John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that labor-saving technologies and automation would lead to a 15-hour workweek by the time his grandchildren came of age. Keynes never had children and thus never had grandchildren. However, if he’d had, they would not have seen a 15 hour workweek in their lifetime. What they would have experienced instead is the advent and rise of Bullshit jobs and meaningless work.
Anthropologist, David Graeber, wrote a book in 2018 called Bullshit Jobs, A Theory. Graeber posits that work for many has become “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.” Graeber contends that more than half the work being done by people today is pointless.
Bullshit jobs are everywhere
Everyday I see people doing work that is totally inconsequential and I know that they know (sometimes subconsciously) that what they do is irrelevant. But they ignore this fact because it doesn’t bare thinking about and it delivers a paycheck. So they do the work and spend a huge amount of time and effort trying to make their jobs seem important and fruitful.
The way people go about showing that their works is valuable is by appearing busy. As long as we don’t look like we’re idle everyone assumes that we must be engaged in something significant. And there are many ways the corporate world allows us to appear busy. We have meetings, we send emails, we send emails late at night and we keep our faces glued to our mobile phones when we’re picking up a coffee, because, well fuck, if I don’t check this email now, the world is going to end.
However, all this bullshit work, and all this effort expended on making it look like the work we do is valuable is what makes large corporations slow and easy targets for disruption. People who don’t, and in many cases can’t, add value insert themselves into projects and initiatives in order to create the illusion of doing ‘real work’. They demand attention, approval-authority and tend to create more meaningless work.
Meaningless work begets meaningless work
And meaningless work begets more meaningless work. People who have jobs that are superfluous also understand that having large teams report into them further creates the expected illusion of doing meaningful work. And it does create that illusion, while creating a whole other group of people who do work that is pointless. A whole other group who need to justify their presence at a company. A group of people who believe that being in ‘important’ meetings might lead to work that is fulfilling and assure them job security.
Companies get bloated, initiatives are stymied and get caught up in pointless debates where people who shouldn’t have a point of view demand to be heard and considered. And the reason they demand being considered is because they’re scared they’re going to be found out. Which I now consider as another form of impostor syndrome.
Bullshit jobs are horrible
And the psychological effects of having people do soul destroying work while at the same time forcing them to cover up that they don’t do anything of any great value is immeasurable. The 19th Century prison system forced prisoners to do hard, meaningless labour. Society demanded that goal be a punishment and nothing breaks the human spirit faster than doing work that has no meaning. It boggles the mind that we now expect law abiding citizens to do work that they know could just as easily not be done.
Knowing your role is expendable creates a feeling of being exposed, constantly in fight-or-flight mode. Which makes people defensive, forces them to work harder at looking busy; doing work that erodes their dignity and their sense of self worth. In turn; anxiety, burnout, depression are words that have become part of our corporate landscape. In trying to address the symptoms of bullshit work, companies offer employees yoga lessons, meditation and mindfulness classes, psychological support, ping pong tables and duvet days.
Perhaps we should start by asking, ‘do we really need this and will someone doing this feel respected and valued?’ Maybe we should give employees the right to say ‘no’ to work that they know wont accomplish anything. And maybe managers need to focus on having their team to focus on doing less but more important work.
And if there isn’t enough valuable work to go around, maybe it’s time we had a meaningful conversation about the role work plays in our society. It’s also time we addressed the elephant in the room; let’s start talking about universal basic income.