There are bad jobs, and then there are meaningless jobs. The latter are worse for your soul.
So argues David Graeber, professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and author of the new book “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.”
More than a third of Britons surveyed believe their jobs don’t make a meaningful contribution to the world, Graeber writes. With that figure as a foundation, he uses research, interviews with dissatisfied workers and a dose of philosophy to construct his case that pointless busywork is an epidemic infecting offices everywhere.
Graeber outlines five common types of BS jobs. There are “flunkies” employed only to make their bosses seem important, like receptionists whose desk phones never ring. There are “duct tapers” who treat symptoms, not problems, like customer service representatives paid to apologize when repair workers don’t show up on schedule. “Box-tickers” create reports that never get used, “goons” use aggression and manipulation to attract consumers and “taskmasters” manage workers who don’t need supervision.
What’s so bad about these roles? Sure, they may leave you bored at work, but they often pay better than professions more obviously useful, such as teaching, cleaning and building.
It turns out, they actually harm workers’ psyches, Graeber believes. He explains why in the following interview, during which he also offers advice about how to spot a BS job in advance and what to do if you’re already stuck in one.
How would you define a BS job?
My definition really leaves it up to the person doing the job.
A bullshit job is a job that even the person doing it feels is so completely pointless that if the job didn’t exist, either it would make no difference at all or the world would be a slightly better place. There’s an added element that they have to pretend otherwise. That’s the bullshit element: You have to pretend you’re actually doing something when you’re not.
What industries produce BS jobs? What industries tend to produce meaningful jobs?
People who feel their jobs are unnecessary are mostly office workers, and they seem to be especially concentrated in clerical, administrative, supervisory, managerial jobs. A lot of people who are in HR, PR and middle management secretly feel their jobs shouldn’t exist. There are whole industries like corporate law, where a lot of people feel if the entire industry didn’t exist, we’d certainly be better off: “Obviously I’m providing a service for my client, but it wouldn’t be necessary to have corporate lawyers if there weren’t other corporate lawyers.” Telemarketers certainly feel that way.
In terms of jobs that have a positive social effect, we all know there are obvious examples of that: You’re a firefighter, you’re a bus driver, you’re a nurse, you’re a builder, you’re a repairman. All those people do something, there’s no doubt about it.
Are men or women more likely to find themselves in meaningless jobs?
In the surveys they did about bullshit jobs, women were much less likely to say their jobs were bullshit. It strikes me that one reason for the pay gap might be that women are more likely to be in useful jobs and useful jobs pay less.
How can you figure out in advance whether a job opportunity is BS? What are the signs?
If this is a job with a title that you couldn’t explain to someone who is not in the corporate world, that’s a bad sign. “Catastrophe risk analyst” or “East coast division coordinator.” Or if the job description itself is pretty much indecipherable. If the task is easy to understand, they’ll tell you what it is right away. If they’re not telling you what it is right away, either it’s something totally different than they’re saying, or it is nothing at all.
[Read: Reclaiming My Time: The Work Resolution for 2018.]
In the book, you use the term ‘spiritual violence.’ What is that, and how does it relate to BS jobs?
It means being deprived of the fundamental basis of your humanity, which is your ability to feel you’re having a positive effect on the world around you. Not only being deprived of it, but being deprived of it in a way where you can’t even object.
I used that term to hit home the degree to which there’s something fundamental about human nature that we don’t want to recognize, which is that people really need to feel they’re useful in some way, or they kind of shrivel up.
We’re all taught this very cynical idea that we’re all rational machines trying to maximize our self-interest and advantage, trying to get the most reward for the least expenditure of either effort or resources. But if that were really true, people who were paid to do nothing all day would be delighted. In fact, what I find is, people are incredibly miserable. It’s made even worse by the fact that they don’t understand why they should be miserable; they don’t feel they have any right to complain.
I went back to child psychology to try to understand this phenomenon, and that’s where I discovered “the pleasure of being at cause.” You first become aware that you’re a thing independent of the environment around you when you realize you can have predictable effects on the outside world. It creates this incredible happiness. That joy at being able to have effects on the world underlies our sense of what we are as a self. If you aren’t doing something with your life, it’s almost as if you don’t really exist.
You write that BS jobs often involve pretending to work when there isn’t anything that needs to be done. Why do employers expect workers to act constantly busy instead of acknowledging that, sometimes, people are actually hired to be “on call” in case work pops up?
There’s this idea that you can own somebody else’s time. It seems to be at the core of it: “You’re on my time. If this is my time, and if you’re sitting around, you’re stealing from me. You’re supposed to be working, it doesn’t matter whether there’s something to do.”
That is again a large part of the spiritual violence. What’s the worst part of any real job? Anybody who has had a productive sort of working-class job, paid by the hour, knows the most annoying part of the job is when there’s nothing to do but you have to pretend you’re working anyway. It’s just infuriating. In the book, we’re looking at entire jobs like that.
Does the ‘gig economy’ pose better alternatives to taking full-time BS jobs?
It’s nice because it’s an organization of work that’s task-oriented, and that is the traditional human way to work. Left to our own devices, we will slack off, and then the deadline will loom and we’ll get mobilized and finally go into an intense burst of effort until the job is done, and then we kick back and feel happy with ourselves again and relax and it starts over.
The problem with it is, it reinforces the tendency that people will see if they can pay little or nothing for work with redeeming qualities for the worker: “If there’s any reason that someone would do this other than the money, let’s see if we can get someone to do it for free.” Like translation work: “Maybe we can get someone who just wants to practice their Italian.”
The entire system seems to be set up to make things easy for you if you are an employer, employee or investor. If you’re an independent producer, woe betide, you’re really screwed. Not only do you not get health care, you have to pay all the things your employer would pay for social security.
As you just mentioned, BS jobs often pay pretty well, while many useful jobs that help other people pay poorly. Why is that?
There seems to be this rhetoric that if you are doing something high-minded or altruistic, then that should be enough for you. Like teachers. People say, “We don’t want people who are greedy to be teachers, so we shouldn’t pay teachers.”
When people who are seen as high-minded then say, “But, I want to be able to take my kids on vacation now and then” or “I would like to have health care,” it’s seen as impertinent. “Oh come on, you want to be recognized as a paragon of virtue and you want a middle class lifestyle?”
It extends even to having a useful job. There’s some bizarre calculus whereby anything that you get out of the job, even the knowledge that you’re benefiting others in some way by teaching them or making something they actually want to buy, rather than making it more valuable somehow makes it less. Work is supposed to miserable. Work is our badge of morality by being self-sacrificing. It’s like a secular hair shirt. We can prove we deserve our consumer toys by just how miserable we make ourselves during the day.
[See: The 12 Best Jobs That Help People.]
Speaking of consumer toys, your theory doesn’t just address our working lives, it also offers an explanation for how we spend leisure time, too. How do BS jobs relate to the rise of social media and what you call ‘furtive consumer pleasures’?
YouTube rants, cat memes, Instagram, Twitter: What we’ve got are popular cultural forms that are the kind of thing you can do while you’re pretending to be working.
The implication is that bullshit jobs are a lot more prevalent than we like to think. People are living their lives while pretending to work. But that means their lives are fragmented even worse than in the past. On the one hand, work fills our lives so that so many people are never free of it. Email makes it impossible to hide from your job, so you’re just working constantly. The other side of it is your life invades your job. Half the time when you are at your job, you’re not actually working.
Millennials have been much maligned for their attitudes toward work. You suggest that young people have figured out that many jobs are pointless but are still coerced into them. Are millennials on to something?
It is interesting to note that with millennials, their politics are really different than any previous generation I’m aware of. Most people from 18 to 30 consider themselves anti-capitalist.
I think there’s a general rebellion against this. Human beings aren’t stupid. If you make them do nothing all day, they figure that out. More and more millennials are in that specific situation and that’s their first experience with work. They’re the first generation introduced to work under the worst possible conditions, burdened with student loans, where the prospect of a permanent, secure, rewarding career is almost nil. You have all of that, and it’s more and more likely that the job you do is completely pointless and you know it. How would you not object to this system? “I am enslaved to my student loans so I have to pretend I’m not just sitting here.” It’s absurd.
[See: The 10 Worst Jobs for Millennials.]
If you realize you have a BS job, what can you do? Should you quit?
Sometimes you don’t have the option. Part of the dilemma is, people have to pay their student loans, have to take care of their families. They don’t have a lot of room to move.
As far as it is possible to go back and forth between meaningful and lucrative employment, or do both at the same time, some of the most successful solutions to this problem I read about were people who either managed to do just enough bullshit employment to pay the rent and then spent the rest of their time doing something real, or people who successfully managed to repurpose time on the job to do something they felt was worthwhile. It’s hard.
What can society do about this problem?
I have increasingly been drawn to the argument that basic income would be a great solution. Let’s guarantee everybody’s livelihood. If you’re alive, you deserve the means to live, and just provide that unconditionally to everyone. After that, it’s up to you. If you want to get even more money by doing something you think you can get money for, do that. If you want to volunteer, do that. If you want to take care of people, do that. If you want to write poetry, go off and do so.
One of the objections is, how do you know people are going to do something useful? Well, if 40 percent of people already think they’re doing nothing, how could it be worse than we’ve already got? It will definitely increase overall social happiness. Sure, most of them are going to be bad poets and annoying street musicians and mad scientists if they go into those things. But all we need is one of those musicians to turn out to be John Lennon, or one of those crank scientists to turn out to be Einstein, and you’ve just all paid it back again, haven’t you?
How optimistic are you that universal basic income will catch on?
It’s one of the few things that has strong constituencies on both the left and the right. It’s possible that an interesting alliance will happen, especially the more that robotization is taking place.
The robots have been taking our jobs since the 1930s, it’s just that we’ve made up stupid jobs to substitute. We can either continue doing that, or we can do something about it. It seems we’re at a crux of a moment where it’s becoming so obvious, people might pay attention this time.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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