Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

Imagine having a job that pays you £12,000 to write a two-page report for a company meeting. Then imagine that nobody even discusses it. This is what anthropologist David Graeber would call a ‘bullshit job'.

Graeber's book on the Occupy movement and related issues was released as The Democracy Project in 2013. One of the points he raises in this book is the increase in what he calls bullshit jobs. These are forms of employment that even those holding the jobs feel should not or do not need to exist.

He sees such jobs as being:

concentrated in professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don't like and are not particularly good at.

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.

The pressure to value ourselves and others on the basis of how hard we work at something we'd rather not be doing...if you're not destroying your mind and body via paid work you're not living right.