important than work,” said Jae Yun Kim, an assistant professor of business ethics at the Asper School of Business at the University of Manitoba. “People are beginning to treat work as work, and that’s a good sign.”Before the 1970s, passion was not a priority for job seekers, said Professor Cech, who is the author of “The Trouble With Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality.” Rather, the focus was on decent pay, hours and security, and if there was fulfillment, it came later as you became more skilled at the job. But that started changing in the ’70s, with the increasing job instability of professionals and a growing cultural emphasis on self-expression and self-satisfaction, a change captured in the wildly popular 1970 book “What Color Is Your Parachute?”Notably, worrying about whether your job will fulfill you applies mostly to the privileged white-collar world. “The majority of people do not work to self-actualize,” said Simone Stolzoff, who wrote the book “The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life From Work.” “They work to survive.”It’s also important to consider the price you may be paying for loving your job. An article in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which Professor Kim contributed to, looked at seven studies and a meta-analysis and found that passion can be used to legitimize “unfair and demeaning management practices,” including asking employees to work extra hours without pay, work on weekends and handle unrelated tasks that are not part of the job.

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Persons: “ We’ve, ”, Jae Yun Kim, Professor Cech, “, Rather, Simone Stolzoff, ” It’s, Kim Organizations: Asper School of Business, University of Manitoba, “