Bullshit Jobs

Based on Wikipedia: Bullshit Jobs

The Job That Exists to Make Someone Feel Important

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine you're a receptionist at a company where almost no one ever walks through the front door. Your job, ostensibly, is to greet visitors. But there are no visitors. Days pass. Weeks. You sit at your desk, performing the theater of being busy, knowing deep down that if you vanished tomorrow, absolutely nothing would change.

Now imagine this isn't just you. Imagine it's half the workforce.

That's the provocative thesis of anthropologist David Graeber's 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Graeber didn't just argue that some jobs are pointless—he claimed that a staggering proportion of modern employment serves no real purpose, and worse, that the people doing these jobs know it. They're trapped in a strange purgatory: well-compensated, perhaps, but spiritually hollowed out by the knowledge that their labor contributes nothing meaningful to the world.

The Five Flavors of Futility

Graeber wasn't content with vague gestures toward bureaucratic bloat. He developed a taxonomy—a field guide to the species of meaningless work.

Flunkies exist primarily to make someone else feel important. Think of the executive who insists on having two assistants, not because the workload demands it, but because having subordinates signals status. Door attendants at buildings that have perfectly functional automatic doors. Store greeters whose welcome you'd rather skip.

Goons are the enforcers and manipulators—but not the kind who break kneecaps. These are lobbyists, telemarketers, corporate lawyers, and public relations specialists. Their jobs exist largely because competitors have them. If no one had lobbyists, companies wouldn't need lobbyists. It's an arms race of influence that produces nothing but advantage relative to others.

Duct tapers patch over problems that should have been solved properly in the first place. The programmer spending months working around a bug that should have been fixed in the original code. The airline employee whose entire job is calming down passengers whose luggage has been lost by a system designed badly from the start. These workers exist because someone upstream couldn't be bothered to do things right.

Box tickers create the illusion of accomplishment. They generate reports no one reads, conduct surveys whose results disappear into filing cabinets, fill out compliance forms that exist only so a company can claim it has a compliance program. The work is performed not to achieve anything but to allow someone to tick a box saying the work was performed.

Taskmasters are perhaps the cruelest category—people whose job is to assign work to others who don't need it. Middle managers creating meetings about meetings. Leadership coaches running mandatory workshops on synergy. These are the people who generate busywork, multiplying pointlessness throughout an organization.

The Numbers Don't Quite Add Up

Here's where things get complicated.

Graeber's original 2013 essay, published in the radical magazine Strike!, went viral. It crashed the publisher's website with over a million hits and was translated into a dozen languages. A YouGov poll subsequently found that thirty-seven percent of British workers thought their jobs didn't contribute meaningfully to the world. Graeber extrapolated from this and similar evidence to claim that more than half of all work was pointless.

But when researchers actually tested Graeber's claims using rigorous survey data, the picture shifted. A 2021 study using the European Working Conditions Survey found that fewer than twenty percent of workers felt their jobs were rarely or never useful—and that number was declining, not rising as Graeber had predicted. A 2023 study using American data came to similar conclusions: nineteen percent of respondents considered their work rarely or never useful to society. Significant, yes. But nowhere near the majority Graeber claimed.

More troubling for Graeber's theory: the workers who felt most useless weren't the hedge fund managers and corporate lawyers he'd singled out. Those "goons" and "taskmasters" reported being perfectly satisfied with their work. Instead, it was essential workers—garbage collectors, janitors, cleaners—who most often felt their jobs lacked meaning.

This is deeply counterintuitive. We need garbage collectors. Society would collapse in weeks without them. Yet they're the ones feeling useless?

Alienation: An Old Idea Returns

The researchers who tested Graeber's claims proposed a different explanation, one that reaches back to nineteenth-century philosophy: alienation.

Karl Marx, writing about factory workers in the Industrial Revolution, described alienation as the estrangement workers feel when they have no control over their labor, no connection to what they produce, and no sense of purpose in their daily tasks. You might be doing essential work—operating a machine that produces goods people genuinely need—but if you're treated as interchangeable, if your input is ignored, if your supervisor is hostile, you'll feel like your work is meaningless even when it isn't.

The studies found that toxic management and poor work culture were far better predictors of feeling useless than the objective usefulness of one's job. A garbage collector with a terrible boss and no autonomy might feel their work is pointless. A corporate lawyer with an engaged team and genuine intellectual challenges might find deep meaning in work that Graeber would classify as pure goonery.

This doesn't mean bullshit jobs don't exist. They clearly do. But the psychological violence Graeber described—the scar across our collective soul—might have less to do with the nature of the work itself and more to do with how we're treated while doing it.

Why Didn't Keynes's Dream Come True?

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a prediction. Given the rate at which technology was advancing, he believed, his grandchildren would work perhaps fifteen hours a week. Machines would do most of the labor. Humanity would face a new challenge: what to do with all our leisure time.

Keynes was spectacularly wrong—not about technology, but about how we'd use it.

Productivity has indeed skyrocketed. A farmer today produces vastly more food than one a century ago. Manufacturing that once required thousands of workers can be done by a handful of people supervising robots. The difficult, labor-intensive jobs can increasingly be performed by machines.

So where did all that extra productivity go?

According to Graeber, it went into creating pointless work. Rather than taking technological gains as leisure—shorter workweeks, earlier retirements—we invented new jobs. Many of them useful. But many of them, he argued, existing only to ensure that everyone remained busy. The prosperity extracted from technological advances was reinvested into industry and consumer growth rather than into buying ourselves more time.

The Puritan Shadow

Why would we do this to ourselves?

Graeber's answer reaches deep into cultural history. Work wasn't always considered virtuous. In classical Greece and Rome, the aristocracy viewed labor as degrading—something for slaves and lesser people. Leisure was the mark of civilization. The free citizen was free precisely because he didn't have to work.

This began to shift with thinkers like John Locke in the seventeenth century, who argued that labor was the source of property and, by extension, rights. But it was the Puritans who completed the transformation. In their theology, hard work became a moral duty, a sign of divine favor. Suffering through toil wasn't just necessary—it was noble. It built character. It proved your worth.

This Puritan work ethic seeped into the bones of capitalism. We now live in a culture where your job defines your identity, where "what do you do?" is the first question at parties, where unemployment feels like moral failure even when it's not your fault. We've internalized the belief that work determines self-worth.

And so, Graeber argued, we've created a civilization that manufactures pointless jobs rather than admit we don't all need to work forty hours a week to produce what we need. The political system reinforces this: politicians promise jobs, not meaningful jobs. Populations kept busy with work have less time and energy to question why things are the way they are.

The Problem Without a Script

One of Graeber's most insightful observations was about our emotional helplessness in the face of bullshit work. We don't have a cultural script for it.

If your spouse leaves you, there's a framework. Friends console you. Movies depict your situation. You know what you're supposed to feel and roughly how to process it. If you lose your job, there's a script too—dust off the resume, network, persevere.

But what if you have a job, and that job pays well, and you know it's completely pointless? What are you supposed to feel? Gratitude for the paycheck? Guilt for not working harder? Shame for caring? There's no roadmap.

Graeber compared this to unrequited love—another situation where society offers little guidance. You're left alone with feelings you can't quite name, resentful of those whose work genuinely matters, trapped in what Graeber called "profound psychological violence."

What Might Be Done

Graeber didn't just diagnose the problem. He proposed solutions, though he acknowledged they were radical.

Universal basic income—a livable payment to all citizens regardless of employment status—would break the link between survival and pointless labor. If people didn't need to work to eat, they could choose work that actually mattered to them. They could pursue creative projects, care for family members, engage in community life. The arbitrary forty-hour workweek could give way to natural rhythms of productivity, the way farmers work intensely during harvest and rest during winter, the way novelists write in bursts.

Graeber also called for stronger unions, which could advocate not just for higher wages but for the elimination of pointless work and the redistribution of meaningful labor.

These ideas remain controversial. Critics argue that universal basic income is unaffordable, that people need the structure work provides, that market competition should naturally eliminate inefficiencies (though Graeber would counter that market competition has manifestly failed to do so—bullshit jobs exist primarily in the private sector).

What's Really Wrong

Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Graeber's work wasn't his theory about bullshit jobs specifically. It was the conversation he started.

Whether or not half of all work is truly pointless, something is clearly amiss. Workers report feeling alienated, unfulfilled, trapped. Technology has advanced to an almost magical degree, yet we work roughly as much as our grandparents did. We have smartphones and year-round produce and same-day delivery, but we're anxious and depressed and wondering what it's all for.

The studies that challenged Graeber's numbers also confirmed something important: believing your work is useless genuinely damages your psychological health. It correlates with depression and anxiety. The scar Graeber described may be real even if its source is different than he thought.

Maybe the problem isn't bullshit jobs. Maybe it's jobs under bullshit conditions—work stripped of meaning by bad management, toxic culture, lack of autonomy. Maybe what workers need isn't necessarily different work but different workplaces: environments where they're treated as people rather than human resources, where their input matters, where the connection between effort and outcome is visible.

Or maybe Graeber was more right than the numbers suggest. After all, those studies measured whether workers felt their jobs were useless—not whether the jobs actually were. A well-paid lobbyist might report high job satisfaction while still doing work that's objectively harmful. A garbage collector might feel undervalued while doing work that's objectively essential.

The Philosopher's Technical Term

There's a delicious irony in Graeber's title. "Bullshit" isn't just a vulgar synonym for nonsense—it's a technical term in philosophy.

In 1986, Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote an essay that turned the word into serious philosophical vocabulary. According to Frankfurt, bullshit isn't the same as lying. A liar knows the truth and deliberately says something false. A bullshitter doesn't care about truth at all. The bullshitter's statements aren't designed to deceive about specific facts—they're designed to create an impression, to perform, to seem a certain way regardless of reality.

This maps perfectly onto Graeber's bullshit jobs. The box ticker doesn't lie about completing compliance reports—the reports are real. But the reports exist to create an impression of compliance, not to achieve actual compliance. The flunky doesn't lie about greeting visitors—visitors are greeted. But the greeting exists to make an executive feel important, not because anyone needed greeting.

Bullshit jobs, in Frankfurt's sense, are jobs dedicated to performance rather than reality, to seeming rather than being. They're not lies. They're something arguably worse: the replacement of genuine purpose with its hollow simulation.

The Conversation Continues

David Graeber died in 2020, just two years after Bullshit Jobs was published. He didn't live to see the pandemic reshape attitudes toward work, the "Great Resignation" that followed, or the ongoing debates about remote work, quiet quitting, and what we actually owe to employers who claim ownership of our waking hours.

But his questions remain urgent. If technology has made us productive enough that we could all work far less, why don't we? If many jobs are pointless, why do they persist? If work is supposed to give our lives meaning, why are so many workers miserable?

The answers are probably more complicated than any single theory can capture. Cultural inertia. Political incentives. Economic structures that benefit from keeping people busy and dependent. The human tendency to measure status by activity rather than achievement.

But the first step is asking the questions. The first step is admitting that maybe—just maybe—the way we've organized work isn't the only possible way. That the forty-hour week isn't a law of nature. That some of what we call work might be elaborate theater. That we might deserve better than spending our lives pretending to be busy.

Whether or not you agree with Graeber's answers, his questions are worth sitting with. After all, you might be reading this during work hours, pretending to look busy.

And if so—you're certainly not alone.