If you are on Linkedln you must have noticed this rather depressing posts. Professionals confessing their passion for their job, how they are fully invested in the company’s vision and are grateful that they work in the company.They talk about how much they have grown. The posts get likes. This is probably someone who gets home tired with no energy left to be fully present with those at home, who believes can be paid more and the company won’t collapse and who have no stake on how the wealth generated by the company is used.
Nobody asks: if the salary stopped tomorrow, would you still show up?
We all know the answer. And yet we participate in the delusion anyways, because somewhere along the line, professionals were handed a requirement on top of the old one. It is used to be enough to show up, do the work, and collect your pay. Now you are required to mean it. To be emotionally invested. To care about the company’s success the way you care about your own. To treat your employer’s vision as though it were your calling.
This is what I want to make a case against. Not work itself. Not the idea of doing your job well, myself I do my job well. So I wouldn’t try to discourage anyone from doing their job well. But this specific demand — that you surrender not just your time and skill, but your emotions to an organization that, if the numbers required it, would restructure you out of existence without a second thought.
How We Got Here
The worker (professional) did not arrive at this posture naturally. He was trained into it — first by an educational system that taught him to think in terms of “careers” rather than income, then by a corporate culture that (probably) borrowed its language from silicon valley and its assumptions from a world where work is supposedly a path to self-actualization.
Walk into any HR induction session in Lagos today, and you will hear the same words: passion, purpose, impact, growth. These are not neutral words. They are doing a specific kind of work. They are transforming what is essentially a transaction — your time and skill in exchange for money — into something that sounds like a vocation. And once that is achieved, the company can ask things of you that it could never justify asking of a mere employee.
It can ask you to work extra hours without extra pay, because people who are passionate about their work don’t watch the clock. It can ask you to take work home, because truly committed people don’t switch off. It can ask you to tolerate poor conditions, low raises, and broken promises, because those who believe in the mission understand that sacrifice is part of the journey.
The True Reason Why You Applied
If you ask your colleagues why they applied for their current job, let’s say during lunch, you will not hear many people say they were drawn by the company’s vision. If they are being honest, you will hear I needed something fast, I have bills to pay, I have to earn a living, and that I wanted to leave my previous place.
These are not shameful answers. They are the true ones. But today’s modern workplace has made people ashamed to say them, because to admit that you came for the money is to appear insufficiently invested — and an insufficiently invested employee is, from the company’s perspective, a flight risk.
This is the subtle coercion at the heart of emotional labour. You are not just being ask to work. You are also being ask to perform a kind of feeling about the work. And if you cannot genuinely feel it, you are expected to stimulate it — in your meetings, on your Linkedln page — until the simulation becomes habit and the habit becomes identity.
What Was Lost
It was not always this way, and it is worth remembering what existed before.
Consider my tailor in Aba Uche-pens, who built a clientele over twenty years, who knew his customers by name, who could look at a man and know what cut suited him, whose reputation was the work of his hands and judgement. Or my mechanic friend Kayo, whose customers returned not because of a company’s marketing but because of him — his diagnostic instinct, his honesty about what the car actually needed, his pride in not cutting corners. These men were not passionate about a company’s vision. They were invested in their own craft, their own name, their own standing in a community that could see what they produced.
When formal employment absorbed people like this, something specific was lost. Not just autonomy, but the direct connection between a person’s effort and something they could point to and say: I made that. That matters. People I know are better off because of it.
The early industrial workers across the world understood this loss viscerally. Kirkpatrick Sale, in Rebels Against the Future, documents how the Luddites — wrongly remembered as people who feared technology — were actually craftsmen defending a world in which work had dignity and meaning rooted in community. They did not pretend they had freely chosen the factory work. They organized, protested, and resisted. They knew the difference between work that belonged to them and work that belonged to someone else.
The modern worker find it difficult to name that difference. But he feels it. It is there in the Sunday evening dread. It is there in the way he describes the job to himself versus how he describes it on Linkedln. It is there in the small, persistent sense that he is spending his life building something that will never truly be his.
Who Benefit From Your Passion
In all the LinkedIn posts about corporate culture and professional growth, emotional labor is extremely profitable for employers, and this is the part that tends to be unspoken.
An employee who is merely doing a job watches the clock, protects his personal time, and negotiates his compensation with clear eyes. An employee who has been convinced he is pursing a calling or building something great does none of these things. He stays late because he wants to. He skips the salary negotiation or simply accepts whatever he is offered because it feels crass to reduce passion to numbers. He absorbs workload increases as opportunity rather than exploitation.
Sarsh Jaffe, in Work Won’t Love You Back is blunt about this dynamic. The ideology of passion and purpose. She argues, does not liberate workers, it disciplines them. It takes the desire for meaning, which is a genuine and legitimate human need, and redirects it into the service of private profit. The company cannot love you. It has shareholders, quarterly targets, and a board.
This is not a cynical or anti-work argument. I am simply stating reality here. The transaction is the transaction. Pretending otherwise does not change its nature; it only changes the person pretending.
The Human Cost
What does it cost a person to perform emotional labor indefinitely? This is the question we rarely ask, and we are going to discuss it.
Emotional labor costs a person their interior life. When what you do for money becomes who you are, you lose access to the parts of yourself that exist outside of productivity. The hobbies that go unpracticed because there is always a deliverable. The friendship that thin out because there’s always an online course to complete. The thinking, reading, wandering, and resting that make a person interesting and whole, slowly crowded out by the always-on demands of a job that has been permitted to occupy your entire self.
David Frayne, in The Refusal of Work, argues that this colonization of human life by the logic of employment is one of the defining injuries of our time. We have been so thoroughly disciplined into the rhythms of work that genuine leisure, not recovery, not consumption, but actual free human time, has become almost beyond reach to most people. We do not rest as it were, we recharge. And we recharge only so that we can perform again.
The Nigeria Professional is not exempt from this. If anything, in a context where job security is precarious and the cost of unemployment is severe, the pressure to perform emotional investment is intense. There is less room to refuse. Less safety in the refusal. Imagine you are the only team member who closes exactly 5pm( assuming you work 9-5) while the rest close by pass 6pm and your manager watches because himself close beyond 5pm. Chances are that your manager will see you as not having business ownership mindset, and this might affect your end of the year performance review. And so the performance continues, and over time the performer can no loner locate the line between the act and himself.
What I Am not Saying
I Chinecherem, is not saying do bad work. I am not saying be indifferent to quality or treat your colleagues poorly because you have decided the job is merely transactional.
I am saying: know what the transaction actually is. Name it clearly to yourself, even if the culture around you insists on dressing it in the language of passion, ownership, mindset, and purpose. Do your work well, for your own integrity, for the people who consume what you produce, for the craft itself, if it is something worth caring about. But do not surrender your emotional life to an institution that has not earned it and cannot reciprocate it, because it is not built to.
The early factory workers knew they were selling their labour. They fought, sometimes at great personal cost, to sell it on better terms. They knew they relationship with the factory owners were instrumental. They did not pretend the factory was their calling. That clarity was not cynicism. It was self-possession, by self-possession, I mean ownership of yourself: your time, your identity, your interior life.
There is a version of the Nigerian Professional who works with full competence and zero illusion, who does great job between the hours agreed upon, who goes home and is fully present there, who has a life that is genuinely his own, who does not need a company’s vision to tell him who he is.
That version is not lazy. That version is, in fact, free.
That version is what I am advocating for.
Who can see beyond the smoke screen?