In his book, Chris Higgins acknowledges the challenges of teaching associated with heavy workloads, increasing responsibilities, and often diminishing respect from the very public institutions that teachers serve. However, his purpose is not to deplore the external conditions of teaching but to raise concerns about its service culture. He argues that the first step in improving the overall well-being of teachers--and thus, promoting the good life of teaching--is to ask "How do we reconcile self-regard and concern for others?". In other words, the approach Higgins takes to improving the lives of teachers does not consider political action(s) to obtain better pay, benefits, and working conditions. Rather, his approach is to reconfigure questions about teacher identity, motivation, and development within a new ethics and "ethos" of teaching that would make a career in education more personally sustainable and, thus, more humane. In this article, the author undertakes a critical analysis of a wide range of the motivations that are shaped by the responsibilities of music educators not simply to teach but also to perform and to please. She explains how she understands what "self-cultivation" means in the context of music education, where it is pursued "in, through, and for" teaching music to students. The first section of this review helps identify what constitutes a lack of balance and becoming by examining the manner of self-sacrifice particular to music education as a sub-profession that is "coded female." The second section provides a critical interpretation of Kafka's "Hunger Artist" as an allegory for music teachers' passion to make music. As a cautionary tale about moral and artistic codes that advance asceticism and burn-out to the point of deadly self-sacrifice for one's art, the plight of the hunger artist alludes to similar consequences as well as motivations for teaching music. The third section introduces the phenomenon of the Hungry Ghost as an allegory to help understand the psychosocial relationship between a particular set of motivations stemming from an uncritical and insatiable passion for (teaching) music and a more common set of motivations stemming from the dynamics of consumerism. The last section underscores the merit of Higgins's recommendation to promote self-cultivation as a necessary element in professional development if music educators are to reconcile not only self-regard and a concern for others but also a passion for teaching music and an educative "vision of human flourishing, individually or collectively." (Contains 11 notes.)