Parachute Perplex

Former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel has an interesting essay in The New York Times Book Review about the latest edition of the job-hunting classic What Color Is Your Parachute. A snippet:

The point of a life-changing job hunt is to find work that makes you happy. This idea makes the book not only practical, but intellectually contrarian. [Max] Weber claimed that Protestantism divested work of its earthly delight, making it purely a religious duty, while capitalism destroyed that delight forever.

"What Color Is Your Parachute?" is an extended market-grounded argument that Weber was wrong. A century after "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" was published, the best-selling book about job hunting is an explicitly Protestant guide to finding joy at work.

Whole thing here.

Comments

[Ruthless]

The world turned upside-down:

Postrel is Ms. Jesus, and Gillespie is her John the Baptist, but on bizarro H&R, their time-line is reversed.

"The point of a life-changing job hunt is to find work that makes you happy."

Happiness is like one of Jesus' parables: perks your ears up, but doesn't withstand scrutiny.

Google here Ogden Nash's The Anatomy of Happiness, a poem.

[Akira MacKenzie]

...but on bizarro H&R

Don't you mean BIZARRO bizarro H&R?

[Michael Gushulak]

Google here Ogden Nash's The Anatomy of Happiness, a poem.

Nash is all wet. As ye sow, so shall ye reap, says I.

[SixSigma]

Who needs a parachute, when my "One Minute Manager" can't seem to get "Raving Fans" when using the "Fish Philosophy" or "GungHo!"?

And another thing - I think those bastards the so-called "Raving Fans" - have move my cheese!

[Douglas Fletcher]

Maybe you need a One-Minute Parachute, you seem to be having a lot of trouble there.