# Bullshit Jobs  ## Metadata - Author:: [[David Graeber]] - Category: #📚 - Rating:: 7 - Tags: - DateFinished:: 8/3/2022 ## 🚀The Book in 3 Sentences - There are huge swaths of people spending large amounts of their time doing tasks they do not feel actually need to be performed. - "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." ### 🎨 Impressions - Graeber is entertaining to read and the testimonies he riddles throughout the book are riveting. However, just like with Burn by Herman Potzner, there are WAY too many anecdotes. The book could have been a fourth as long. In fact the book started out as a treatise of much shorter length and it should have stayed that way with only a few additions. ### 📖Who Should Read It? - People who feel like they are working a job that has no purpose, use, or is unfulfilling. - People interested in the role work plays in human society. - People who feel the jobs they love are slowly becoming filled with bullshit tasks. ### ☘️ How the Book Changed Me - This book made me realize just how many jobs there are in the world that serve utterly no good use. I now understand that money doesn't translate 100% to the value it represents. Often the people paid the most are the ones doing the most heinous or bullshit jobs. - I'm even more driven in my efforts at working as a part time or full time content creator while staying with my goal of one day becoming a professor. These jobs seem like the opposite of bullshit from all the definitions he gives in the book. - I'm more empathetic toward those in jobs that I would never want to have to do myself. It's not necessarily their choice but there only option. ### ✍️ My Top 3 Quotes - "Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at." - "In our society, there seems to be a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it." # Main Points In this funny and scarily illuminating book, David Graeber explains that over the past few decades our society has been filling with more and more bullshit jobs. His book started as a small treatise on the concept of Bullshit Jobs he posted on the internet. After it exploded, however, he decided to ask for testimonials from those actively working in Bullshit Jobs so he could create a full fledged book out of his treatise. This is how we got Bullshit Jobs. According to Graeber, a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so useless, pernicious, or pointless that even the employee themselves can't justify it's existence but, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee is obligated to pretend this is not the case. This is different from a shit job which is a job that admittingly most people know sucks but it is necessary that it is done. For example, garbage cleaners and janitors. It might sound terrible but the world is being filled with bullshit jobs. Even the jobs that aren't bullshit likes teachers of academic institutions are increasingly having more and more bullshit tasks pushed on them like filling out exorbitant amounts of paper work. ## The Five Types of Bullshit Jobs ![[Five Types of Bullshit Jobs 2022-09-08 09.15.14.excalidraw|1000]] ### Flunkies Flunkies are jobs that exist simply to make the institution or someone else feel or look important. Some examples are receptionists of institutions that receive almost entirely phone calls. There are a large amount of "administrative assistants" in especially cooperate fields who solely exist to do the dirty work of a higher up. ### Goons Goons are employees who's job has an aggressive element that can either be entirely physical or who's job is to convince the other party of doing something entirely against their common sense. The first example is most classically the army which exists in many countries only because of how large the armies in other countries are. I think we can all agree the U.S. army is much larger than it needs to be and only is so large because of the size of other armies. In the second case, telemarketers are the job that comes first to mind. I don't think a single person can say they liven up with a sense of intense joy when they pick up the phone and hear the words, "I would like to have a moment of your time to tell you about..." I usually hang up immediately. ### Duct Tapers Duct tapers are jobs that exist solely to help fix a problem or glitch that exists because of some faulty system or problem with a higher up. The worst part is these faults are often created by bullshit jobs that exist in other areas of the company. ### Box Tickers Box tickers are jobs that exist solely to create the illusion that the company or institution is doing something that it's not. The classic example are sales reporters who's job it is to create the most sexually appealing physical report every week recounting the companies finances. I can't know for sure but these reports are often rarely put into action for something outside of the meeting. This is because the ratio of [[Signal to noise ratio]] is very skewed to the noise end as the information is much to recent. ### Taskmasters Task masters come in two forms. The first form is a job that exists to give other people mostly Flunkies bullshit tasks. The second example are employees who exist to supervise bullshit or hire people for bullshit jobs. This is the much more insidious type. ## How do People in Bullshit Jobs Feel? ### Purposelessness and Falseness People who emailed Graeber described not only a feeling of purposefulness knowing they are doing something utterly useless but also in some bullshit jobs, particularly Goons and type Taskmasters, a feeling of falseness at making people do something entirely against their common sense. ### Crushed Dreams Another feeling that came up quite a lot was the feeling of having ones dreams crushed. People in bullshit jobs aren't only people with low education. There are countless PhD. graduates who sent testimonies in describing work a high school graduate could have done. I can't imagine the feeling this would cause. One exits college thinking their hard earned education will pay off only to have their dreams crushed entering into a bullshit job. ### The Destruction of Creativity I believe from the bottom of my heart that one of the things humans need after food, water, security, and social relationships to thrive is a fulfillment of their need for creativity. The ability to perform make believe play as the purest form of human expression. But because these bullshit jobs often leave people feeling so drained at the end of the day, they feel unable to exercise their creative muscles and can do nothing else other than waste away in front of the television. ### They Never Get a Break Since the ever presence of the clock starting in the 1400s, the spread of the hand watch, and more recently the scheduling of days in terms of time made pervasive by modern public transportation and industrialization, there is an [[The Obsession with Time in The Modern Era|obsession with time]]. This is another one of the things complained about most by people in Bullshit jobs. They have no time to take breaks because if their bosses catch them not showing a visual indication of their bullshit, they will get yelled at for "slacking on their time." ## Why is There No Uproar Against Bullshit Jobs? If bullshit jobs are everywhere and so terrible, why isn't anyone saying anything. This is an incredibly hard question to answer with facts, but I believe one of the main reasons is because of societies outlook on work. After reading the book and reflecting on my own life, I think there are three main reasons. ### Culture of Business We seem infatuated with looking busy. At Cornell University I can say from firsthand experience that there is a [[The culture of hurry|culture of hurry]] and [[Toxic productivity]]. Students brag about the amount of work they can do on little hours of sleep. They open conversations to their "friends" about the amount of homework they have to do before going to the party that night. For some reason it's considered sacrilege to admit that you are doing something simply for the enjoyment of it. In other words, that you are doing a hobby. Even if you do admit you are taking time to rest, it's often explained as a way of being able to do more work. This creates [[Pluralistic ignorance]] because every student thinks every other student is much more productive than they actually are and push themselves harder as a result even if they can't go any harder. Intimacy is lost as students spend the majority of their time complaining about schoolwork and sleep rather than about life and fun stories. ![[Bullshit Jobs 2022-09-08 09.24.50.excalidraw|1000]] ### It Motivates Workers According to some of the testimonies Graeber received this artificial push toward business is necessary in some bullshit jobs because otherwise employees would have no motivation to do any work. ### Where Else Would People Work? Sadly, I think the hardest question to answer regarding bullshit jobs is where and what people would work on if there were no bullshit jobs. The human population has skyrocketed in the last couple of hundred years. In this skyrocketing there has been a massive need for more and more jobs. There are few things worse than a peasant without a job to keep them occupied. That's how riots and rebellions happen. Maybe one answer to why there is no uproar then is that there is no other option. The other option of having no jobs for millions of people would be worse. ### Drawbacks to the Theory of Bullshit Jobs While I agree with many of Graeber's points and am horrified by the testimonies he riddles throughout the book, there are a few things I'm antsy about considering his claim. Firstly, it's based largely on testimonies rather than defined statistics. I generally don't like anecdotal evidence in proving a point unless it's bolstered by statistical fact. Secondly, I haven't experienced any of this myself yet. Granted I'm only nineteen years old and have never had a serious job but every job I have worked in was definitely necessary. Despite all of this I have heard from a variety of college friends about their horrifying working experiences which align with the ideas talked about in this book. I guess it's only a matter of time before I come face to face with the reality of bullshit jobs. I'm hoping it's not as bad as Graeber puts it out to be. ## Highlights - Preface: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs ([Location 69](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=69)) - The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. (Think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the sixties.) And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them. ([Location 128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=128)) - Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. ([Location 133](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=133)) - Note: What is hell? Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. - For instance: in our society, there seems to be a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. ([Location 161](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=161)) - Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. ([Location 163](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=163)) - Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. ([Location 204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=204)) - It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working. ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=205)) - The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it. ([Location 206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=206)) - How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? ([Location 207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=207)) - the polling agency YouGov took it upon itself to test the hypothesis and conducted a poll of Britons using language taken directly from the essay: for example, Does your job “make a meaningful contribution to the world”? Astonishingly, more than a third—37 percent—said they believed that it did not (whereas 50 percent said it did, and 13 percent were uncertain). This was almost twice what I had anticipated—I’d imagined the percentage of bullshit jobs was probably around 20 percent. What’s more, a later poll in Holland came up with almost exactly the same results: in fact, a little higher, as 40 percent of Dutch workers reported that their jobs had no good reason to exist. ([Location 209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=209)) - Tags: [[pink]] ### Chapter 1 What Is a Bullshit Job? - the main difference between the public and private sectors is not that either is more, or less, likely to generate pointless work. It does not even necessarily lie in the kind of pointless work each tends to generate. The main difference is that pointless work in the private sector is likely to be far more closely supervised. ([Location 331](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=331)) - Note: What is the main difference between the private and public work sectors in terms of bullshit jobs? The private work sector is likely to be far more supervised and harder to get away with doing no work. - but could you really call Mafia hit man a bullshit job? That just feels somehow wrong. As Socrates teaches us, when this happens—when our own definitions produce results that seem intuitively wrong to us—it’s because we’re not aware of what we really think. (Hence, he suggests that the true role of philosophers is to tell people what they already know but don’t realize that they know. One could argue that anthropologists like myself do something similar.) ([Location 363](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=363)) - Note: According to Socrates, what is the role of philosophers? To tell people what they already know but don’t realize they know. - 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. ([Location 409](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=409)) - Note: Is is the important word here as it means the job feels and is pointless, useless, and pernicious. - Another distinction that’s important to bear in mind is between jobs that are pointless and jobs that are merely bad. I will refer to the latter as “shit jobs,” since people often do. ... Shit jobs are usually not at all bullshit; they typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society; it’s just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly. ([Location 479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=479)) - Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. ([Location 496](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=496)) - Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers—as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do. Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which they fill their lives; they feel it’s all based on a lie—as, indeed, it is. ([Location 498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=498)) - What about jobs that are just partly bullshit? This is a tough one because there are very few jobs that don’t involve at least a few pointless or idiotic elements. To some degree, this is probably just the inevitable side effect of the workings of any complex organization. ([Location 648](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=648)) - Teachers in higher education spend increasing amounts of time filling out administrative paperwork. ([Location 652](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=652)) - Note: An example of a job that is clearly not bullshit having to do bullshit tasks. ### Chapter 2 What Sorts of Bullshit Jobs Are There? - over the course of my research, I have found it most useful to break down the types of bullshit job into five categories. I will call these: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters. ([Location 701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=701)) - Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important. ([Location 704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=704)) - Throughout recorded history, rich and powerful men and women have tended to surround themselves with servants, clients, sycophants, and minions of one sort or another. ... there is usually a certain portion whose job it is to basically just stand around and look impressive. ([Location 705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=705)) - Just as a thought experiment: imagine you are a feudal class extracting 50 percent of every peasant household’s product. If so, you are in possession of an awful lot of food. Enough, in fact, to support a population exactly as large as that of peasant food producers.7 You have to do something with it—and there are only so many people any given feudal lord can keep around as chefs, wine stewards, scullery maids, harem eunuchs, musicians, jewelers, and the like. Even after you’ve taken care to ensure you have enough men trained in the use of weapons to suppress any potential rebellion, there’s likely to be a great deal left over. As a result, indigents, runaways, orphans, criminals, women in desperate situations, and other dislocated people will inevitably begin to accumulate around your mansion (because, after all, that’s where all the food is). You can drive them away, but then they’re likely to form a dangerous vagabond class that might become a political threat. The obvious thing to do is to slap a uniform on them and assign them some minor or unnecessary task. It makes you look good, and at least that way, you can keep an eye on them. ([Location 716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=716)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Note: Flunkies in history have often formed to keep a vagabond class of beggars and hobos created from a system of rent extraction and the subsequent distribution of loot. - So, what might the modern equivalent be? ([Location 727](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=727)) - In some countries, such as Brazil, such buildings still have uniformed elevator operators whose entire job is to push the button for you. ([Location 733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=733)) - Why shell out a full-time salary and benefits package for a woman—actually, it would seem, in this case, two women—just to sit at the front desk all day doing nothing? The answer is: because not doing so would be shocking and bizarre. No one would take a company seriously if it had no one at all sitting at the front desk. ([Location 743](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=743)) - Note: Why do receptionist jobs exist even in places that don’t need receptionists? A company simply wouldn’t be taken seriously if no one was at the desk. - In other cases, as with Ophelia, the flunkies end up effectively doing the bosses’ jobs for them. This, of course, was the traditional role of female secretaries (now relabeled “administrative assistants”) working for male executives during most of the twentieth century: while in theory secretaries were there just to answer the phone, take dictation, and do some light filing, in fact, they often ended up doing 80 percent to 90 percent of their bosses’ jobs, and sometimes, 100 percent of its nonbullshit aspects. ([Location 793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=793)) - Note: Sometimes the bullshit job is actually the boss of the flunkie because they offload all their non bullshit tasks into the flunkie. The flunkies job, however, is still bullshit because it doesn’t need to exist. The boss should be doing their non bullshit work. Not the insubordinate. - what goons do The use of this term is, of course, metaphorical: I’m not using it to mean actual gangsters or other forms of hired muscle. Rather, I’m referring to people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but, crucially, who exist only because other people employ them. ([Location 823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=823)) - The most obvious example of this are national armed forces. Countries need armies only because other countries have armies.12 If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society. ([Location 825](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=825)) - there are few things less pleasant than being forced against your better nature to try to convince others to do things that defy their common sense. ... this is at the very heart of what it is to be a goon. ([Location 891](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=891)) - Duct tapers are employees whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organization; who are there to solve a problem that ought not to exist. ([Location 894](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=894)) - The most obvious examples of duct tapers are underlings whose jobs are to undo the damage done by sloppy or incompetent superiors. ([Location 912](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=912)) - what box tickers do I am using the term “box tickers” to refer to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing. ([Location 970](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=970)) - here the importance of the physical attractiveness of the report. This is a theme that comes up frequently in testimonies about box-ticking operations and even more so in the corporate sector than in government. If the ongoing importance of a manager is measured by how many people he has working under him, the immediate material manifestation of that manager’s power and prestige is the visual quality of his presentations and reports. ([Location 1035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1035)) - Taskmasters fall into two subcategories. Type 1 contains those whose role consists entirely of assigning work to others. This job can be considered bullshit if the taskmaster herself believes that there is no need for her intervention, and that if she were not there, underlings would be perfectly capable of carrying on by themselves. Type 1 taskmasters can thus be considered the opposite of flunkies: unnecessary superiors rather than unnecessary subordinates. ([Location 1069](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1069)) - Whereas the first variety of taskmaster is merely useless, the second variety does actual harm. These are taskmasters whose primary role is to create bullshit tasks for others to do, to supervise bullshit, or even to create entirely new bullshit jobs. ([Location 1072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1072)) - A final ambiguous category consists of jobs which are in no sense pointless in and of themselves, but which are ultimately pointless because they are performed in support of a pointless enterprise. An obvious example would be the cleaners, security, maintenance, and other support staff for a bullshit company. ([Location 1244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1244)) ### Chapter 3 Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy? - everything that those with bullshit jobs say is distressing about their situation. It’s not just the purposelessness—though certainly, it’s that. It’s also the falseness. I’ve already mentioned the indignation telemarketers feel when they are forced to try to trick or pressure people into doing something they think is against their best interests. ([Location 1406](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1406)) - There was once a time when most students in college whose parents could afford it, or who qualified for scholarships or assistance, received a stipend. It was considered a good thing that there might be a few years in a young man’s or woman’s life where money was not the primary motivation; where he or she could thus be free to pursue other forms of value: say, philosophy, poetry, athletics, sexual experimentation, altered states of consciousness, politics, or the history of Western art. Nowadays it is considered important they should work. However, it is not considered important they should work at anything useful. In fact, like Rufus they’re barely expected to work at all, just to show up and pretend to do so. ([Location 1438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1438)) - Note: I feel this exactly with the number of people I hear doing internships in absolutely bullshit jobs. - But of course, efficiency is not the point. In fact, if we are simply talking about teaching students about efficient work habits, the best thing would be to leave them to their studies. Schoolwork is, after all, real work in every sense except that you don’t get paid for it ([Location 1473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1473)) - As early as 1901, the German psychologist Karl Groos discovered that infants express extraordinary happiness when they first figure out they can cause predictable effects in the world, pretty much regardless of what that effect is or whether it could be construed as having any benefit to them. ... Groos coined the phrase “the pleasure at being the cause,” suggesting that it is the basis for play, which he saw as the exercise of powers simply for the sake of exercising them. ([Location 1557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1557)) - 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. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Francis Broucek called this the “trauma of failed influence” and suspected that such traumatic experiences might lie behind many mental health issues later in life. ([Location 1576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1576)) - If make-believe play is the purest expression of human freedom, make-believe work imposed by others is the purest expression of lack of freedom. ([Location 1599](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1599)) - one can find occasional warnings by nineteenth-century plantation owners in the American South or the Caribbean that it’s better to keep slaves busy even at made-up tasks than to allow them to idle about in the off-season; the reason given always being that if slaves were left with time on their hands, they were likely to start plotting to flee or revolt. ([Location 1642](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1642)) - The modern morality of “You’re on my time; I’m not paying you to lounge around” is very different. It is the indignity of a man who feels he’s being robbed. A worker’s time is not his own; it belongs to the person who bought it. ([Location 1644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1644)) - As the great classicist Moses Finley pointed out: if an ancient Greek or Roman saw a potter, he could imagine buying his pots. He could also imagine buying the potter—slavery was a familiar institution in the ancient world. But he would have simply been baffled by the notion that he might buy the potter’s time. ([Location 1649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1649)) - Note: The industrial revolution cemented the concept of time in the minds of people because productivity was measured in output per hour. - When I lived in Madagascar, I found that rural people—who had little use for clocks—still often described distance the old-fashioned way and said that to walk to another village would take two cookings of a pot of rice. In medieval Europe, people spoke similarly of something as taking “three paternosters,” or two boilings of an egg. This sort of thing is extremely common. In places without clocks, time is measured by actions rather than action being measured by time. ([Location 1674](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1674)) - Note: How is time measured in places without clocks? It’s measured by actions. - By the fourteenth century, most European towns had created clock towers—usually funded and encouraged by the local merchant guild. It was these same merchants who developed the habit of placing human skulls on their desks as memento mori, to remind themselves that they should make good use of their time because each chime of the clock brought them one hour closer to death. ([Location 1687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1687)) - The dissemination of domestic clocks and then pocket watches took much longer, coinciding largely with the advent of the industrial revolution beginning in the late 1700s, but once it did happen, it allowed for similar attitudes to diffuse among the middle classes more generally. ([Location 1690](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1690)) - Once time was money, it became possible to speak of “spending time,” rather than just “passing” it—also of wasting time, killing time, saving time, losing time, racing against time, and so forth. ([Location 1696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1696)) - 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. ([Location 1708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1708)) ### Chapter 4 What Is It Like to Have a Bullshit Job? - In the case of bullshit jobs, it’s rarely so clear-cut. Who exactly is forcing you to pretend to work? The company? Society? Some strange confluence of social convention and economic forces that insist no one should be given the means of life without working, even if there is not enough real work to go around? ([Location 1852](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1852)) - everyone knows that jobs like substitute teacher (in America) or tax official (in France) are mostly bullshit—so there’s little room for disillusionment or confusion. Those who apply for such jobs are well aware of what they’re getting into, and there are already clear cultural models in their heads for how a substitute teacher or tax official is supposed to behave. There does seem to be a happy minority, then, who enjoy their bullshit jobs. ([Location 1885](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=1885)) - Note: It sounds like one aspect that makes bullshit jobs so terrible is the expectation that there should be something more. - Whatever the ambiguities, almost all sources concur that the worst thing about a bullshit job is simply the knowledge that it’s bullshit. ([Location 2027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=2027)) - Many speak of the intense frustration of learning gradually that they are instead paid to do nothing. ([Location 2035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=2035)) - Stress was another theme that popped up regularly. When, as with Greg, one’s bullshit job involves not just sitting around pretending to work but actually working on something everyone knows—but can’t say—is pointless, the level of ambient tension increases and often causes people to lash out in arbitrary ways. ([Location 2093](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=2093)) - This leads us to another issue: the effects of such situations on employees’ physical health. While I lack statistical evidence, if the testimonials are anything to go by, stress-related ailments seem a frequent consequence of bullshit jobs. I’ve read multiple reports of depression, anxiety overlapping with physical symptoms of every sort, from carpal tunnel syndrome that mysteriously vanishes when the job ends, ([Location 2128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=2128)) - bullshit jobholders can be secretly tortured by the suspicion that they are being paid more than their actually productive underlings (“How bullshit would that be?”), or that others have legitimate reason to hate them. This left many genuinely confused about how they should feel. No moral compass was available. One might consider this a kind of moral scriptlessness. ([Location 2191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=2191)) - It doesn’t help that higher-ups in such situations will regularly insist that perceptions of futility are self-evidently absurd. It doesn’t always happen. Some managers, as we’ve seen, will basically wink and smile; a precious few might honestly discuss at least part of what’s going on. But since middle managers generally see their role as one of maintaining morale and work discipline, they will often feel they have little choice but to rationalize the situation. (In effect, doing so is the only part of their jobs that isn’t bullshit.) ([Location 2230](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=2230)) - workers hired for a certain skill, but who are then not really allowed to exercise it, rarely end up exercising that skill in a covert way when they discover they have free time on their hands. They almost invariably end up doing something else. ([Location 2382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=2382)) - Note: Often the acts people end up pursuing instead of work are creative. It seems many people have a craving for creativity. ### Chapter 5 Why Are Bullshit Jobs Proliferating? - There is every reason to believe that the overall number of bullshit jobs, and, even more, the overall percentage of jobs considered bullshit by those who hold them, has been increasing rapidly in recent years—alongside the ever-increasing bullshitization of useful forms of employment. In other words, this is not just a book about a hitherto neglected aspect of the world of work. It’s a book about a real social problem. Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense. ([Location 2517](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=2517)) - Describing a country’s economy as dominated by the service sector leaves one with the impression that people in that country are supporting themselves principally by serving each other iced lattes or pressing one another’s shorts. Obviously, this isn’t really true. So what else might they be doing? 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). But back in 1992, Robert Taylor, a library scientist, suggested it would be more useful to define it as information work. ([Location 2548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=2548)) - As we can see, even in 1990, the proportion of the workforce made up of actual waiters, barbers, salesclerks, and the like was really quite small. ([Location 2555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=2555)) - In a way, one could argue that the whole financial sector is a scam of sorts, since it represents itself as largely about directing investments toward profitable opportunities in commerce and industry, when, in fact, it does very little of that. The overwhelming bulk of its profits comes from colluding with government to create, and then to trade and manipulate, various forms of debt. 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. ([Location 2580](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=2580)) - 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.7 But it remains true that “More Jobs” is the one political slogan that both Left and Right can always agree on. ([Location 2668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=2668)) - Note: After hearing about Rheas Internship experience I feel I have come face to face with an example of a bullshit job. ### Chapter 6 Why Do We as a Society Not Object to the Growth of Pointless Employment? - Questions of value are always at least a little murky. Most people would agree that some companies might just as well not exist, but it’s more likely to be based on some kind of gut instinct than anything they can articulate precisely. If I had to tease out the prevailing, unstated common sense, for a first pass, anyway, I would say that most people seem to operate with a combination of Tom’s and Rupert’s positions: that when a good or service answers a demand or otherwise improves people’s lives, then it can be considered genuinely valuable, but when it merely serves to create demand, either by making people feel they are fat and ugly, or luring them into debt and then charging interest, it is not. This seems reasonable enough. But it still doesn’t answer the question of what it means to “improve people’s lives,” and on that, of course, rests everything. ([Location 3382](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=3382)) - If we all woke up one morning and discovered that not only nurses, garbage collectors, and mechanics, but for that matter, bus drivers, grocery store workers, firefighters, or short-order chefs had been whisked away into another dimension, the results would be equally catastrophic. If elementary school teachers were to vanish, most schoolchildren would likely celebrate for a day or two, but the long-term effects would be if anything even more devastating. And while we can no doubt argue about the relative merits of death metal versus klezmer music, or romance novels versus science fiction, there’s no doubt that even if the sudden disappearance of certain categories of authors, artists, or musicians left certain sectors of the population indifferent or even happy, for others the world would become a far more dismal and depressing place. ([Location 3514](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=3514)) - The same cannot be said of hedge fund managers, political consultants, marketing gurus, lobbyists, corporate lawyers, or people whose job it is to apologize for the fact that the carpenter didn’t come. As Finn said of his software licensing firm in chapter 4: “If I showed up on Monday and the building had disappeared, not only would society not care, I wouldn’t, either.” ... Yet in many of these are precisely the people who get paid the very highest salaries. ([Location 3521](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=3521)) - Clement: My colleagues often discussed how busy things would get and how hard they work, even though they would routinely be gone at two or three in the afternoon. What is the name for this kind of public denial of the crystal-clear reality? My mind keeps going back to the pressure to value ourselves and others on the basis of how hard we work at something we’d rather not be doing. I believe this attitude exists in the air around us. We sniff it into our noses and exhale it as a social reflex in small-talk; it is one of the guiding principles of social relations here: if you’re not destroying your mind and body via paid work, you’re not living right. Are we to believe that we are sacrificing for our kids, or something, who we don’t get to see because we’re at work all fucking day!? ([Location 3645](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=3645)) - Note: Some students at Cornell follow this trend so hard. I don’t understand what the benefit of sprouting how much in agony you are is. - Nouri, the software developer, provides an interesting insight, suggesting that the hostility and mutual hatreds in a bullshit office might actually be functional in inspiring workers to act at all. He reports that while working in an obviously doomed banner ad company, an enterprise that made him depressed and sick, “I was so bored that a couple programmers snitched to management (excuse me, Scrum Master) about my productivity. So he hostilely gave me a month to prove myself, trying to accumulate evidence that I was missing doctor’s notices. ([Location 5131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=5131)) ^7ad2fc - Note: According to Nouri, why is the work environment in a bullshit job often more stressed? It needs to be because then workers wouldn’t be able to force themselves to do meaningless work. - I sometimes ask my students, when discussing Marx, “What was the unemployment level in ancient Greece? Or medieval China?” The answer, of course, is zero. Having a large proportion of the population who wish to work, but cannot, appears to be peculiar to what Marx liked to call “the capitalist mode of production.” But it appears to be, like public debt, a structural feature of the system which must nonetheless be treated as if it were a problem to be solved. ([Location 5195](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B075RWG7YM&location=5195)) - Note: What is it about the capitalist system of today that necessitates there being tons of useless jobs?