Bullshit Jobs

 

 

I take the deaths of writers like David Graeber hard. 

Not only are dupes of the 1 percent and those longing for a Christ Saviour encircling (70 million in the U.S. at last count), but encountering someone with real character or original thinking these days is, it seems, increasingly difficult.

Books (mind-altering experiences) go beyond gifts, or mere generosity, and more so when they buck all trends and are written in a language meant for ordinary people outside of the self-perpetuating medieval cloister, I mean, the academic discipline. There's a price to pay for this, of course (see the Chronicle of Higher Education's article on his black balling in American academia).

Recently, I read Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Highly recommended. It was simultaneously a thrilling and mournful experience. Here are a few golden nuggets. 

On the crucial difference between shit and bullshit jobs:

Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they do not only work hard but also are held in low esteem for that very reason. But at least they know they're doing something useful. Those who work in 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.

Automation did, in fact, lead to mass unemployment. We have simply stopped the gap by adding dummy jobs that are effectively made up. A combination of political pressure from both right and left, a deeply held popular feeling that paid employment alone can make one a full moral person, and finally, a fear on the part of the upper classes...of what the laboring masses might get up to if they had too much leisure on their hands, has ensured that whatever the underlying reality, when it comes to official employment figures in wealthy countries, the needle should never jump too far from the range of 3 to 8 percent."

One the great paradox of modern work: 

(1) Most people's sense of dignity and self-worth is caught up in working for a living. (2) Most people hate their jobs.

It strikes me that recognizing that a great deal of work is not strictly productive but caring, and that there is always a caring aspect even to the most apparently impersonal work, does suggest one reason why it's so difficult to simply create a different society with a different set of rules.

Underlings have to constantly monitor what the boss is thinking; the boss doesn't have to care. That, in turn, is one reason, I believe, why psychological studies regularly find that people of working-class background are more accurate at reading other people's feelings, and more empathetic and caring, than those of middle-class, let alone wealthy, backgrounds."