Bullshit Jobs is a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, and their consequences.

Everyone is probably familiar with jobs with a fancy title but seem to do nothing. It got the author David Graeber thinking: are these jobs really useless? Are the people in the jobs blissfully ignorant, or do the people in the jobs know it’s bullshit too?

The YouGov poll in the UK found that only 50% of those with full-time jobs were entirely sure that their job made any sort of meaningful contribution to the world, and 37% were absolutely sure that it didn’t. A poll by the firm Schouten & Nelissen in Holland found that number was as high as 40% of those that thought their job made absolutely no difference.

Graeber collected data as well as anecdotes about how people were spending their working lives and what they felt about it. He got emails from thousands of people who felt that they were wasting time and energy on their jobs. It’s as if someone is making up pointless jobs for the sake of it—just to keep people busy while they’re not actually achieving or contributing anything. Graeber found that whilst it’s kind of funny to talk about on the surface, it can leave scars deep down—both on the individual level and on the collective societal psyche.

Shit Job VS Bullshit Job

There is an important difference between jobs that are pointless (bullshit jobs) and jobs that are merely bad but serve a purpose (shit jobs). Bullshit jobs pay quite well and offer excellent working conditions, but they’re just pointless. Shit Jobs are usually not at all bullshit. They typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society. It’s just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly.

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.

5 Types Of Bullshit Jobs

1. Flunkies

Flunky jobs primarily exist to make someone else look or feel important. Throughout recorded history, rich and powerful people would surround themselves with servants, clients, sycophants, and minions of one sort or another.

The opinion is that you can’t be magnificent without an entourage. For the truly magnificent, the very uselessness of the uniformed retainers hovering around you is the greatest testimony to your greatness.

For example: well into the Victorian era, wealthy families in England would still employ footmen—they were servants whose entire purpose was to run alongside carriages, checking for bumps in the road. Servants of this sort are normally given some token job to justify their existence, but it’s really just a cover. In reality, the whole point is to employ attractive young people in flashy uniforms that make the rich look good and powerful.

2. Goons

Goons are referring to jobs that have some kind of aggressive element, but crucially, they only exist because other people employ them. The most obvious example of this is the national armed forces.

If no one had armies, no one would need armies. This concept applies to a range of other less-physical jobs as well—like PR specialists, lobbyists, telemarketers, or corporate lawyers. Organisations hire corporate lawyers not to protect them against doing something illegal, but to protect them against other corporate lawyers from other firms. There are firms seeding negative PR about your company, so you need a PR team to counteract that.

If all of the corporate lawyers and marketing gurus and telemarketers vanished off the world in a puff of smoke, they probably wouldn’t be missed (and you could argue that the world would actually be a little better). So many of the people who hold these jobs know and admit that they feel that their jobs have no social value.

3. Duct Tapers

Duct tapers jobs that exist only because of a glitch or a fault. Duct tapers are there to solve a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. The job is like putting a bandaid over a gaping wound where the scab keeps getting picked off; if they just stitched up the wound once and for all, you wouldn’t need bandaids anymore.

For example: a coder. Pablo says he basically has two jobs in one. One job is working on the core technologies and solving challenging problems. The other one is taking a bunch of core technologies and applying some duct tape to make them all work together and talk to each other. The first part of the job is extremely useful, but the second part is utterly useless and shouldn’t even exist if things were done properly in the first place.

4. Box Tickers

A box ticker is an employee who exists only to enable an organisation to claim it’s doing something.

For Example: an employee in an aged care facility claimed:  “My job was to interview residents and fill out recreation forms that listed their preferences of what games and activities they most liked to be involved in. The problem was that the form was filed away and promptly forgotten. My boss saw filling out the forms as the most important part of my job, even though she never looked at it nor used it. She used to give me hell if I ever fell a day behind on them. The residents hated doing it too, as word had gotten around that nothing was actually being done about it. The form was simply a way of ticking the box, to show that they’d at least asked the question and written it down. it was a way of pretending that they card about the residents, even though they really didn’t.

5. Taskmasters

Type 1

These jobs are almost the exact opposite of flunkies. They are unnecessary superiors rather than unnecessary subordinates. Task Masters’ sole purpose is to assign work to other people. But these jobs are bullshit if the manager can admit that without their intervention, the work would still get done regardless.

Type 2

If type 1 is merely assigning tasks,  type 2 actually causes harm by creating extra bullshit work.

Conclusion

As an individual, you can identify the parts of your work that are bullshit, and acknowledge them as such. As a society, we can start a conversation that works toward a better distribution of labour and energy. You might argue that giving people more freedom over how they choose to use their time could lead to a bunch of inefficiencies. But, it would be difficult to become more inefficient than what we currently have—given somewhere between 37-40% of people know that their job is complete bullshit.

This is a powerful argument for human freedom if you follow this book all the way through to the endpoint. Most of us like to talk about freedom in the abstract, and even claim that it’s the most important thing for anyone to fight or die for. But we don’t think a lot about what being free or practising freedom might actually mean.

The main point of Bullshit Jobs isn’t to propose concrete policy prescriptions or change laws. Bullshit Jobs is a prompt to start thinking about what a genuinely free society might actually be like.

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