If you're reading this article, chances are that you have a career -- or imagine that you do. You probably expect to derive satisfaction and even status from it, as well as a livelihood. It probably consumes the bulk of your waking hours.

That all may seem perfectly sensible, but Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine think you are nuts. In "Fire Your Boss," (HarperResource, 273 pages, $23.95) they lay out a radical and dismayingly persuasive vision for rethinking the whole idea of what a career is and what can be expected from it.

The book's provocative thesis is that baby boomers are in thrall to a fantasy: Unlike their parents, who toiled stoically from nine to five at a mere job and contented themselves with finding satisfaction at home, boomers have set out to find a more meaningful life by finding satisfying work and investing themselves in it.

"The search for work that offers both financial and psychological satisfaction has left most people with neither," the authors assert. "Having made such a strong commitment to their work, people today are working longer and longer hours. Meanwhile, they are spending less and less time at home, with their family, in church, in their community, or pursuing their hobbies. And despite this incredible time commitment, their income isn't secure." Messrs. Pollan and Levine have a solution: "The best route to emotional satisfaction is to stop looking for it at work."

To some, the suggestion that we should work for money, period, will not seem especially heretical. But for others -- lots of others -- it will verge on sacrilege. Yet it is hard to argue with such Machiavellian ideas. "In every profession that is followed not for the sake of money but for love," wrote the novelist Robert Musil, "there comes a moment when the advancing years seem to be leading into the void."

Mr. Pollan, a life coach of sorts, and Mr. Levine, his frequent collaborator, offer seven basic principles for coping with modern work, among which are:

• Kill your career: Instead choose the best paying job (but consider the time and expense of commuting as well). "The job of your dreams is the one that pays the most."
• Forget your company's success and even your own. And get over the naive idea that there is justice in the workplace.
• Go job fishing: Troll for offers all the time, not just when you're desperate.
• Hello, I must be going: When you get hired, start planning an exit strategy.
• Fire your boss: This one really just means take charge of your destiny, in part by pandering to your boss's every wish and constantly looking for work.

Certainly the authors' ideas will save you the crushing disappointment of investing your hopes and dreams in a workplace that isn't likely to reward them. They may also allow you to give yourself much more freely to your family and community. But Messrs. Pollan and Levine, while hitting on a clever and potentially winning strategy, tend to over-simplify the complexity of human motives and desires.

Most people, in fact, will not work for money alone unless forced by circumstances to do so. They will, instead, readily trade some income for self-expression, psychic rewards, congenial co-workers or some other form of utility. And we are all better off as a result. Based on the logic of "Fire Your Boss," schoolteachers, firefighters and novelists would have to stop what they are doing, at least until their pay rose considerably. We would certainly miss the schoolteachers and firefighters.