This is my view on “Bullshit Jobs: a theory” by anthropologist David Graeber about the rise of pointless work and what we can do about it.
How did this book come to me.
I acquired this book as a gift from a friend. It’s a reminder that it would be better to pass a book onto someone else rather than let it sit on your shelf gathering dust. If you don’t think you will read it again give it to a friend or donate it, if you want to read it again a few years later, just buy it again.
What is this book about?
There are many reviews and summaries available on the internet about this book already. So I’ll try to keep it about my point of view and about what I learned from this book.
Defining bullshit jobs
Definition
What are “bullshit jobs” according to the author?
“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.” David Graeber
A note
Before we occupy any points of view on this book, I think it is best we take into account that David Graeber studied anthropology, the study of human behaviour. This is also the point of view David adopts when conducting his study for this book. Meaning, he doesn’t define “bullshit jobs” with an exact or mathematically correct theory but looks at it with a psychological perspective and from the standpoint of the employee who performs the bullshit job. So, in my opinion, it is possible to argue if certain jobs are in fact completely useless.
For example, a “flunky” as mentioned in the book, is someone who stands around doing nothing useful, just to make someone else look important. It could be argued that they actually do have an important role if the image and appearance of the boss is really important for the company’s revenue. But this is from the perspective of the boss or the company and not from that of the employee. So, David wonders what the psychological effects are on the employee and by extend, which effects this has on our society and what we can do about it.
We also need to keep in mind that people might feel their job is useless while actually, it’s not. Or people can think their job is useful while it is not. This can have an impact on the surveys. However, in certain types of jobs, the amount of people who report that their job is useless is disproportionately high. Like mentioned in this article: The consequences of having a ‘bullshit job, from an interview of professor Robert Dur by NPO Radio 1 (28/02/2022).
How did they come to be and why do they exist?
According to the research done by mr. Graeber, bullshit jobs find their origin in the Sovjet Union. After the downfall of the Russian royal family and the killing of Tsar Nicholas II, Vladimir Lenin rose to power. Lenin wanted to establish a socialist nation along Marxist lines as was written down in the political pamphlet: The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And so, the Sovjet Union came to be.
‘Sovjet’ means council or advisors, so Sovjet Union would be the union of the advisors. But the political party actually comes forth from the workers union. Which was a group opposing the aristocracy in Russia fighting for the working people. Therefore “Sovjet” also translates to workers council. They promoted work as something honourable, the more you worked the better it was, and the more people you could employ the more honourable you were. It didn’t really matter if the work was useful. Employers also hired workers out of fear for not having enough people when they were needed in the future.
These days
So that was mainly a political and idealistic approach to work. Yet, these days, Graeber has found, there still are lots of useless jobs, and more so in the private sector than in governmental jobs. How come? Well, in the sovjet union the country took pride in making everybody work. In the same way the “decision makers” (middle managers etc.) also take pride in employing a large number of people. And, these days people take pride in working 40 hours a week. So, a lot of times people are happy as long as they have work, even if it is useless.
Why do these companies not just fire the people that don’t contribute to the profits you ask? There still happens to be a market for the services of people with useless jobs. So, if they bring in money, why fire them? It’s a little more complicated than that, unfortunately. Work wasn’t invented 1 century ago, work exists almost as long as humans do. So, it evolved more like an organism with a very complex biological structure.
Where is the market?
One example of a market for useless jobs is arguably our materialism. We buy so many things we don’t need in fact we would lead much better lives without them. Still, we buy these things for a variety of reasons: to impress others, to go with the latest trends or just plain addiction to something. All these things need to be fabricated so people need to be employed.
Another one is the inefficient structures of our bureaucracies. This can be for both our governments as private companies. Sometimes these systems are so complicated nobody knows where to begin to streamline them. And a lot of times nobody really wants to streamline them because cutting out others may mean you could be cut out as well someday. And why do something about it when things are good as they are now, for you personally? People don’t really tend to act for the greater purpose all that often.
If you want to have a proper concise of the book definitely watch this video from the YouTube channel How Money works: Your Job Achieves Nothing… (probably). It presents a good, overall image of the problem of bullshit jobs and mainly uses the discussed book as it’s source.
What are the consequences?
The consequences can be personal and societal. If people really believe that their job is useless, they tend to lose motivation and can, eventually in combination with other factors, slide into depression. If this happens to many people or most people of certain industries, it can have a depressing effect on society.
Then there also is the waste of money. Graeber argues that we have invented useless jobs because of our perception of what work is, and that we could have our society running with a lot less work. Just like the economist John Maynard Keynes speculated in 1930. So that would mean we are wasting lots of money at the moment. I don’t know if this is entirely true for there are many industries screaming for more workers. And yet so many people report having a bullshit job. This means bullshit jobs are having a stagnating effect on our economies. We could make a lot more progress if people were funnelled from their useless job to a more useful job. If on top of that we can shorten our workweeks, we’d have a win-win situation.
To freshen up my mind about who speculated about the 15-hour work week I resorted to the following article: It’s time to put the 15-hour work week back on the agenda from www.TheConversation.com.
Sometimes having a bullshit job is not all that bad. It is possible you’d want a bullshit job because sometimes this means you can be home at a decent hour every day, you don’t need to have any stress about work and maybe you have plenty of time to work on your own, useful, projects.
What can we do about them?
Once we become aware of what bullshit jobs are we can train ourselves to spot them and avoid getting into one. Or if we already are in one, look for ways to make them more useful, to us, the company and/or society. We could also just re-evaluate our current job and decide whether it’s time to move on to another job or not. All in all, the effect of this wouldn’t be felt very soon. And there is still political pressure at play that would actually like to keep bullshit jobs in existence. Both left and right winged political parties often agree that the solution to a lot of problems is more jobs.
Another thing we could do, has to do with our mindset. Up until now people are ridiculed a lot of times for not working. “If one is not working that must mean one is a failure.” (Or has made so much money that he or she doesn’t have to work anymore.) It doesn’t matter if there is work to be done or not. If we would focus more on people fulfilling useful tasks, following their passion doing what makes them happy. And if we would encourage people to clock off when the job is done instead of when the day is over. I believe we would create a happier and more effective society.
An interview of David Graeber on Bullshit Jobs.
Opinion
This is a very interesting and entertaining book to me. The Author manages to explain the issues of the current job market clearly, sometimes with a comic twist, and then presents some solutions to those issues. You need to be awake and stay focussed to read it but it is not that hard to digest. It has made me think about all sorts of jobs these days and whether they could be classified as partly or complete bullshit jobs.
The book definitely opened my eyes and made me think about the subjects that were bespoke. And that’s what a book like this is meant to do. I believe David Graeber knows his profession and has done a lot of thorough research in order to write it. Yet we have to stay objective and be open to constructive criticism. I’m sure a lot of people follow suit in his opinion, probably a lot of experts as well. But I can also believe that people wouldn’t agree or completely agree with him.
Now, let’s hope people will talk about it more and more so that eventually our society will evolve into something new and fresh with happier, purpose driven people living an effective life.
Thanks for reading
Thank you for reading my review. It took me a long time to write it as I lost inspiration and motivation many times. And over time it got worse because what was once fresh in my mind from the book got pushed further and further to the back. That’s why I had to resort to other reviews and articles about the book as well as YouTube to freshen up my memory. That’s not a completely bad thing, because now I have added some other points of view to my view, and I’ve repeated some things which should make everything stick better in the long run.
I hope you enjoyed reading it. And, as always, if I wrote something which doesn’t ring true to you, you don’t agree or found a mistake please let me know in the comment section below.