Name: Bullshit Jobs
Rating: 4.3 (178 reviews)
Author: David Graeber

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Learn why so many of us are stuck in bullshit jobs.

Have you ever had the nagging feeling that your job – or the job of a friend or colleague – is actually pointless? Why, you may have wondered, do most of us still spend the majority of our time toiling away in offices?

Considering how much economic and technological progress we’ve made in the last century, it is odd that we waste our days writing reports that never get read and attending performance-review meetings that just lead to more performance-review meetings. This is precious time – time that could be spent on any number of other enjoyable pursuits, be it brewing beer or discussing books.

According to the author, roughly two out of every five jobs are bullshit. These blinks explore the nature of bullshit jobs, and the impact they have on our lives.

Along the way, they also explain how we got here, delving into the religious, historical and philosophical influences that have led us to the point where, even in the twenty-first century, we regard hard work as a virtue, even if it doesn’t produce anything particularly virtuous.

In the following blinks, you’ll discover

what a medieval lord’s entourage has to teach us about pointless jobs;
why our society is built around the idea of jobs being a good thing; and
that having an impact in the world is important to our well-being.

Key idea 1 of 9

Society today is full of pointless, bullshit jobs.

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes asserted that by the twenty-first century, technological advances would result in developed countries adopting a 15-hour workweek.

Keynes was dead right about technological advancements – but his predictions about work could hardly have fallen further from the mark. Why?

The truth is, bullshit jobs have been slowly growing in number.

According to a report cited by the author, the number of people working in industry, farming and as domestic servants plummeted between 1910 and 2000. Meanwhile, professional, managerial, sales and service jobs have tripled in number, and now account for 75 percent of all American jobs.

In other words, productive jobs have been destroyed in huge numbers. You may have heard commentators talking about how robots and technology will soon destroy countless jobs. Well, that’s already happened. It’s just that, instead of overall employment declining, we’ve somehow invented a load of bullshit jobs to fill the gap, from university administrators to PR researchers, human resources advisers to middle managers. These are all jobs that, by and large, didn’t exist 100 years ago.

And here’s the thing: none of these jobs are really necessary. Unlike cleaners, bus drivers and nurses, whose absence would bring cities and society to a grinding halt, lobbyists and private equity CEOs aren’t really that vital. Without them, life wouldn’t be any worse.

In other words, bullshit jobs are characterized by being pointless. So how do the people working these kinds of jobs feel about them?

A 2013 YouGov poll in Britain found that a full 37 percent of people believed that their jobs did not make a “meaningful contribution to the world.” A similar poll in Denmark put the figure at 40 percent.

Something in our political and moral culture, and the way our organizations work, is pushing more and more of us into bullshit jobs. And the first step to understanding this is to get to the core of what makes a job bullshit.

Key idea 2 of 9

A bullshit job is so pointless that the person doing it knows it, but has to pretend to be oblivious to the fact.

Have you ever found yourself sitting at a desk, quietly wondering what the hell you are actually doing there? If so, then you’ve probably worked a bullshit job.

What exactly do we mean when we say a job is bullshit? First, a word on what it is not. There is a difference between shit jobs and bullshit jobs.

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Key idea 3 of 9

Flunkies and goons are employed by others for dubious means.

There are five distinct categories of bullshit job: flunkies, goons, ducttapers, boxtickers and taskmasters.

Flunkies are employed simply to make a person or an organization look important.

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Key idea 4 of 9

Ducttapers, boxtickers and taskmasters are all types of bullshit jobs the world could do without.

If you’ve ever worked in a large company, you’ve encountered people whose job is purely and simply to deal with a fault in a system, or a glitch in the organization. If everything were working perfectly, their job simply wouldn’t exist.

Meet the ducttaper, who is usually only there to address problems that no one else wants to deal with. One of the author’s readers reported spending eight hours per day photocopying the health records of veterans because – management said – it was too expensive to buy digitizing technology. Another reported that, at his travel company, someone was employed to receive up-to-date flight schedules and hand copy them into a spreadsheet.

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Key idea 5 of 9

Bullshit jobs instill a sense of falsity and purposelessness that makes people unhappy.

We spend most of our waking lives working. So doing a bullshit job must take a toll on the soul, right?

Remember how YouGov polling found that 37 percent of people believe their job is meaningless? Well, it also found that 33 percent of people found their jobs personally unfulfilling. What this tells us is that, while a small percentage might be happy in their bullshit jobs, most people are not.

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Key idea 6 of 9

Modern working patterns and times go against nature and force many of us into miserable working lives.

Many of us have experienced the frustration of having to sit in an office until 5 p.m., even though we’ve finished our work for the day. It hasn’t always been this way. The idea that an employer “owns” you for certain hours a day is, in fact, a recent development.

Throughout much of history, humans have worked in a cycle involving occasional spurts of energy, followed by a more relaxed approach.

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Key idea 7 of 9

Historical, religious and philosophical attitudes mean that we regard work as a virtue.

So why do we persist in creating and doing bullshit jobs, even though most of us know that they are taxing and meaningless? Why haven’t we grasped the possibility of a 15-hour workweek and a more relaxing life?

One answer lies in our attitudes of work. Centuries of religious and moral thinking have led to our associating work with virtue.

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Key idea 8 of 9

Our political focus on full-time employment, and the myth of market inefficiency, leads to the proliferation of bullshit jobs.

Anyone familiar with some basic economic principles knows that bullshit jobs shouldn’t exist. Maybe those in the public sector make sense – governments tend to be a little wasteful, after all. But in the private sector? Why would a business employ people to do nearly nothing?

There is a strong cultural and political bias toward full employment. Politicians on the left demand more jobs, while those on the right call for tax cuts to put money in the hands of job creators.

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Key idea 9 of 9

Universal basic income could provide an escape from our bullshit-jobs culture.

What if we all had the financial freedom to avoid taking a bullshit job? Well, there is one policy idea that might enable it.

Universal basic income is the idea of giving all adults, from the unemployed to billionaires, a basic income to cover their basic living costs, funded through taxation.

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Bullshit Jobs summary