"We need work that serves as a companion as we search for an understanding of our humanity." This is it in a nutshell. Work has always been a friend to me. And I am so glad I read kafka as a teenager 60 Yr ago and so never had a boss, even if I have shovelled plenty of bullshit.
I have had some wonderful days shoveling bullshit (I think it was mostly chicken/pig shit, though I'm not sure). It gets a worse reputation than it deserves.
Patrick, I get it. And you did a good job of fleshing it out. But I couldn't help but embellish the bits that I thought were funny.
I do agree with much of it. Some great writers, like Herman Melville, lucked onto 'do nothing' jobs that paid them enough to survive, and left them with enough energy and creativity when they went home so that they could do the real work, namely, write.
You're right, and long before Kafka, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts mob chose to try and revive artisan making as both a personal project, and a resistance to industrial ways of being. Morris' influence on the Victorian aesthetic shows that it can be done, and done beautifully. On the other hand, doing any job - even those Graeber characterised as bullshit - with integrity, is worthwhile. If your integrity can't be maintained while doing it, then better not to do the job.
A job furnishes you with the means of survival. It is up to your wisdom to make use of the day that survival has bought you. Thank you for writing this. This comes at a time when I am seriously reconsidering my relationship to work.
Great piece. Dickens penned characters with bullshit jobs. Just to add low level tech workers also hate the tech industry as we deal with the bullshit without the big wages.
I reckon a lot of this boils down to the soft edges of definition in the discourse e.g. what precisely is meant by a bullshit job? Graeber, to his credit spends a lot of time in his book, wrestling with this and lands on a meaning that can be reduced to Bullshit Job = Job that lacks usefulness. It rests on an assumption that people fundamentally value being useful to others and if a job can be lifted out of existence without any significant impact on colleagues, or company or field, then it is a bullshit job.
This is different to how both McCann and Petersen define it, where Bullshit Job = Job that lacks agency or Bullshit Job = Job involving admin (with the underlying assumption that all admin is useless). I'd argue that these are insufficient definitions because, as you point out - moving from employee to self-employed does not overcome the problems of a 'valueless' career in finance or marketing, nor does it absolve us from the need to write emails or complete paperwork. However, I don't think Graeber actually makes the case that all Marketing/Finance/Corporate jobs are by definition bullshit nor that all meetings and paperwork are bullshit.
To this note I'd turn to another recent book, Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman. His thesis is that plenty of consultants, marketers, financiers etc could use their considerable skillsets to more valuable ends e.g. a marketing manager for a drinks company could use that same skillset to drive funding into the charity sector. Both marketing jobs might have the same level of bullshit by McCann and Petersens definitions but I'd be hard pushed to call the latter 'bullshit'.
Enjoyed your summary and will check out the book! Is your view then that the bullshittiness of a job could then be outweighed by its moral worth? I struggle a bit with that though as my first thought is that if a charity marketing job is to have moral worth then it has to achieve something, and so would be ‘useful’ in Graeber’s model.
I think marketing gets a lot of flack as it has a disagreeable premise: encourage people to spend more than they need to. This is something I battle with, but at the same time it is consumer spending that has driven most of the increased quality of life across the world through economic growth, so it’s usefulness becomes a vote on the morality of consumerism for me.
Graeber would argue that capitalism has already put a "price" on moral worth. He suggests that we already punish meaningful jobs by paying people less to do them and that there is an inverse relationship between pay and meaning. I.e. a teacher is paid less because the meaning of the job is part of their remuneration. A lawyer is paid well because their job is meaningless and therefore they require compensation.
Thanks for outlining that, James. Really interesting. I find it unconvincing though: it's a bit too neat as a reason, as it only incidentally interacts with supply and demand, regulation etc as drivers of incomes. And moral worth seems easy to conflate with prestige. All of this implies I need to get round to taking my untouched copy off the shelf!
I think what I'm trying to work out in my own head is the difference between:
a) bullshittiness within a job (i.e. tasks that are inefficient and don't serve much purpose in themselves other than some performative function for the company) and
b) bullshittiness of the job (i.e. the job itself serves no net-positive value - which might be moral worth but we could possibly think of other examples too, like your point here on consumer spending not always being the devil but being part of a function that increases quality of life, and so marketing serves a purpose)
So to take your point here, bullshit tasks within a job might be outweighed by the overall value (e.g. moral worth) of the job itself. It would still be better for the job to NOT have these bullshit tasks but job itself might not be bullshit because it serves a bigger purpose.
And for a job to be truly bullshit, I think it must serve no meaningful end other than for it to exist - like being an assistant manager where the manager requires no real assistance but the company structure requires a manager to have someone who assists (and there's an ego element to the managerial job that is boosted by having said assistant).
On a gut level, the bullshit jobs concept resonates pretty strongly with a lot of people, but fails a bit when we look at it closely because the term itself is a bit nebulous.
Someone described jobs to me as a 'bundle of tasks' combined with the qualia of how it feels / your relationships / how you approach problems etc, which your differentiation reminds me of. It may also be why the bullshit jobs concept resonates so much - as everyone, even UN Peacekeepers - feels some of their tasks are bullshit. But the 'bullshit tasks' could be a weak proof, as they're immediately cancelled out if the job feels meaningful (you're a pointless assistant manager supporting the ego of someone who in turn is saving thousands of lives).
But the qualia of the job is probably much more abstract and hard to measure - leading to uneasiness/uncertainty about the job's overall bullshittiness. It's also endlessly contestable: "Yeah but actually tobacco companies employ farmers in Malawi" etc.
I agree with you that this probably leads to the bar for someone to confidently say that their job is bullshit is actually quite high!
I don't see how this engages with what I took to be the core idea of a bullshit job for Graeber, namely that your work is good for nothing. I like the example of having to stay at work after all the actual work is done just because you are paid to be there. This has nothing to do directly with agency. And this kind of bullshit job I would venture to be very recent. Probably other of Graeber's paradigm examples are older.
So how is the idea of useless jobs itself bullshit? You still need to address this.
“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.”
It’s been a few years since I’ve read it, but I’m not convinced Patrick read Graeber’s work on this topic, or at least not with much attention. Because the above quote is something Graeber would have wholeheartedly agreed with. The piece comes across as confused because it is engaging with multiple, clearly diverging uses of the same term.
Bullshit here does not refer to tedium (e.g. emails) or even necessarily lack of autonomy (e.g. a boss breathing down your neck). It’s largely about if the job provides and genuine value to the world, and if the world would be better off without it. Being a nurse is not a bullshit job, even if it now comes with more paperwork. A corporate lawyer is a good candidate for a bullshit job, but a human rights lawyer perhaps not. The devil being in the detail, of course.
Graeber is not suggesting that we could all attain non-bullshit jobs and then live happily ever after. Principally he’s identifying a phenomenon which has accelerated in the last few decades. Beyond that, his anti-capitalism isn’t just some adjunct to his bullshit jobs definition. It’s a foundation of his worldview. He was an anthropologist, and his work can be summed up with his oft quoted statement that we made all of this up and we might just as easily make it up differently. He’s an Enlightenment philosopher through and through, and might be accused of the limitations of that frame. But he’s certainly working with ideas much larger and more consequential than dreaming of non-bullshit jobs. I read recently about Hannah Arendt’s distinction between labor and work, and I suspect Graeber would basically agree.
I think this is conflating two things, but I also think Graeber conflated two things:
—alienation from your job is not necessarily the same as it having no social value. You are bored as an accountant at the chair producing factory; you are exploited and never even see any chairs. But your work remains vital to the continued production of chairs, which are very nice
—a job with no social value is not the same as a job with no corporate value. A lot of the jobs in *Bullshit Jobs* sounded like they came about through evolutionary arms races: a company needs to hire corporate lawyers, because the corporate lawyers from other companies will outlitigate them if they don’t. Society spends lots on unfulfilled lawyers, but the logic of capitalism ticks on
—a job which is *useless to everyone* might still exist. You might think you contribute nothing to society *and also nothing to the organisation you work for.*
This is something people might say doesn’t happen in companies because of the powers of the free market, but I am unsure of this. I think sometimes the Big Boss has an idea of what the free market wants which leads to jobs that really don’t do anything. Sometimes social dynamics within organisation create roles that will actively destroy value.
Those seem like *bullshit jobs,* but they’re *not the same kind of bullshit jobs* as the other two examples here. I think often it’s this third thing that gets assumed, which would be ominous if I am correct
I think there is a great benefit to identifying with your job. Nurses and teachers have strong unions. If you see your work as completely separate to yourself, it’s easy to use money to justify attaching yourself to a harmful organization or industry. You are what you do.
Damn dude. Banger. And mccann is a) a full of shit AI grifter in training and b) getting way too much buzz over this. Your article should be 10x as viral. But nuance. Complexity.
I have a master's degree and work in a grocery. Can somebody tell me how to get one of these so called bullshit jobs?
Luck
Lie on your resume. If the job is bullshit, then how will they ever find out?
"We need work that serves as a companion as we search for an understanding of our humanity." Bravo (on the entire essay).
Glad you enjoyed!
I'll need to re-read it; just wanted to thank you, since it's a very timely piece, personally for me.
"We need work that serves as a companion as we search for an understanding of our humanity." This is it in a nutshell. Work has always been a friend to me. And I am so glad I read kafka as a teenager 60 Yr ago and so never had a boss, even if I have shovelled plenty of bullshit.
I have had some wonderful days shoveling bullshit (I think it was mostly chicken/pig shit, though I'm not sure). It gets a worse reputation than it deserves.
Patrick, I get it. And you did a good job of fleshing it out. But I couldn't help but embellish the bits that I thought were funny.
I do agree with much of it. Some great writers, like Herman Melville, lucked onto 'do nothing' jobs that paid them enough to survive, and left them with enough energy and creativity when they went home so that they could do the real work, namely, write.
Best!
You're right, and long before Kafka, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts mob chose to try and revive artisan making as both a personal project, and a resistance to industrial ways of being. Morris' influence on the Victorian aesthetic shows that it can be done, and done beautifully. On the other hand, doing any job - even those Graeber characterised as bullshit - with integrity, is worthwhile. If your integrity can't be maintained while doing it, then better not to do the job.
Really really interesting, thank you Patrick. Amie
A job furnishes you with the means of survival. It is up to your wisdom to make use of the day that survival has bought you. Thank you for writing this. This comes at a time when I am seriously reconsidering my relationship to work.
This is really good; I too will return to it for another pass.
Great piece. Dickens penned characters with bullshit jobs. Just to add low level tech workers also hate the tech industry as we deal with the bullshit without the big wages.
I reckon a lot of this boils down to the soft edges of definition in the discourse e.g. what precisely is meant by a bullshit job? Graeber, to his credit spends a lot of time in his book, wrestling with this and lands on a meaning that can be reduced to Bullshit Job = Job that lacks usefulness. It rests on an assumption that people fundamentally value being useful to others and if a job can be lifted out of existence without any significant impact on colleagues, or company or field, then it is a bullshit job.
This is different to how both McCann and Petersen define it, where Bullshit Job = Job that lacks agency or Bullshit Job = Job involving admin (with the underlying assumption that all admin is useless). I'd argue that these are insufficient definitions because, as you point out - moving from employee to self-employed does not overcome the problems of a 'valueless' career in finance or marketing, nor does it absolve us from the need to write emails or complete paperwork. However, I don't think Graeber actually makes the case that all Marketing/Finance/Corporate jobs are by definition bullshit nor that all meetings and paperwork are bullshit.
To this note I'd turn to another recent book, Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman. His thesis is that plenty of consultants, marketers, financiers etc could use their considerable skillsets to more valuable ends e.g. a marketing manager for a drinks company could use that same skillset to drive funding into the charity sector. Both marketing jobs might have the same level of bullshit by McCann and Petersens definitions but I'd be hard pushed to call the latter 'bullshit'.
Enjoyed your summary and will check out the book! Is your view then that the bullshittiness of a job could then be outweighed by its moral worth? I struggle a bit with that though as my first thought is that if a charity marketing job is to have moral worth then it has to achieve something, and so would be ‘useful’ in Graeber’s model.
I think marketing gets a lot of flack as it has a disagreeable premise: encourage people to spend more than they need to. This is something I battle with, but at the same time it is consumer spending that has driven most of the increased quality of life across the world through economic growth, so it’s usefulness becomes a vote on the morality of consumerism for me.
Graeber would argue that capitalism has already put a "price" on moral worth. He suggests that we already punish meaningful jobs by paying people less to do them and that there is an inverse relationship between pay and meaning. I.e. a teacher is paid less because the meaning of the job is part of their remuneration. A lawyer is paid well because their job is meaningless and therefore they require compensation.
Thanks for outlining that, James. Really interesting. I find it unconvincing though: it's a bit too neat as a reason, as it only incidentally interacts with supply and demand, regulation etc as drivers of incomes. And moral worth seems easy to conflate with prestige. All of this implies I need to get round to taking my untouched copy off the shelf!
I think what I'm trying to work out in my own head is the difference between:
a) bullshittiness within a job (i.e. tasks that are inefficient and don't serve much purpose in themselves other than some performative function for the company) and
b) bullshittiness of the job (i.e. the job itself serves no net-positive value - which might be moral worth but we could possibly think of other examples too, like your point here on consumer spending not always being the devil but being part of a function that increases quality of life, and so marketing serves a purpose)
So to take your point here, bullshit tasks within a job might be outweighed by the overall value (e.g. moral worth) of the job itself. It would still be better for the job to NOT have these bullshit tasks but job itself might not be bullshit because it serves a bigger purpose.
And for a job to be truly bullshit, I think it must serve no meaningful end other than for it to exist - like being an assistant manager where the manager requires no real assistance but the company structure requires a manager to have someone who assists (and there's an ego element to the managerial job that is boosted by having said assistant).
On a gut level, the bullshit jobs concept resonates pretty strongly with a lot of people, but fails a bit when we look at it closely because the term itself is a bit nebulous.
Someone described jobs to me as a 'bundle of tasks' combined with the qualia of how it feels / your relationships / how you approach problems etc, which your differentiation reminds me of. It may also be why the bullshit jobs concept resonates so much - as everyone, even UN Peacekeepers - feels some of their tasks are bullshit. But the 'bullshit tasks' could be a weak proof, as they're immediately cancelled out if the job feels meaningful (you're a pointless assistant manager supporting the ego of someone who in turn is saving thousands of lives).
But the qualia of the job is probably much more abstract and hard to measure - leading to uneasiness/uncertainty about the job's overall bullshittiness. It's also endlessly contestable: "Yeah but actually tobacco companies employ farmers in Malawi" etc.
I agree with you that this probably leads to the bar for someone to confidently say that their job is bullshit is actually quite high!
I love that description. It definitely resonates with my own thoughts on this.
I don't see how this engages with what I took to be the core idea of a bullshit job for Graeber, namely that your work is good for nothing. I like the example of having to stay at work after all the actual work is done just because you are paid to be there. This has nothing to do directly with agency. And this kind of bullshit job I would venture to be very recent. Probably other of Graeber's paradigm examples are older.
So how is the idea of useless jobs itself bullshit? You still need to address this.
“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.”
It’s been a few years since I’ve read it, but I’m not convinced Patrick read Graeber’s work on this topic, or at least not with much attention. Because the above quote is something Graeber would have wholeheartedly agreed with. The piece comes across as confused because it is engaging with multiple, clearly diverging uses of the same term.
Bullshit here does not refer to tedium (e.g. emails) or even necessarily lack of autonomy (e.g. a boss breathing down your neck). It’s largely about if the job provides and genuine value to the world, and if the world would be better off without it. Being a nurse is not a bullshit job, even if it now comes with more paperwork. A corporate lawyer is a good candidate for a bullshit job, but a human rights lawyer perhaps not. The devil being in the detail, of course.
Graeber is not suggesting that we could all attain non-bullshit jobs and then live happily ever after. Principally he’s identifying a phenomenon which has accelerated in the last few decades. Beyond that, his anti-capitalism isn’t just some adjunct to his bullshit jobs definition. It’s a foundation of his worldview. He was an anthropologist, and his work can be summed up with his oft quoted statement that we made all of this up and we might just as easily make it up differently. He’s an Enlightenment philosopher through and through, and might be accused of the limitations of that frame. But he’s certainly working with ideas much larger and more consequential than dreaming of non-bullshit jobs. I read recently about Hannah Arendt’s distinction between labor and work, and I suspect Graeber would basically agree.
I think this is conflating two things, but I also think Graeber conflated two things:
—alienation from your job is not necessarily the same as it having no social value. You are bored as an accountant at the chair producing factory; you are exploited and never even see any chairs. But your work remains vital to the continued production of chairs, which are very nice
—a job with no social value is not the same as a job with no corporate value. A lot of the jobs in *Bullshit Jobs* sounded like they came about through evolutionary arms races: a company needs to hire corporate lawyers, because the corporate lawyers from other companies will outlitigate them if they don’t. Society spends lots on unfulfilled lawyers, but the logic of capitalism ticks on
—a job which is *useless to everyone* might still exist. You might think you contribute nothing to society *and also nothing to the organisation you work for.*
This is something people might say doesn’t happen in companies because of the powers of the free market, but I am unsure of this. I think sometimes the Big Boss has an idea of what the free market wants which leads to jobs that really don’t do anything. Sometimes social dynamics within organisation create roles that will actively destroy value.
Those seem like *bullshit jobs,* but they’re *not the same kind of bullshit jobs* as the other two examples here. I think often it’s this third thing that gets assumed, which would be ominous if I am correct
I think there is a great benefit to identifying with your job. Nurses and teachers have strong unions. If you see your work as completely separate to yourself, it’s easy to use money to justify attaching yourself to a harmful organization or industry. You are what you do.
Damn dude. Banger. And mccann is a) a full of shit AI grifter in training and b) getting way too much buzz over this. Your article should be 10x as viral. But nuance. Complexity.
Anyway thanks!