So recently, I read the book Bullshit Jobs. A book that’s main premise is that a substantial amount of jobs in the USA today, at least 30% and quite probably more, are bullshit jobs that can be removed entirely with no effect upon the economy, or are useful jobs that are being increasingly subjected to “bullshitification”.

A lot of you people are probably saying “Well, no shit.” Being that my father is a public school teacher, I’m well aware of how the public school systems are full of meaningless administrative jobs that serve as glorified sinecures. But I had never imagined just how deep the rabbit hole goes. And more than just documenting the amount of bullshit jobs there are in the world, the book also discusses why such jobs might exist and what could be done to reduce the amount of bullshit jobs in the world.

Essentially, the book says that at least 37% of jobs in America today are completely meaningless, and it details the criteria that make a job bullshit or not—this was determined by asking people if they felt that their jobs were accomplishing anything or not. With thousands of people surveyed, and thousands more emailing Graeber out of the blue to tell him that their jobs were bullshit (he first posited the idea of bullshit jobs in a widely publicized article), he began to collate this data.

What he found was that bullshit jobs are almost entirely concentrated in one industry in particular: white collar office jobs, and the like, with a few service jobs as well. He found that there were almost NO instances of people in other industries saying that their jobs were bullshit—certainly no plumbers or electricians were saying that their jobs were meaningless. Graeber also discusses just how psychologically damaging this all is—being aware that you serve no purpose in life is very disturbing indeed, despite the fact that this would seem to defy all rational explanation.

He details instances of people literally being paid to do nothing, their positions existing only to fluff up the resumes of their superiors (see below), and how this drove people to madness contrary to what one would think: one would assume that people would love being paid to do nothing, but that’s repeatedly shown to be not the case. People want to feel that they have purpose.

Even worse than the jobs that are outright bullshit are the jobs that could be useful but are subjected to bullshit. Jobs like nursing and eldercare that are vital but are ordered to do meaningless paperwork to prove that they’re doing their jobs rather than, y’know, actually doing a job (see “box checking” below)

Graeber goes over the five basic categories of bullshit jobs, of which there can be overlap with each other: Flunkies, Goons, Box-Checkers, Taskmasters, and Duct-Tapers. A flunky is what is detailed above—a job that exists to make somebody else look good. A Goon aggresses against customers or other people for his bread and actively makes the world worse (think telemarketing or advertising). A Box-Checker is a bureaucrat who prints out and fills out paperwork that says you’re doing your job (note that “saying” you’re doing your job is often not actually DOING the job), a Duct-Taper is a person who does temporary fixes on a recurring problem rather than spending a little extra money to fix the problem once and for all (the analogy given is a person who puts a bucket under a leaky ceiling and periodically changes the buckets instead of fixing the leak, this is common in software programming), and a Taskmaster assigns tasks that are themselves meaningless to other people. Already, I’m sure the gentle reader can think of at least one of these people in their own life.

Furthermore, bullshitification of useful jobs will inevitably involve shunting in one of those categories.

No, documenting this is all well and good; and I found the prose to be lively and eminently readable. But why I found so interesting were his attempts to determine why. WHY are bullshit jobs a thing? In other words, why would a capitalist society (that by definition seeks to maximize profit) throw away profit by paying people to do nothing? Graeber’s answer is that we have long since stopped living in a pure capitalist society! Quite the contrary, with the sheer levels of income inequality and the total disconnect between elite and peasant, his argue is that we’ve essentially restarted feudalism, with bullshit employees being the equivalent of, say, the guy who got paid to wipe the king’s ass—employees that exist just because they’re a standard part of a pseudo-noble’s retinue: You’re not a REAL manager unless you have a set of underlings, so just hire them and think up some bullshit to justify their salary later.

Of course, like much that sucks about modern society, it comes from the United States and is spreading to other countries. Why did bullshit jobs arise in particular? Graeber judges it to be a combination of several things, one being the Puritan work ethic and their conception of time as being something ordered and valuable (and the idea that toil is a virtue in and of itself), and the other being that corporate types cynically exploited that facet of American culture to brainwash the American labor into enjoying his servitude:

To go more into detail about that second part, he discusses how for pretty much all of recorded history people operated under the “labor theory of value”, that all wealth derives from labor. This also existed in the USA from the colonial times up until the post Civil War era—Even Abraham Lincoln said things that would have the twats at Fox News in hysterics today, and I quote:

“Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Indeed, the farmers and tradesmen who became the militias of the American Revolution saw themselves as producers of the wealth that the British crown looted, fitting right in with the Lincoln quote above. It absolutely shocked me to see that for much of its history, “capitalist” was an epithet of abuse in America!

But due to concentrated public relations efforts by the 19th century robber barons who created the “Gospel of Wealth” (and the implication that one has to justify his right to exist with continuous labor…) here we are today.

To go back to the Puritans…by virtue of being colonizers and settlers to a new land, every day was undoubtedly a day full of meaningful work to do (I can scarcely imagine them coming up with the concept of bullshit jobs), it is clear that this cultural continuity has existed for 300 years, ultimately leading us to the situation detailed in the book where:

“…I remember once spending several hours in a field, by myself, picking rocks…When the boss came back to pick me up to do something else, he looked disapprovingly at my pile and declared that I hadn’t really done very much work. As if being told to do menial labor for menial labor’s sake wasn’t degrading enough, it was made more so by my being told that my hours of hard work, performed entirely by hand with no wheelbarrow or any other tool whatsoever, simply wasn’t good enough. . What’s more, no one ever came to haul off the rocks I had collected. From that day, they sat in that field exactly where I had piled them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were still there to this day.”

I’m certainly not one of those internet rightists who blames Calvinists for everything, but sometimes they deserve it.

So in the end, what can be done to end the scourge of bullshit jobs? He suggests Universal Basic Income—I disagree. But I do agree with another of his ideas: since most jobs today are, at best, “on-call” jobs where you’ll only be doing the actual labors of your job some of the time…why not just accept that and let your employees do as they will until they’re needed? That would do away with the need for pointless make-work and thus decrease huge amounts of stress. Let people loaf around until they need to work and be honest about the bullshitification of jobs.

While I don’t agree with Graeber’s solution, I do appreciate that he even pointed out the problem to begin with. I highly recommend the book, and if more people read it, maybe somebody can come up with a better solution than his!

Click here to buy Bullshit Jobs