The Bullshit Jobs Discourse Is Itself Bullshit

Anybody Who Thinks BS Jobs Are New Should Read Franz Kafka

Dear Republic,

We’re excited to have Patrick Koroly kick off our debate about bullshit jobs. Unless you’re lucky, you’ve probably got one — so read on for Koroly’s advice on navigating the whole unseemly field of them while salvaging your humanity. Stay posted for Alex McCann’s take later this week.

- ROL

THE BULLSHIT JOBS DISCOURSE IS ITSELF BULLSHIT

It has now been over a decade since David Graeber first described the phenomenon of “bullshit jobs” infesting the economy. These are the “pointless jobs” made up “just for the sake of keeping us all working.” These are the swamps of bureaucracy, the constant influxes of emails, and the endless Zoom meetings that demand that every single decision be double- and triple-checked before anyone can actually sit down and do something substantial.

Graeber contends that such jobs exist for no reason other than to maintain our present socioeconomic order—as he puts it, “a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger” to the ruling class. Why are massive corporations willing to hire so many useless employees? Because such employees become the middle-class defenders of the ruling class, an equally unproductive and significantly wealthier class in need of a buffer between themselves and the productive forces they must exploit. The office workers are the foot soldiers in the battles against unions and strikers.

This problem has been relitigated and the same positions reiterated countless times since then, though often without Graeber’s radical anti-capitalist analysis. Alex McCann’s viral “The death of the corporate job” spoke of the corporate class’s sense of purposelessness—but while Graeber pointed to a radical upheaval of the system, McCann encourages quiet rebellion, telling workers to maintain their place in the corporate system while “building something real” on the side. We are in an unfortunate transition period, McCann explains, where we are all aware of the fiction of the corporate job yet unable to escape it. As such, we’re best off exploiting this structure to our advantage. Use your desk and your salary to build your own thing.

It’s striking how McCann’s examples of such a “real thing” are all self-employment in those same bullshit-ridden fields he decries: “developers who do their ‘official’ job in the morning and build their own products in the afternoon. Marketers who run their agencies from their corporate desks.” It’s another form of quiet quitting, but a very bizarre one: one that sweeps aside the “bullshit” from your desk just to get down to the work underneath it.

There’s a certain element of workaholism under here. McCann never elaborates on what “building something real” entails—generally, this seems to be some kind of shorthand for becoming an entrepreneur in your field.

Of course, merely making something isn’t enough for your job to be “real.” As Sarah Majdov recently argued, there is plenty of bullshit work in tech, no matter how much they produce. They have products. They have deliverables. They do things other than sending emails back and forth. This does not make their work inherently substantial, meaningful, or useful.

And there remains a tremendous elephant in the room: is self-employment free from bullshit? Anne Helen Petersen argued against some of the accusations McCann made against the corporate world—most of those jobs are much realer than the critics would contend—and made the point that every single job has these same issues. Guess what: you will deal with emails, meetings, and paperwork everywhere from entrepreneurship to academia to consulting to freelancing. And, of course, many of those frustrated with the corporate world are speaking from an incredibly privileged position. It’s easy to take your six-figure salary and benefits for granted.

It’s not that this is some ridiculous choice, of course. We want independence. We’re willing to “trade security for control, which we understand as happiness” as Petersen puts it, but the fear and dissatisfaction will not disappear from an insecure life of self-control.

But I think Petersen’s most significant and clearest contribution to this conversation is pointing out an even larger and more overwhelming elephant in the room: bullshit jobs are not a new, emerging phenomenon. Graeber and McCann talk about the “present” system of bullshit jobs as though it’s particularly unique to this era to be inundated with meaningless nonsense at your job. Graeber seems to think that the phenomenon emerged sometime in the mid-20^th century (as with much of his work, he’s just noncommittal enough to evade the thorny details), while McCann points to a unique post-COVID awareness of the fiction of the corporate world (though not necessarily to the exclusion of earlier awareness).

The greatest prophet of the tide of these pointless bullshit jobs decently predates Graeber’s diagnosis. I contend that this prophet is none other than Franz Kafka. Long before Graeber wrote his article, before Office Space defined our image of the cubicle-based office, and before McCann could speculate on the potential for “corporate entrepreneurship” or “intrapreneurship” Kafka depicted the despair of the pointless man perfectly. The Metamorphosis may be the clearest example: Kafka’s protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is inexplicably transformed into some manner of disgusting insect and proceeds to spend most of his time wondering how he can return to work.

It’s remarkable that perhaps the best depiction of the existential terror of bureaucracy does not spend a single moment in the office: it’s not the job itself that causes Gregor’s existential dread. It’s the horror of realizing he has nothing without his job.

Gregor’s identity is more or less reducible to his usefulness. He is his job. His job is the only thing that gives him a place in his family and a sense of self. In some sense, his transformation is unnecessary: anything that took away his job would have left him in equal despair.

The horror of Kafka isn’t that our work is meaningless. It’s that our work is all we have. Once its meaninglessness is exposed, what lies beneath? Here, I’m reminded of my favorite Kafka story, “A Hunger Artist.” The nameless protagonist devotes himself to the craft of starvation: working in fairs and circuses, he goes months and months at a time without eating anything. Spectators comes from far away to gawk at his discipline. Each time, he’s only stopped by cautious promoters afraid he’ll die if they let him fast a moment longer.

We’re led to see the hunger artist as a true believer, an ascetic, a genuine starving artist in every sense of the word. He works because the work is beautiful. He has nothing in mind but sheer devotion to his craft.

But, as it turns out, we were misled. When the hunger artist dies, after he’s seen his fame decline and the spectators lose interest, he has an awful confession: it was never for the art. Truthfully, he just never found any food he liked.

What Kafka points to in The Metamorphosis, “A Hunger Artist,” and just about everything else he wrote would be codified and explicated in Sartre. Each of these figures is a clear example of Sartre’s notion of “bad faith:” a life lived in denial of one’s own freedom. Sartre’s own example is appropriately Kafkaesque: he asks the reader to imagine a waiter who is bizarrely exaggerated in his performance as a waiter. Each of his actions seems to deliberately mimic the ideal of his profession nearly to the point of parody. His footsteps, his words, his posture—it betrays that there’s a conscious attempt to subsume himself to the image of waiting.

In this strange self-identification with his profession, this figure no longer treats himself as a man. He can take on the principles and tendencies that define a waiter as a replacement for his humanity. Sartre argues that such behavior is an attempt to hide from one’s own freedom.

It’s comforting to hide in your work. “What am I?” is a difficult and painful question. “I am a marketer, a developer, a lawyer” is an easy and straightforward answer that hides from the labyrinths of existential doubt. When your job isn’t a comfortable hiding place, these questions come roaring back. Gregor Samsa’s humanity disappears alongside his job. Where can he hide now?

Graeber points to this as well: in the world of bullshit jobs, hard work is a moral value and “anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing.” We weren’t just tricked into believing this. We like to believe it—at the very least, we liked to believe it when a respectable job was more or less a guarantee for anyone of sound mind and able body. As Petersen argues, for everyone sick of bullshit jobs, you can find plenty of people desperately in search of any sustainable work.

The jobs may be gone, but the shame is not. Without a “real” job, you are nothing. The ultimate and irrefutable solution here is to become nothing but your job. How can anyone accuse you of being nothing when you are a lawyer? The self outside your labor just delimits your work. You are a vessel for the sum total of your career.

In many ways, I think such bad faith lies behind the fear of bullshit jobs. If you have a bullshit job, it means you’re a bullshit person. If you do nothing at work, it means you are nothing. How can you answer the question “what am I?” without a job?

This, then, is the dilemma at the heart of bullshit jobs: we identify ourselves with our work, yet this work is never commensurate to our need for identity. It should be obvious that, taking Sartre’s perspective, there is no job that can be commensurate to humanity in this sense. Perhaps a job as a craftsman or a writer is more “real” than the oft mocked (and oft desired) email jobs: you walk away with a tangible task complete and a very clear idea of “what you do.” (I’m reminded of that webcomic saying that any job that can’t be described in three words or less is fake.) But this tangibility doesn’t make these jobs worthy of devotion. Cynically, they’re just fruitful paths for uninterrupted bad faith. A mechanic is not more human than a corporate legal consultant.

I fear that McCann’s “building something real” is just the same pursuit of bad faith. We want to identify ourselves with our jobs, but it’s harder when we can’t actually work. If we clear out the bullshit and build our little intrapreneurial spaces, we can become the workaholics we always wanted to be. We can freely be “marketers,” “consultants,” and “developers.” Still, it’s unclear how this gets us any closer to being humans.

What, then, would a good-faith answer to the problem of bullshit jobs be? Certainly, it’s not just finding better ways to identify with your job. Rather, good faith comes in the recognition of one’s own freedom and humanity in its fullest. It means seeing that you are always and inevitably free, always surrounded by choice, and always human.

As David Foster Wallace argued, freedom means choosing what to worship. As Petersen points out, McCann seems to think we should worship self-control: your life is at its best when you are calling all the shots. What you’re actually doing is secondary to the fact that you’re doing it of your own volition. Perhaps McCann wouldn’t agree with this when stated this way, but his decision to handwave the actual content of “corporate entrepreneurship” in favor of pointing to the independence it affords shows where his core concerns lie. Graeber, meanwhile, doesn’t explicitly state his devotion, though he seems to hope for a world where we can devote ourselves to pursuits like art and the humanities rather than spending our hours on domesticated make-work—perhaps he is pointing towards some form of the Thomistic transcendentals of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

Such grounding is necessary for a real answer. Worshipping control and independence is, I believe, a firm dead end. As we’ve seen already, plenty of forms of unfreedom will continue in any job. You will still deal with admin bullshit. You will sacrifice freedom in other parts of your life. (“Work from home” often means “work on and off from 8 AM to 10 PM.”) There is no way to guarantee control—your success in the worship of freedom is about luck.

In one of my preferred treatments of bullshit jobs (bias disclosure: the author was my best man), Anthony Scholle took Graeber’s critique as a platform to ask what it means for work to strive for good in the first place. Rather than taking “something real” for granted, he draws out the notion of work as directed towards human flourishing. There’s a particular teleological bent that we need to take when thinking about work: “Jobs, like all other work, should be done out of love to actualize some real good in the world.” When we think about human happiness and human fulfillment first, our needs at work become clearer.

We don’t need bullshitless work. We don’t need work that’s worth dying for. Human purpose isn’t about finding the one thing you do well and doing that exclusively. We need work that serves as a companion as we search for an understanding of our humanity.

McCann thinks that you should make the corporate world into your tool. Yet I don’t think he comes close to escaping its ontology. He says that the corporate world should be exploited “for building skills, for funding your real projects, for buying time while you figure out what matters to you.” “Building skills” and “funding projects” feels indistinguishable from the logic that governs corporate mission statements and retreats. “Figuring out what matters to you” is more promising, but McCann still can’t escape the idea that “what matters” is just a job.

The solution is not to reclaim Progress, Success, and Self-Sufficiency for yourself. The teleology of the corporate world is not going to save you. The goods of the workplace—success, financial security, and so on—are instrumental to the pursuit of the things that need no justification. There is no satisfying explanation for why humans want to find beauty and truth. These are axioms of our existence. We are searchers in pursuit of understanding, not machines waiting for a task. The Kafkaesque workplace renders these superfluous, telling workers to focus on their corner and make it as useful as possible.

Don’t spend your life waiting for the bullshitless job. Even if it exists, it cannot answer the real questions of human existence—as Gregor Samsa showed us, an all-consuming job can render these questions unanswerable up until the moment when we are deprived of everything. You are not your work. You are unfailingly human, terrifying though that may be.

Patrick Cavanaugh Koroly lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife and cat. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in several publications, including Convivium, Paris Lit Up, and The Savage Collective. He co-founded The Vocation Project, an educational collaboration focused on making philosophical ideas applicable to working life, and recently self-published the book From Work to Vocation along with his partner, entrepreneur Chris Farls.