The Rise of the Bullshit Job
By: Carlyn Beccia
Tags: Productivity, Self Improvement, Meaning, Purpose, Life Lessons

The Rise of the Bullshit Job

Sisyphus (1548–49) by Titian | Public Domain

In my junior year in high school, my father did something cruel — he forced me to work in a factory.

“I don’t want to work in some boring assembly line,” I whined.

His response told me that it was not up for discussion.

“You are working in a factory. And when you are done, you will appreciate the value of an education.”

There are moments in everyone’s childhood when you think your parents are needlessly draconian when they are actually giving you a valuable life lesson. This was definitely one of those times. But I didn’t realize it then.

My job in this dimly lit dystopian was to assemble medical kits. I would get a list of parts and collect them in one bag. It was mind-numbing, and the bags smelled like carcinogens. But it was not the dreariness of the task that made me want to Sylvia Plath my head in an oven.

When I was done assembling the kits, there would be nothing left for me to do. But my manager didn’t want his manager to know that I was idle because then I would get shuffled to another department, and he would lose his lackey. So after I had sealed the final bag, he would tell me to undo the kits and then… assemble them again.

There is nothing more demoralizing than completing a task and then undoing it. It might not have been a Sisyphean boulder, but it still felt just as heavy. I was chained to unnecessary busywork.

On really slow days, my boss would hide me in the office supply closet until he needed me. I would read Anne Rice novels for hours and use various office supplies to sketch superheroes. But there was nothing heroic about my job.

On the surface, getting paid to sit in an airconditioned closet and do nothing might seem like a sweet gig. But I grew increasingly depressed and resentful. It was the only time in my life when I felt the maddening suffocation of ennui.

And the irony of this lesson wasn’t lost on me either. I was assembling medical kits that would save lives. But my job had no purpose.

Fortunately, my dad’s existentialist lesson on privilege worked. I got a four-year scholarship the following year and was determined to work in a job that changed the world in some small way.

Of course, I now understand what I didn’t fully understand then — my factory job was a “bullshit job.”

Anthropologist and professor David Graeber coined the term bullshit job. In his book, “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory,” Graeber defines bullshit jobs as any job that, if eliminated today, “would make no discernable difference in the world.” In other words, your job is bullshit if no one would notice if your job disappeared. Or you disappeared.

Bullshit jobs should not be confused with shit jobs — jobs that are horrible but necessary. With a bullshit job, the worker must pretend that the job is valuable. (Thus, the element of closet-hiding bullshit.)

Unfortunately, bullshit jobs are everywhere. According to a recent Pew Research Center study, 30% of Americans view their job as “just a job to get them by” and not a “career.” Most interestingly, when asked if their job gives them a sense of identity, only half (51%) of Americans said yes.

But is that the right question to ask? What if they had asked Americans if their job gave them a sense of meaning instead of a sense of identity? Meaning is the belief that your work contributes to the greater good of humanity. A sense of identity is ego-driven. Someone feels defined by their job. It’s a label.

For example, if someone is a lawyer, they might be proud of that title, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they value upholding justice. I am sure you know plenty of people who do their jobs for monetary and status rewards and not for altruistic reasons.

Meaning is active. And several studies have found a correlation between job satisfaction and finding meaning in your work. If bullshit jobs do not matter, meaningful jobs are valued by society and rewarded accordingly.

But it’s the reward part that is tricky. Paradoxically, it is the essential jobs — firefighters, police officers, teachers, nurses — who get paid the least. And it probably won’t surprise anyone that job satisfaction is also correlated with income. 59% of those with an annual family income of $75,000 or more reported that they were “very satisfied with their current job,” compared with only 39% of those making less than $30,000.

Graeber makes some valid points for why people are miserable when he breaks down which sectors are experiencing the most growing pains. Currently, about 20% of the workforce are service jobs. And that number has stayed roughly the same in the last fifty years.

But administrative, clerical, and supervisory positions have ballooned. Many of those positions are bullshit jobs in which workers spend most of their day looking productive or doing tasks that offer little value. And there are only so many meetings you can have to hide those inefficiencies.

Graeber argues that a free-market society is supposed to fix these problems. If profits are the bottom line, companies should be motivated to reduce employee overhead. But that isn’t happening.

If Graeber’s theories sound similar to Marx’s alienation ideologies, it would be wise to remember who feeds this beast. When corporations create jobs that are redundant and pointless, it lines the pockets of the rich. It’s a classic scene from The Office that isn’t as funny if you are living it.

But there are times when Graeber does sound a little sour-grapey against capitalism. He especially condemns financial advisors and corporate lawyers for having bullshit jobs. His evidence? Every corporate lawyer he has ever met thinks their job is pointless. My ex-husband is a corporate lawyer, and he doesn’t think his job is bullshit. You can’t use anecdotal evidence and apply it to swaths of society.

Still, others argue that bullshit jobs are not pointless. Instead, they are just a byproduct of Adam Smith’s specialization. Someone who is a data entry specialist is doing the same repetitive task because that is the nature of automation.

I am not so convinced. Many once believed self-driving trucks and robot butlers would alleviate some of the mindless drudgeries of service jobs, but so far, the opposite has occurred. Artificial Intelligence is primarily being used to monitor workers. The result is that they lose even more autonomy. Even worse, part of the responsibility of working a bullshit job is hiding the fact that there is a level of bullshit to your job. But AI exposes that deceit. And that is stressful.

Before AI, managers might have been aware that their staff was not 100% productive, but they didn’t know who was making cat memes all day. And now they do.

A perfect example of how AI is gnawing away at workers’ souls is Amazon. Peek inside an Amazon warehouse, and you will find layers of algorithms designed to make workers more efficient. Robots have sped up menial tasks, requiring human workers to keep up with them. And the ones that don’t… they lose their job.

They lose the job that they need to feed their family.