Bullshit Jobs
Bullshit Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work, and What We Can Do About It by David Graeber.
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
In a You Gov survey, 37% of people thought their jobs were pointless.
We have made work a central aim of our life, creating inefficient, pointless work, even though capitalism was meant to stop this from happening.
No-one is talking about this phenomenon, despite how significant it is. There is hope to move to a society in which freedom is actually practiced.
🎨 Impressions
This is an in-depth, fascinating on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs. Graeber, the pioneer of this discussion, discusses the problem, how it came about, why we are not talking about it, how work impacts our lives, happiness in bullshit jobs, and a potential solution allowing us to practice freedom.
How I Discovered It
This was recommended to me by Oshan Jarow who writes about economics, philosophy and consciousness.
Who Should Read It?
If you are one of the 37% who feel like you are in a pointless job, this may help understand what is at play. I think this book is great as it discusses a problem that most people are not talking about, this book will help articulate thoughts on the matter.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.
Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honour and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers.
We have created societies where much of the population, trapped in useless employment, have come to resent and despise equally those who do the most useful work in society, and those who do no paid work at all.
📒 Summary + Notes
Defining Bullshit Jobs
Certainly you meet people now and then who seem to feel their jobs are pointless and unnecessary. Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed—that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse?
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or, for that matter, the whole host of ancillary industries (dog washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.” It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen.
Sure, in the old inefficient Socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as it had to. (This is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat.) But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.
For instance: in our society, there seems to be a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.
Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralyzing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyze London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the United States, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against schoolteachers and autoworkers for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “But you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that, you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”
We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities.
The main political reaction to our awareness that half the time we are engaged in utterly meaningless or even counterproductive activities—usually under the orders of a person we dislike—is to rankle with resentment over the fact there might be others out there who are not in the same trap. As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion have become the glue that holds society together. This is a disastrous state of affairs.
Final Working Definition: a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.
Bullshit jobs often pay quite well and tend to offer excellent working conditions. They’re just pointless. Shit jobs are usually not at all bullshit; they typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society; it’s just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly. Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried.
Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honour and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers—as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do. Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which they fill their lives; they feel it’s all based on a lie.
Varieties and Categories:
So far, we have established three broad categories of jobs: useful jobs (which may or may not be shit jobs), bullshit jobs, and a small but ugly penumbra of jobs such as gangsters, slumlords, top corporate lawyers, or hedge fund CEOs, made up of people who are basically just selfish bastards and don’t really pretend to be anything else. Bullshit jobs in five categories: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.
Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important. eg a reputable company has a receptionist, so we also have 1, despite the fact that there is actually no work for that person.
Goons are referring to people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies. If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. The same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers.
Duct-taper jobs are the result of a glitch in the system that no one has bothered to correct—tasks that could easily be automated, for instance, but haven’t been either because no one has gotten around to it, or because the manager wants to maintain as many subordinates as possible, or because of some structural confusion, or because of some combination of the three.
What makes such a role bullshit is when the plan obviously can’t work and any competent architect should have known it; when the system is so stupidly designed that it will fail in completely predictable ways, but rather than fix the problem, the organization prefers to hire full-time employees whose main or entire job is to deal with the damage. It’s as if a homeowner, upon discovering a leak in the roof, decided it was too much bother to hire a roofer to re-shingle it, and instead stuck a bucket underneath and hired someone whose full-time job was to periodically dump the water.
Box tickers to refer to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing. Since it diverts time and resources away from the purpose itself.
Taskmasters fall into two subcategories. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others. This job can be considered bullshit if the taskmaster herself believes that there is no need for her intervention, and that if she were not there, underlings would be perfectly capable of carrying on by themselves. Type 1 taskmasters can thus be considered the opposite of flunkies: unnecessary superiors rather than unnecessary subordinates.
Whereas the first variety of taskmaster is merely useless, the second variety does actual harm.
These are taskmasters whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for others to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs. One might also refer to them as bullshit generators. Type 2 taskmasters may also have real duties in addition to their role as taskmaster, but if all or most of what they do is create bullshit tasks for others, then their own jobs can be classified as bullshit too.
If 37 percent of jobs are bullshit, and 37 percent of the remaining 63 percent are in support of bullshit, then slightly over 50 percent of all labour falls into the bullshit sector in the broadest sense of the term.
CEO's: One might be tempted to conclude from these responses that there is at least one class of people who genuinely don’t realize their jobs are bullshit. Except, of course, what CEOs do isn’t really bullshit. For better or for worse, their actions do make a difference in the world. They’re just blind to all the bullshit they create.
Why Is This a Problem
Why does having a pointless job so regularly cause people to be miserable? On the face of it, it’s not obvious that it should. After all, we’re talking about people who are effectively being paid—often very good money—to do nothing. One might imagine that those being paid to do nothing would consider themselves fortunate, especially when they are more or less left to themselves. But while every now and then I did hear testimonies from those who said they couldn’t believe their luck in landing such a position, the remarkable thing is how very few of them there were. Many, in fact, seemed perplexed by their own reaction, unable to understand why their situation left them feeling so worthless or depressed. Indeed, the fact that there was no clear explanation for their feelings—no story they could tell themselves about the nature of their situation and what was wrong about it— often contributed to their misery. At least a galley slave knows that he’s oppressed. An office worker forced to sit for seven and a half hours a day pretending to type into a screen for $18 an hour, or a junior member of a consultancy team forced to give the exact same seminar on innovation and creativity week in and week out for $50,000 a year, is just confused.
Everyone is encouraged to assume that human beings will always tend to seek their best advantage, that is, to find themselves a situation where they can get the most benefit for the least expenditure of time and effort, and for the most part, we do assume this—especially if we are talking about such matters in the abstract.
But bullshit jobs tend to contradict these assumptions at many points. People almost never act and react to situations in quite the way our theories of human nature would predict. The only reasonable conclusion is that, at least in certain key essentials, these theories about human nature are wrong.
Nowadays it is considered important people should work. However, it is not considered important they should work at anything useful.
But of course, efficiency is not the point. In fact, if we are simply talking about teaching students about efficient work habits, the best thing would be to leave them to their studies. Schoolwork is, after all, real work in every sense except that you don’t get paid for it. One must attend classes, do the readings, write exercises or papers, and be judged on the results. But in practical terms, this appears to be exactly what makes schoolwork appear inadequate to those authorities.
I think we can conclude that from these jobs (part-time bullshit work whilst studying), students learn at least five things: how to operate under others’ direct supervision; how to pretend to work even when nothing needs to done; that one is not paid money to do things, however useful or important, that one actually enjoys; that one is paid money to do things that are in no way useful or important and that one does not enjoy; and that at least in jobs requiring interaction with the public, even when one is being paid to carry out tasks one does not enjoy, one also has to pretend to be enjoying it.
It’s not just an assault on the person’s sense of self-importance but also a direct attack on the very foundations of the sense that one even is a self. A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist.
Changing The Word 'Time'
The modern morality of “You’re on my time; I’m not paying you to lounge around” is very different. It is the indignity of a man who feels he’s being robbed. A worker’s time is not his own; it belongs to the person who bought it.
So how did we get to the situation we see today, where it’s considered perfectly natural for free citizens of democratic countries to rent themselves out in this way, or for a boss to become indignant if employees are not working every moment of “his” time?
First of all, it had to involve a change in the common conception of what time actually was. Human beings have long been acquainted with the notion of absolute, or sidereal, time by observing the heavens, where celestial events happen with exact and predictable regularity.
Ancient times had no expression equivalent to “time” in our language, and they cannot, therefore, as we can, speak of time as though it were something actual, which passes, can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth. I do not think that they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time or having to coordinate activities with an abstract passage of time, because their points of reference are mainly the activities themselves, which are generally of a leisurely character. Events follow a logical order, but they are not controlled by an abstract system, there being no autonomous points of reference to which activities have to conform with precision. Once time was money, it became possible to speak of “spending time,” rather than just “passing” it—also of wasting time, killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so forth.
As a result, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, starting in England, the old episodic style of working came increasingly to be viewed as a social problem. The middle classes came to see the poor as poor largely because they lacked time discipline; they spent their time recklessly, just as they gambled away their money.
Lack of Purpose
any, probably most, bullshit jobs involve a similar agonizing scriptlessness. Not only are the codes of behaviour ambiguous, no one is even sure what they are supposed to say or how they are supposed to feel about their situation.
Even in relatively benign office environments, the lack of a sense of purpose eats away at people. It may not cause actual physical and mental degeneration, but at the very least, it leaves workers struggling with feelings of emptiness or worthlessness. These feelings are typically in no sense mitigated, but actually compounded by the prestige, respect, and generous compensation that such positions often confer.
This is, of course, a commonplace dilemma. The job itself may be unnecessary, but it’s hard to see it as a bad thing if it allows you to feed your children. You might ask what kind of economic system creates a world where the only way to feed one’s children is to spend most of one’s waking hours engaged in useless box-ticking exercises or solving problems that shouldn’t exist. But, then, you can equally well turn this question on its head and ask whether all this can really be as useless as it seems if the economic system that created these jobs also enables you to feed your children. Do we really want to second-guess capitalism? Perhaps every aspect of the system, no matter how apparently pointless, is just the way it has to be.
The most common complaint among those trapped in offices doing nothing all day is just how difficult it is to repurpose the time for anything worthwhile.
The Rise of Bullshit Jobs
The more immediate causes for the creation of useless employment: managers whose prestige is caught up in the total number of their administrative assistants or underlings; weird corporate bureaucratic dynamics; bad management; poor information flow.
Why were such bad organizational dynamics more likely to occur in 2015 than they were in, say, 1915, or 1955? Has there been a change in organization culture, or is it something deeper: a change, perhaps, in our very conceptions of work?
Some insist, that these jobs exist because people need the money. Looking at the subjective motives of those who take such jobs is then treated as an alternative to asking why so many people find themselves in a position where the only way they can get money is by taking such jobs to begin with.
Since World War II, all economic policy has been premised on an ideal of full employment. Now, there is every reason to believe that most policy makers don’t actually want to fully achieve this ideal, as genuine full employment would put too much “upward pressure on wages.”
But it remains true that “More Jobs” is the one political slogan that both Left and Right can always agree on. They differ only about the most expedient means to produce the jobs. Banners held aloft at a union march calling for jobs never also specify that those jobs should serve some useful purpose. It’s just assumed that they will—which, of course, means that often they won’t.
People say it is just caused by increased government regulation and intervention. In reality, the number of administrators and managers at private institutions increased at more than twice the rate as it did at public ones. It seems extremely unlikely that government regulation caused private sector administrative jobs to be created at twice the rate as it did within the government bureaucracy itself.
Industrial capitalism obviously changed all that, and the rise of managerialism in the twentieth century drove the process even further; but rather than this in any sense reversing under financialized capitalism, the situation has actually worsened. “Efficiency” has come to mean vesting more and more power to managers, supervisors, and other presumed “efficiency experts,” so that actual producers have almost zero autonomy. At the same time, the ranks and orders of managers seem to reproduce themselves endlessly.
Such complaints are similar to what one regularly hears in academia: it’s not just the senselessness of the process that rankles, but as with all box-ticking rituals, the fact that one ends up spending so much more time pitching, assessing, monitoring, and arguing about what one does than one spends actually doing it. In film, television, and even radio, the situation becomes even more distressing, because owing to internal marketization.
Complicated Structures
It seems to me all this is an intrinsic feature of managerial feudalism. Where once universities, corporations, movie studios, and the like had been governed by a combination of relatively simple chains of command and informal patronage networks, we now have a world of funding proposals, strategic vision documents, and development team pitches—allowing for the endless elaborations of new and ever more pointless levels of managerial hierarchy, staffed by men and women with elaborate titles, fluent in corporate jargon, but who either have no first-hand experience of what it’s like to actually do the work they are supposed to be managing, or who have done everything in their power to forget it.
No doubt bullshit jobs have long been with us; but recent years have seen an enormous proliferation of such pointless forms of employment, accompanied by an ever-increasing bullshitization of real jobs—and despite a popular misconception that all this is somehow tied to the rise of the service sector, this proliferation appears to have everything to do with the growing importance of finance.
Why Does No-One Seem to Care
We have already considered the economic and social forces that have led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs, as well as the misery and distress those jobs cause for those who have to do them. Yet despite this evident and widespread distress, the fact that millions of people show up to work every day convinced they are doing absolutely nothing has not, until now, been considered a social problem. We have not seen politicians denouncing bullshit jobs, academic conferences dedicated to understanding the reasons for the rise of bullshit jobs, opinion pieces debating the cultural consequences of bullshit jobs, or protest movements campaigning to abolish them. To the contrary: if politicians, academics, editorialists, or social movements do weigh in on the matter, it’s usually by acting directly or indirectly to make the problem worse.
There have been an enormous number of surveys, studies, inquests, and ethnographies of work over the course of the twentieth century. Work about work has become a kind of minor industry in its own right. The conclusions reached by this body of research—and what follows appears to hold true, with only minor variations, for both blue- and white-collar workers virtually anywhere in the world—might be summarized as follows: Most people’s sense of dignity and self-worth is caught up in working for a living. Most people hate their jobs. We might refer to this as “the paradox of modern work.” The entire discipline of the sociology of work, not to mention industrial relations, has largely been concerned with trying to understand how both these things can be true at the same time.
In well over a hundred studies in the last twenty-five years, workers have regularly depicted their jobs as physically exhausting, boring, psychologically diminishing or personally humiliating and unimportant. But at the same time they want to work because they are aware at some level that work plays a crucial and perhaps unparalleled psychological role in the formation of human character. Work is not just a course of livelihood, it is also one of the most significant contributing factors to an inner life … To be denied work is to be denied far more than the things that work can buy; it is to be denied the ability to define and respect one’s self.
Carlyle said: work should be painful, the misery of the job is itself what “forms character.”
Workers, in other words, gain feelings of dignity and self-worth because they hate their jobs.
Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because they cause misery because human happiness is always caught up in a sense of having effects on the world; a feeling which most people, when they speak of their work, express through a language of social value. Yet at the same time they are aware that the greater the social value produced by a job, the less one is likely to be paid to do it.
The belief that what ultimately motivates human beings has always been, and must always be, the pursuit of wealth, power, comforts, and pleasure, has always and must always be complemented by a doctrine of work as self-sacrifice, as valuable precisely because it is the place of misery, sadism, emptiness, and despair.
Moving Towards a Society Focused on Freedom
Since at least the Great Depression, we’ve been hearing warnings that automation was or was about to be throwing millions out of work—Keynes at the time coined the term “technological unemployment,” and many assumed the mass unemployment of the 1930s was just a sign of things to come—and while this might make it seem such claims have always been somewhat alarmist, what this book suggests is that the opposite was the case. They were entirely accurate. Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up.
A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes, already noted by George Orwell in 1933, of what the labouring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes to official unemployment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent.
But if one eliminates bullshit jobs from the picture, and the real jobs that only exist to support them, one could say that the catastrophe predicted in the 1930s really did happen. Upward of 50 percent to 60 percent of the population has, in fact, been thrown out of work. What the phenomenon of bullshit jobs really brings home is the foolishness of such assumptions. No doubt a certain proportion of the population of a free society would spend their lives on projects most others would consider to be silly or pointless; but it’s hard to imagine how it would go much over 10 or 20 percent. But already right now, 37 to 40 percent of workers in rich countries already feel their jobs are pointless. Roughly half the economy consists of, or exists in support of, bullshit. And it’s not even particularly interesting bullshit!
If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labour more inefficient than the one we already have? This is a powerful argument for human freedom. Most of us like to talk about freedom in the abstract, even claim that it’s the most important thing for anyone to fight or die for, but we don’t think a lot about what being free or practicing freedom might actually mean. The main point of this book was not to propose concrete policy prescriptions, but to start us thinking and arguing about what a genuine free society might actually be like.
