This story is part of a collection of pieces on how we work today, from video conferencing to using productivity apps for off-label purposes to appeasing our robot overlords.

When J. Lo and Shakira put on their “provocative” performance during the Super Bowl halftime show in January, was it an act of female empowerment or a demeaning objectification? Just kidding. People will never agree on that. But I bet everyone can agree on this: Technology-driven change is accelerating, wiping out entire job categories one day, while inventing entire new ones the next. (Goodbye call center operator, hello social media coordinator.) So you’re right to be worried about what the future holds when it comes to your career. It’s not just How can I make my job better tomorrow? It’s Will I even have a job tomorrow? And Is any of this within my control?

That anxiety has spawned an onslaught of books seeking to prescribe the best response to it. Some appeal to readers on a day-to-day, micro level: What is my future job starting to look like, and what should my individual response to that vision be? Others are broader, more sweeping: What is the economy of the future starting to look like, and what should our collective response to that vision be? The best answers to each are rooted in creativity; the worst are hamstrung by wishful, delusional, or even cynical thinking, in particular the sort that relieves our societal institutions (and corporate overlords) of any responsibility for our collective fate—the onus is on you!—as if they weren’t simply collections of people too.

The fundamental premise of Designing Your Work Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness At Work is that you are the boss of you, that your job and career are actually things you can “design” (as opposed to merely accept), and that happiness is only one revised “Worklife” draft away. This is not the first time Bill Burnett and Dave Evans have advocated a “design-based” approach; their first book did the same thing, but with life, not work, as your object of design. And now they’re back, promising to change all of our jobs the same way they congratulate themselves for helping “hundreds of thousands of people [to] use design thinking to improve their lives.”

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By my count, there is one single piece of wisdom in this book, and it is this: You really can change your mind about some things, and the way to get unstuck from many a seemingly intractable work situation is indeed to reframe the problem. But that only works when it works—just like diets. Diet books, of course, can usually be summarized in just three words: Everything in moderation. But it’s hard to sell three words for $27.95, so they come garnished with candy fluff. That’s kind of what we have here: a diet book for your work life.

Every generation has its self-help books. Even as times change, though, the books all seem to be written by the same kind of person: The softness at the core of the “you should feel better about yourself!” argument usually coincides with equally squishy author biographies. This book is different: Burnett was a product leader at Apple and Evans cofounded Electronic Arts, a hugely successful videogame maker. Could the secrets of Apple’s success be within it? Might you be able to design your work life in the same way they designed the iPhone? Can you use checklists for personal quality control? When the authors tell you “Don’t Resign, Redesign!,” are they doing anything more substantial than playing with rhymes?

WIRED Series How We Work

Not that I can see. In fact, it’s hard to see the enduring (let alone the immediate) value to someone struggling to find meaning at work by contemplating a bunch of acronyms that the authors seem to view as worthwhile. What kinds of people are in every organization? If you measure along two axes, authority and influence, you have: noninfluential authoritarians (NIA), influential nonauthoritarians (INA), influential authoritarians (IA), and noninfluential nonauthoritarians (NINA). Is this a valuable taxonomy or simply a list of all the possibilities, like eye color? All I got out of that was that I can’t decide if I want to be an INA or an IA.