You’re tired. Perhaps you’re on your feet all day, or sit in a car for most of the night. Maybe you wake up to unread emails. You polish that resume, prep that interview, hold out hope. You clock in, you invoice, you bill the hour. You cannot shake that sinking feeling that you are not quite where you need to be. That your time, already limited, is misspent. That you could be, should be, doing more. You are not alone.

Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (337 pages; Harvard University Press) arrives amid a wide longing for a reliable diagnosis to this nationwide exhaustion caused by side-hustles and constant striving. Baker delivers a deeply researched and timely exploration on the origins of America’s obsession with entrepreneurship, and how the corporate class has leveraged this obsession to reshape our economic landscape for the worse. As a professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, Baker blends meticulous scholarship with a clear and caustic writing style, which reads as a rare combination, both intellectually rigorous and engaging.

Tracing the evolution of work culture in the United States, Make Your Own Job first examines how the “industrious work ethic” of the smokestack factory in the Gilded Age encouraged “persevering without questioning assigned tasks or expecting much reward.” In previous generations, where good work was scarce and worker power nonexistent, this survival skill was necessary.  But as deindustrialization took hold and stable work grew scarcer, that notion of work ethic gave way to an entrepreneurial one that valorized individuals who “create work for themselves, as opposed to merely executing, however dutifully, the work assigned to them by others.”

This entrepreneurial mindset evolved into self-help literature, Harvard Business School curriculums, corporate boardrooms, and Silicon Valley startups. But its reach goes beyond there. By examining the roles of 20th century popular psychologists and management experts, Baker highlights how systems like healthcare, a sector of the economy that began independent of the profit margin, have “imported techniques of profit- and productivity-maximizing.”

One of the book’s most striking insights is its dispelling of the notion that the freelancing created by the “gig economy” is something novel. In fact, “entrepreneurialism has always thrived most in the United States amid precarity and economic turbulence.” Baker draws clear trend lines from the New Thought religious movement of the early 1900s, which encouraged individuals “to use the power of their minds to overcome all forms of distress, disease, and deprivation,” and the perfume-selling Avon Ladies of the Depression (America’s first gig-worker), to the capitalist icons Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie. Baker provides us with a sweeping and kaleidoscopic picture of those that have shaped entrepreneurship into the national religion There are the usual suspects (Sam Walton of Walmart, the Koch brothers, Steve Jobs) but also strange bedfellows (Marcus Garvey, Ralph Nader, the founders of Erewhon).

In his 1974 oral history investigating the meaning of work, author Studs Terkel tells us that, “most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us,” he writes in Working, “have jobs that are too small for our spirit.” While this may indeed be true, Make Your Own Job demonstrates that the sentiment has been co-opted by the corporate class to squeeze ever more energy out of a disaffected workforce. They’ve done so by persuading workers to spend increasing energy to create their perfect career and build an escape from the daily toil. In a particularly distressing description, Baker highlights a non-profit whose impassioned workers “often lose track of the clock — letting the vacation or the weekend go by, the novel go unread, the friend go one more week without a letter or a phone call.” Work is no longer a means to an end, but rather the end itself.

By the late 20th century, Baker argues, “the relationship between class and work had become inverted.” The working class is now a “class without work,” while the rich glorify their relentless schedules. Elon Musk tells us that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” What he won’t say is that people were shot and hung for demanding an eight-hour work day.

Make Your Own Job is a bracing reminder that our current work culture is neither natural nor immutable. It challenges us to reconsider the reverence we assign to our working lives, and questions the purpose of valorizing entrepreneurship in a time of increasing instability. AI, for instance, may create “a world without work.” To stay relevant, we’re told to retrain, upskill, to make ourselves indispensable, while an unrelenting sprint toward technological dominance leaves us unemployed. Sure, we may lose our jobs, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admits,  but, he tells us, “we will find new and much better jobs when that happens!” Make Your Own Job gives us reason to doubt that.

Christian Baba is a writer from San Francisco, as well as a master’s candidate at UC Berkeley. His work has appeared in SFGATE, The San Franciscan Magazine, and A24.