The pain of useless work

⊕There is a depressing mens rea here: the worker knows the work is unnecessary, and still has to help maintain the fiction.Huge swaths of people in Europe and North America, in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.

I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless?

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There is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity and labor when one secretly feels one's job should not exist?

This is the thread that stayed with me. The fact that people know that their jobs are not meaningful, or even worse, are actually bullshit.Counter-reading to chase: Soffia, M., Wood, A. J., and Burchell, B. (2022). “Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs.” Work, Employment and Society, 36(5), 816–840. Their abstract says the perception of useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, but that their evidence contradicts Graeber’s main causal claims. And that this can profoundly affect that person. Especially considering the time spent doing this “bullshit work”.

The structural causes of bullshit jobs

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week.

The article tenuously claims that the holders of capital shape the work done by labor toward what they deem important. Maybe this is fleshed out more in his book.

The article also dismisses the claim that the reason is because we have higher demands as consumers, without giving too much reasoning behind that.

⊕When I was early in my law career, I’d be working 80-100 hour weeks, with so much of that time being just waiting to get busy. There was not much work to be done in the morning, but at midnight, we were frantic.But he kind of makes a point that hit home:

More and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hours a week on paper, but effectively working 15 hours, just as Keynes predicted.

The point there is that although we work “more,” we are sometimes really just at work, while working something closer to the hours Keynes predicted.