Bookshelf

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Estimates based on surveys suggest that more than a third of all employed people are convinced that their own job is so pointless it wouldn’t matter at all to anyone if their position would cease to exist tomorrow.
2. Not only is this making people miserable, it also makes little economic sense, but still the invisible hand of the market astonishingly won’t solve the situation for a variety of reasons.
3. Bureaucratic processes and politicians of all spectrums require people to have to do pointless jobs, because otherwise they might question or attack the status quo.

🎨 Impressions

I bought the book because the title triggered a diffuse feeling in me that what the book is about would bring light to the suspicion I’ve carried around for years. I wasn’t disappointed in that regard – my expectations were met.

The author David Graeber is an anthropologist who in 2013 published a short essay about the phenomenon that according to a multitude of surveys, a huge chunk of employees in the western world identify their own jobs as absolutely pointless, or in service of a pointless job. Without naming names, I have had that feeling about so many of my friends’ jobs for decades, and, about some of my own former jobs, too.

Unsurprisingly to me, that essay hit a nerve and went viral. So Graeber set out to deepen his understanding of the phenomenon and wrote a whole book about it.

A very long book at around 110,000 words (thanks for calculating, ChatGPT). The amount of pages isn’t required to transport what he has learned and what thoughts he has formed along the way. There are so many uninteresting tangents he goes off onto. That’s especially annoying when they are put into footnotes. It was at times really tough to make it through this book. Lots of unnecessary sentences. What angered me most was that he qualifies his statements by adding limiting conditions in a multitude of subordinate clauses all the time. There’s no need to play it this safe! Be a bit bolder, Graeber! This book should have been mainly about getting the point across, not to make everything as bulletproof as possible. It could have been half as long.

I also felt my own engagement with the topic waning over the course of the book. The first third was entertaining and much like a typical book of this sort. Then, he drifted off into other topics and vague attempts at explanation more and more often. This seemed to me that he was trying to either artificially inflate the book or try to get in as much of his wisdom as possible, regardless of how related to the main points that wisdom was.

But, it starts off strong. He used the popularity of his essay to ask a multitude of people from around the world about their individual experiences having a pointless job and put their statements directly into the book. These vary a lot and oscillate between being funny, angry, and really sad. Many of the jobs are those kinds of jobs we already suspected to be useless to society. These are mostly office jobs. And you can broadly say it’s those jobs that weren’t affected by the lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. The “essential workers” clearly didn’t have bullshit jobs, but everyone else did – to a degree.

He has some funny anecdotes, such as how there are a few examples when companies or even governments were without the people at the very top for a while and nothing bad happened. This includes the government crisis in Belgium, where a whole country went without a government for over 500 days, but their economy still grew and everything else kept on working fine. Another example is the time when the complete C-level at the private taxi company “Uber” stepped down and wasn’t replaced for months. None of the employees really noticed in their day-to-day. This only seems a good argument at first sight, but I think it’s actually misleading. From all the business books and books on leadership I’ve read, and also my own experiences running companies I’ve learned that the point of good leadership is to make yourself obsolete at running the thing – the processes shouldn’t rely on you, they should work automatically, so you can use your time to work on the longterm focus and trajectory the whole entity should follow. These optimizations can only manifest after many months and often years. Without leadership, any of these examples and many other big companies would do fine for a couple of years until they would slowly deteriorate and fall apart without adapting to a changing landscape around them due to that lack of leadership.

That’s just a point about the necessity of leadership, though. The largest amount of unnecessary jobs is somewhere between that and all the way down, where the people doing the real work are doing their thing. The middle management, if you need a term. So far, so clear. But how did this happen and why do we choose to keep this facade up? That’s the main question and Graeber goes through real lengths to try and answer it, but not to my satisfaction, I must say. Maybe I am too stupid to get it, I don’t know. He is going around in circles, talking about how the industrial revolution and capitalism started out. How factory work got automated over the decades and more people started to find white-collar jobs. Then he goes back to ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, who talked about what work actually is and what its purpose and effect on the humans should be, then he explains the difference in meaning we have given to the word “value”, as in creating something of value to be sold, and its own plural form, “values”, as in what values you as a human being hold dearly. Interesting, yes.

There’s a tangent about the long tradition of Northern European work ethic to be learned from serving as a milkmaid or stable boy for many years before you could qualify as an adult capable of raising your own family. Also interesting. How most cowboys on the frontier in the Wild West timespan of the US were actually Marxists. The shift in our consciousness at some point that productivity is increased by management and not by the workers themselves, that happened around 150 years ago. He assumes that communism and marxism only failed because the processing power to allocate all the jobs and resources effectively just wasn’t ready at the time it had been tried, but with our current advancements in computation, it would be a whole different story – it’s just that unfortunately no one wants to do that experiment ever again. Interesting, again. And maybe books like these help to open minds and move the Overton window a little bit so it becomes accepted to again discuss these ideas.

Everything seems to be sort of relevant but doesn’t help me personally to make sense of the actual causes which led us here. Maybe Graeber just does a great job of accurately showing how complex humankind actually is and that it’s nearly impossible to understand everything we do and why we do it. Or maybe he isn’t explaining it well enough. Or, totally possible, I’m still too dumb.

The sentences grow longer the further you are into the book. Some span half of a page and make it hard to get the point of that sentence. I had to read many of them twice. If Graeber had worked together with Harari, who is known to write wonderfully sharp and concise sentences explaining complex situations, we would have a winner.

More and more I was wondering when the solution part begins, which is even part of the subtitle of the book. “The rise of pointless work and what we can do about it.” – yeah, what? And then I was disappointed to see that his solution proposition is just a few pages right at the end and without going into detail much. He starts it off by again qualifying what he’s about to say and stating that he doesn’t want the book to become known as having one single solution, but instead of showcasing the problem first and foremost. Fair, but that’s not what the title advertised.

And here’s the proposal. It’s so clear, I’ve had that thought right when I read what’s on the cover for the first time. Can you guess it? It’s, of course, introducing a Universal Basic Income. I think that about two thirds of the book should have been about UBI. He makes a handful of good arguments in favor of UBI, but dismisses the main ones as being too obvious or not fitting within his narrative here. So I probably should find out what the best books on Basic Income are, so I can learn about what this book promised but didn’t deliver.

During this last chapter, Graeber also lets his guard down. This came as a surprise to me and left a bad aftertaste. Here’s the dirt. His tenure as an associate professor at Yale was terminated, he says due to his support of the unionizing efforts of the graduate students, but the official reason was never publicly declared. He then stated to be a convinced anarchist. His goal being that governments get fully dismantled. I know very little about the ideas of anarchism but it sounds just so juvenile to me, I don’t know. Maybe I should finally read that book by Mikhail Bakunin. And then, on the last few pages, he starts praising BDSM sexual practices and how those helped philosopher Michel Faucoult to find a better voice for explaining his ideas about power, power dynamics, and freedom within a society. I didn’t need to learn about that. The point about work being a method of social control had been made and is valid, though.

In total, I think the book serves a good purpose. We need to talk more about that. It’s a huge undertaking to tackle this apparent problem of so many jobs being absolutely pointless. But wherever there’s a slight chance at change, I think we should keep our eyes open and do what’s possible. For example, in my city there’s currently a new initiative for testing out a more longterm program of distributing Universal Basic Income. I’m supporting those tests, because how else are we going to learn if something else might be better than the current status quo?

🍀 How the Book Changed Me

• Level one, the societal aspect. It seems to me that the situation might probably be one of the reasons of the growing mental crises, especially so in the younger generation who seem to realize on a larger scale how pointless so many jobs are. The prospect of having to spend the next half century of their lives working at something that makes absolutely no positive impact on anyone but is rather just some sort of busywork to keep you occupied, but you can’t really do anything about it because living just costs money, is anxiety-inducing for many. This worries me. Especially so since it seems to entrenched in our society. There isn’t a practical way out of this mess that’s feasible in the short term.
• Level two, the personal aspect. The book has made a big impact on me despite all its flaws. The basic message comes across and sinks in deeply. Had I read it a few years back, the course I would have taken my companies on would probably have been strongly influenced. But right now, a year after having sold them all, I am trying to figure out what sort of job to do next when taking care of my four kids won’t require as much attention as it does now. I certainly will put major emphasis on finding a job which is not completely pointless, even though it might be comfortable or paying well. From all the examples in this book, and from personal experience too I have learned that almost no amount of money or comfort is worth to spend the majority of every single day in that type of prison of doing a job that serves no purpose. It eats you up inside and is a sure way to slide into a depression. Working a job that improves the lives of other humans should be the main goal for everyone. The unfortunate side is that not many are in the position to choose.

📔 Highlights

Preface: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

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 ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.

If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.

There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself.

Chapter 1: What Is a Bullshit Job?

Provisional Definition: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.

Provisional Definition 2: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

Kings, earls, emperors, pashas, emirs, squires, zamindars, landlords, and the like might, arguably, be useless people; many of us would insist (and I would be inclined to agree) that they play pernicious roles in human 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.

Now, one could certainly make the argument that there’s a deep structural affinity between wasteful extravagance and bullshit, and theorists of economic psychology from Thorstein Veblen, to Sigmund Freud, to Georges Bataille have pointed out that at the very pinnacle of the wealth pyramid—think here of Donald Trump’s gilded elevators—there is a very thin line between extreme luxury and total crap.

Chapter 2: What Sorts of Bullshit Jobs Are There?

Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important. Another term for this category might be “feudal retainers.”

If we’re at the point where in order to sell products, you have to first of all trick people into thinking they need them, then I think you’d be hard-pressed to argue that these jobs aren’t bullshit.

If a government’s employees are caught doing something very bad—taking bribes, for instance, or regularly shooting citizens at traffic stops—the first reaction is invariably to create a “fact-finding commission” to get to the bottom of things. This serves two functions. First of all, it’s a way of insisting that, aside from a small group of miscreants, no one had any idea that any of this was happening (this, of course, is rarely true); second of all, it’s a way of implying that once all the facts are in, someone will definitely do something about it. (This is usually not true, either.) A fact-finding commission is a way of telling the public that the government is doing something it is not.

In fact, for many years, I have been receiving periodic unsolicited communications from indignant entrepreneurs and executives telling me my entire premise is wrong. No one, they insist, would ever spend company money on an employee who wasn’t needed.

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.

Chapter 3: Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy?

While the rise of bullshit jobs is a comparatively recent phenomenon, I think it creates a similar moral embarrassment. On the one hand, everyone is encouraged to assume that human beings will always tend to seek their best advantage,

On the other hand, our own experience, and those of the people we are closest to, tends 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.

When we think of scams, after all, we think of grifters, confidence artists; they are easy to see as romantic figures, rebels living by their wits, as well as admirable because they have achieved a certain form of mastery.

Nowadays it is considered important they should work. However, it is not considered important they should work at anything useful.

The underlying assumption is that if humans are offered the option to be parasites, of course they’ll take it. In fact, almost every bit of available evidence indicates that this is not the case.

In fact, experiments have also shown that if one first allows a child to discover and experience the delight in being able to cause a certain effect, and then suddenly denies it to them, the results are dramatic: first rage, refusal to engage, and then a kind of catatonic folding in on oneself and withdrawing from the world entirely.

Freedom is our ability to make things up just for the sake of being able to do so.

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.

Of course, we learned our lesson: if you’re on the clock, do not be too efficient. You will not be rewarded, not even by a gruff nod of acknowledgment (which is all we were really expecting). Instead, you’ll be punished with meaningless busywork. And being forced to pretend to work, we discovered, was the most absolute indignity—because it was impossible to pretend it was anything but what it was: pure degradation, a sheer exercise of the boss’s power for its own sake.

Chapter 4: What Is It Like to Have a Bullshit Job?

Lilian testifies eloquently to the misery that can ensue when the only challenge you can overcome in your own work is the challenge of coming to terms with the fact that you are not, in fact, presented with any challenges; when the only way you can exercise your powers is in coming up with creative ways to cover up the fact that you cannot exercise your powers; of managing the fact that you have, completely against your choosing, been turned into a parasite and fraud.

Whatever the ambiguities, almost all sources concur that the worst thing about a bullshit job is simply the knowledge that it’s bullshit.

The entire enterprise of making and selling banner ads, he was convinced, is basically a scam. The agencies that sell the ads are in possession of studies that made clear that Web surfers largely didn’t even notice and almost never clicked on them.

That job taught me that pointlessness compounds stress. When I started working on those banners, I had patience for the process. Once I realized that the task was more or less meaningless, all that patience evaporated. It takes effort to overcome cognitive dissonance—to actually care about the process while pretending to care about the result.

I am suggesting, then, that the very meaninglessness of bullshit employment tends to exacerbate the sadomasochistic dynamic already potentially present in any top-down hierarchical relationship.

In most wealthy countries, the current crop of people in their twenties represents the first generation in more than a century that can, on the whole, expect opportunities and living standards substantially worse than those enjoyed by their parents. Yet at the same time, they are lectured relentlessly from both left and right on their sense of entitlement for feeling they might deserve anything else. This makes it especially difficult for younger people to complain about meaningless employment.

Much of what happens in such offices is simply pointless, but there is an added dimension of guilt and terror when it comes to knowing you are involved in actively hurting others. Guilt, for obvious reasons.

Chapter 5: Why Are Bullshit Jobs Proliferating?

When economists speak of a fourth, or quaternary, sector (coming after farming, manufacturing, and service provision), they usually define it as the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, real estate).

All I am really arguing in this book is that just as much of what the financial sector does is basically smoke and mirrors, so are most of the information-sector jobs that accompanied its rise as well.

A child born to parents of modest means in Sweden is much more likely to become wealthy than a similar child is in the United States. Must one conclude that Swedes overall have more grit and entrepreneurial spirit than Americans?

Marx appears to have been right when he argued that a “reserve army of the unemployed” has to exist in order for capitalism to work the way it’s supposed to. 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.

when right-wing politicians call for tax cuts to put more money in the hands of “job creators,” they never specify whether those jobs will be good for anything; it’s simply assumed that if the market produced them, they will be.

Since all actually existing market systems are to some degree state regulated, it’s easy enough to insist that any results one likes (say, high levels of overall wealth) are the result of the workings of the market, and that any features one doesn’t like (say, high levels of overall poverty) are really due to government interference in the workings of the market—and then insist that the burden of proof is on anyone who would argue otherwise.

Simon: In my conservative estimation, eighty percent of the bank’s sixty thousand staff were not needed. Their jobs could either completely be performed by a program or were not needed at all because the programs were designed to enable or replicate some bullshit process to begin with.

Simon: In one instance, I created a program that solved a critical security problem. I went to present it to an executive, who included all his consultants in the meeting. There were twenty-five of them in the boardroom. The hostility I faced during and after the meeting was severe, as I slowly realized that my program automated everything they were currently being paid to do by hand. It’s not as if they enjoyed it; it was tedious work, monotonous and boring. The cost of my program was five percent of what they were paying those twenty-five people. But they were adamant. I found many similar problems and came up with solutions. But in all my time, not one of my recommendations was ever actioned. Because in every case, fixing these problems would have resulted in people losing their jobs, as those jobs served no purpose other than giving the executive they reported to a sense of power.

The “one million, two million, three million jobs” that Obama was so concerned to preserve were created, specifically, by the very sorts of processes we have just been describing: the seemingly endless accrual of layer upon layer of unnecessary administrative and managerial positions resulting from the aggressive application of market principles, in this case, to the health care industry.

It was only in the 1970s that the financial sector and the executive classes—that is, the upper echelons of the various corporate bureaucracies—effectively fused. CEOs began paying themselves in stock options, moving back and forth between utterly unrelated companies, priding themselves on the number of employees they could lay off. This set off a vicious cycle whereby workers, who no longer felt any loyalty to corporations that felt none toward them, had to be increasingly monitored, managed, and surveilled.

Chapter 6: Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment?

A hundred years ago, many assumed that the steady advance of technology and labor-saving devices would have made this possible by now, and the irony is that they were probably right. We could easily all be putting in a twenty- or even fifteen-hour workweek.

Some originally theological notions about work are so universally accepted that they simply can’t be questioned. One cannot assert that hardworking people are not, generally speaking, admirable (regardless of what they might be working hard at), or that those who avoid work are not in any way contemptible, and expect to be taken seriously in public debate.

many people have come to accept this situation is morally right—they genuinely believe this is how things ought to be. That we should reward useless or even destructive behavior, and, effectively, punish those whose daily labors make the world a better place.

“I consider a worthwhile job to be one that fulfills a preexisting need, or even that creates a product or service that people hadn’t thought of, that somehow enhances and improves their lives”

the price of a loaf of bread will fluctuate according to the contingencies of supply and demand, but that price will always gravitate around some kind of center that seems the natural price a loaf of bread should have.

a well-meaning liberal who buys fair trade coffee and sponsors a float in the Gay Pride Parade isn’t really challenging power structures of power and injustice in the world in any significant way, but, ultimately, just reproducing them on another level.

Still, I suspect they would all have agreed on at least two things: first, that the most important things one gets out of a job are (1) money to pay the bills, and (2) the opportunity to make a positive contribution to the world. Second, that there is an inverse relation between the two. The more your work helps and benefits others, and the more social value you create, the less you are likely to be paid for it.

In fact, it often happens that, at the very top of organizations, apparently crucial positions can go unfilled for long periods of time without there being any noticeable effect—even, on the organization itself. In recent years, Belgium has gone through a series of constitutional crises that have left it temporarily without a sitting government: no prime minister and no one in charge of health, transportation, or education. These crises have been known to continue for considerable periods of time—the record so far is 541 days—without there being any observable negative impact on health, transportation, or education.

Work, Aristotle insisted, in no sense makes you a better person; in fact, it makes you a worse one, since it takes up so much time, thus making it difficult to fulfill one’s social and political obligations.

Carlyle was ultimately led to the conclusion so many reach today: that if work is noble, then the most noble work should not be compensated, since it is obscene to put a price on something of such absolute value (“the ‘wages’ of every noble Work do yet lie in Heaven or else nowhere”)—though he was generous enough to allow that the poor did need to be afforded “fair wages” in order to obtain the means to live.

Underlings have to constantly monitor what the boss is thinking; the boss doesn’t have to care. That, in turn, is one reason, I believe, why psychological studies regularly find that people of working-class background are more accurate at reading other people’s feelings, and more empathetic and caring, than those of middle-class, let alone wealthy, backgrounds.

After all, he noted, even though we all act as if capitalism is some kind of behemoth towering over us, it’s really just something we produce. Every morning we wake up and re-create capitalism.

Even if we don’t like what the world looks like, the fact remains that the conscious aim of most of our actions, productive or otherwise, is to do well by others; often, very specific others.

In the same way that teenage idealists regularly abandon their dreams of creating a better world and come to accept the compromises of adult life at precisely the moment they marry and have children, caring for others, especially over the long term, requires maintaining a world that’s relatively predictable as the grounds on which caring can take place.

Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economies—but to an increasing degree, all economies. 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.

Chapter 7: What Are the Political Effects of Bullshit Jobs, and Is There Anything That Can Be Done About This Situation?

The less the value of work is seen to lie either in what it produces, or the benefits it provides to others, the more work comes to be seen as valuable primarily as a form of self-sacrifice, which means that anything that makes that work less onerous or more enjoyable, even the gratification of knowing that one’s work benefits others, is actually seen to lower its value—and as a result, to justify lower levels of pay.

Within a community of do-gooders, anyone who exemplifies shared values in too exemplary a way is seen as a threat; ostentatiously good behavior (“virtue signaling” is the new catchword) is often perceived as a moral challenge; it doesn’t matter if the person in question is entirely humble and unassuming—in fact, that can even make it worse, since humility can be seen as itself a moral challenge to those who secretly feel they aren’t humble enough.

Teachers are seen as people who have ostentatiously put themselves forward as self-sacrificing and public-spirited, as wanting to be the sort of person who gets a call twenty years later saying “Thank you, thank you for all you did for me.” For people like that to form unions, threaten strikes, and demand better working conditions is considered almost hypocritical.

Conservative voters, I would suggest, tend to resent intellectuals more than they resent rich people, because they can imagine a scenario in which they or their children might become rich, but cannot possibly imagine one in which they could ever become a member of the cultural elite.

Soldiers allowed to perform public service duties, they found, were two or three times more likely to reenlist.

A crisscrossing of resentments increasingly defines the politics of wealthy countries. This is a disastrous state of affairs.

It’s hard to imagine a surer sign that one is dealing with an irrational economic system than the fact that the prospect of eliminating drudgery is considered to be a problem.

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 laboring 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.

Finance works its way into everything, from car loans to credit cards, but it’s significant that the principal cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt, and the principal force drawing young people into bullshit jobs is the need to pay student loans.

unless we happen to be part of that roughly 3 percent to 5 percent of the population whose views actually do affect policy makers, this is all a game of make-believe; we are identifying with our rulers when, in fact, we’re the ones being ruled.

calling for a new government bureaucracy to assess the usefulness of jobs would inevitably itself turn into a vast generator of bullshit.

If women were to be compensated in the same way as men then a huge proportion of the world’s wealth would instantly have to be handed over to them; and wealth, of course, is power.

What Basic Income ultimately proposes is to detach livelihood from work. Its immediate effect would be to massively reduce the amount of bureaucracy in any country that implemented it.

If it seems implausible to most (“But where would the money come from?”), it’s largely because we’ve all grown up with largely false assumptions about what money is, how it’s produced, what taxes are really for, and a host of other issues that lie far beyond the scope of this volume.

Huge sections of government—and precisely, the most intrusive and obnoxious ones, since they are most deeply involved in the moral surveillance of ordinary citizens—would be instantly made unnecessary and could be simply closed down.

Most people would prefer not to spend their days sitting around watching TV and the handful who really are inclined to be total parasites are not going to be a significant burden on society, since the total amount of work required to maintain people in comfort and security is not that formidable.

As Orwell noted, a population busy working, even at completely useless occupations, doesn’t have time to do much else. At the very least, this is further incentive not to do anything about the situation.

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 labor more inefficient than the one we already have?