Sounds great, but it’s a mantra for getting ripped off by your boss.

“Do what you love” is not a new mantra. It’s been around since the 1980s, when individualistic ambition was elevated to a national virtue. How better to escape work than by finding a way to turn it into its opposite – leisure, pleasure, creativity, joy?

Do What You Love: And Other Lies about Success & Happiness, Miya Tokumitsu’s short, sharp and timely new book, stabs plenty of pins into this heart-shaped balloon. In today’s increasingly freelance economy, DWYL has become a convenient way for corporations to pay fewer people less money for more work. If work is what you love, after all, why do anything else? We’ve come a long way, Tokumitsu argues, from the traditional Protestant work ethic, which held that laboring to make money was virtuous precisely because it wasn’t enjoyable. Drudgery was dignity, and the reward lay in heaven, or at least retirement.

Tokumitsu sees the mantra leveraged on three levels, correlating to the executive, middling and entry-level rungs of employment. At the top, passion rules. Workers at this level must continue to prove their commitment by staying later at the office than anyone, and remaining visibly connected (via social media and email) to their professional worlds even off the clock, even though studies show that people who work “heroic” hours are unproductive, miserable and liable to get sick.

For lower-level, white-collar workers, the DWYL drumbeat is muted – though Tokumitsu still discerns its effect in pressure to exhibit attitudes of insistent happiness at work. Tokumitsu also notes that the rise of DWYL correlates with the glut of micromanagement such as employee surveillance and relentless performance assessments, which seem to exist only to justify middle-management positions.

The DWYL fairy tale motivates by decoupling work and money, insisting that workers should be fulfilled by work itself, regardless of salary. It therefore excludes those who may be working the longest (and least lovable) hours of all: the minimum-wage workers who brew the morning coffee for the stressed executives and empty the wastebaskets after dark. There’s no reason a worker might not enjoy and appreciate this work, if it paid decently. But the mantra insists workers should love work for itself, rather than as a means to an end. More sinisterly, DWYL implicitly assumes that everyone has the same options to follow their heart, and denigrates the worker who chooses not to.

Work as we know it is changing, even disappearing. Over the past half-century, the capitalist dogma of relentless economic growth has had devastating effects on the planet, while technology has advanced to the point at which millions of jobs in manufacturing, transportation and telecommunications are (or may soon be) obsolete. DWYL may yet become a radical slogan, if it pushes us – all of us – to find meaning and joy in our lives beyond the capitalist imperative. But as career advice, it’s a disaster.

Joanna Scutts, Ph.D., is a writer living in New York.