Abstract
Many readers of this journal may find themselves experiencing a degree of uncomfortable recognition while reading Mark Deuze's Well-Being and Creative Careers: What Makes You Happy Can Also Make You Sick. Although the book focuses on media and creative industries, its descriptions of passionate workers, blurred boundaries between work and life, identity-driven labour, escalating performance demands and chronic overcommitment will feel familiar to many academics. Indeed, many of the dynamics Deuze identifies – vocational commitment, emotional labour, self-surveillance and the expectation to derive identity and fulfilment from work – extend far beyond the creative industries to mission-driven sectors such as higher education and the voluntary sector as well as performance-oriented fields including performing arts and elite sport. This wider relevance is one of the reasons I found the work fascinating.
Organised around eight chapters, the book begins by establishing the scale and urgency of the well-being crisis within media and creative work before exploring why these issues have become increasingly prominent. Deuze then develops a conceptual framework for understanding health and well-being in creative careers, maps the evidence for the crisis across different sectors and examines the paradoxes of media work, including the tensions between passion, fulfilment and exploitation. The final chapters explore the relationship between occupational stress, identity and well-being before considering how more sustainable and joyful forms of creative work might be fostered.
In drawing together research from journalism, film, television, music, games, advertising and platform-based creator economies, Deuze synthesises a substantial body of evidence demonstrating the extent to which creative work is increasingly associated with anxiety, burnout, insecurity and emotional exhaustion. At the heart of the book lies a paradox that structures much contemporary creative labour: the same characteristics that make creative careers meaningful also make workers vulnerable to self-exploitation. Creative labour is experienced not simply as employment but as identity, aspiration and personal fulfilment. Workers are expected to embody flexibility, authenticity, entrepreneurialism and continual self-improvement. Across sectors, this produces blurred boundaries between work and life, unstable professional identities and constant pressures toward visibility and self-management.
Rejecting the frequent tendency to frame burnout as a failure of personal resilience, Deuze situates well-being within the structural organisation and culture of creative labour itself. Insecure contracts, portfolio careers, unpaid labour, algorithmic visibility and perpetual self-branding are treated as defining conditions of contemporary cultural production. Particularly effective is the discussion of platformised labour where metrics, audience engagement and personal branding intensify forms of self-monitoring and emotional labour. Here, the book contributes to broader debates around affective labour and platform capitalism by illustrating how market pressures become internalised as forms of identity management.
Deuze's contribution sits within a well-established tradition of critical scholarship on creative labour. Like Rosalind Gill, he highlights how autonomy, passion and entrepreneurialism can become mechanisms of self-exploitation. Like David Hesmondhalgh, he remains attentive to the possibility that creative work can be meaningful and rewarding when supported by appropriate institutional conditions. And like Angela McRobbie, he questions the cultural and policy narratives that celebrate creativity while obscuring precarity and insecurity. What Deuze adds to this tradition is a sustained focus on well-being, positioning mental health as a structural outcome of contemporary creative labour markets. In doing so, he shifts the conversation from questions of access, inequality and labour conditions towards the broader issue of sustainability: what kinds of creative careers are actually possible to sustain over the long term, and at what personal cost?
This focus on sustainability is particularly valuable when considered in relation to higher education. As a media educator, I found myself reflecting on the implications of Deuze's argument for how we prepare students for careers in the creative industries. Across many media and creative programmes, employability agendas encourage students to cultivate entrepreneurial identities, portfolio careers and professional visibility alongside creative and technical competencies. In my own teaching and research, I have increasingly come to recognise the value of authentic learning experiences that create opportunities for collaboration between students and industry through assessment co-design, live projects, internships and placements, because such experiences can enhance engagement, confidence and employability by enabling students to encounter professional practice within supported environments. However, Deuze's analysis suggests that we should do more than prepare students to enter creative industries – we should help them to understand and challenge the conditions that too often normalise burnout, insecurity and self-exploitation, while maintaining healthy boundaries between professional identity and personal well-being. That is something I will endeavour to address more deeply in my own practice,
The breadth of sectors and international contexts covered gives the book considerable authority as a synthesis of contemporary scholarship on creative well-being. However, this breadth occasionally comes at the expense of depth. Questions of class, geography and unequal access to creative careers are acknowledged but receive relatively limited sustained attention, particularly amid growing concern about regional inequalities and the concentration of creative opportunities within major urban centres. Readers interested in how well-being intersects with place, mobility and social class may therefore be left wanting more. Nevertheless, these limitations do little to diminish the book's overall contribution.
One of the most impressive aspects of Well-Being and Creative Careers is that it remains constructive despite the seriousness of the problems it documents. By framing well-being as a collective concern and structural issue shaped by organisational practices and wider cultural expectations, Deuze calls for healthier institutional cultures, stronger support structures and more sustainable approaches to creative labour.
For scholars of communication, media and cultural industries, the book provides an accessible and wide-ranging synthesis of current debates around creative labour and mental health. For educators, however, its implications may be even more significant. At a moment when universities are increasingly tasked with demonstrating graduate employability outcomes while also responding to growing concerns around student well-being, Deuze's work offers an important reminder that preparing students for creative careers must involve more than creative practice, critical thinking or entrepreneurial ambition. Fundamentally, it requires a shift from thinking about employability as access to employment towards understanding employability as preparation for navigating, sustaining and ultimately reshaping professional life.
Ultimately, Well-Being and Creative Careers is a call to rethink the conditions that enable meaningful, sustainable and fulfilling participation in creative work. Many readers may arrive expecting a study of media and creative careers and leave recognising a broader diagnosis of how purpose, identity and labour have become increasingly intertwined within contemporary professional life. By positioning well-being as a structural rather than individual concern, Deuze makes an important contribution to ongoing debates about labour, identity, participation and sustainability within media cultures and beyond.