Graeber’s essay is still quite readable and captures what many people intuitively suspect about their own jobs, but it does so without much evidence and employs an alarming number of abstractions (whenever somebody writes “the ruling class” or “our society” without expanding on what they mean, watch out).
But I think what Graeber does usefully touch on is the vital psychological role that work has for many of us. I’m generally in agreement with Freud on that:
“No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work.”
I sometimes define real work as something where you shower afterwards, not beforehand like most of the rest of us do. I suspect there’s something about that kind of work that’s more inherently satisfying than, say, pushing paper. Perhaps it’s just the physical activity involved.
But at the same time, some of these jobs really do need to be automated. Think of agricultural stoop labor. One reason why there’s always a chronic labor shortage in California agriculture is because the work is so physically demanding. The recent immigrants who do most of this work sensibly go on to other jobs as soon as possible.
Freud also thought the examination dream so many of us have had was a recent development in human history. That seems reasonable. Our forebears were probably too busy surviving, gleaning a potato field in Poland, for example, to have that kind of anxiety dream; likely they dreamed about food, not exams or jobs.
As for superfluous jobs, when Musk eliminated half of Twitter’s workforce, many hated him for that. But isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work?
And look at some of the WPA work of the 30s: many of those national park lookouts and rock walls are still there, in good shape, now part of the park system’s aesthetic. Yet those were so-called “make work” jobs.
Boots Riley’s 2018 movie, Sorry to Bother You, deals with telemarketers in a slightly alternative universe and efforts to unionize them. One of my favorite lines is when Steven Yeun’s union organizer mentions that they organized the LA sign twirlers the year before. That’s so funny: is sign twirling, a goofy kind of advertising, a necessary job, or a superfluous one?
The movie is currently on the Amazon Prime streaming service:
As for the number of poet-musicians, I think most people are indifferent to poetry and many of the rest actively dislike it, so maybe we have about the right number, if not a surplus.
In the Chinese short story Folding Beijing, someone from the working class discovers that all the work they do could be performed by machines, but the rulers allow people to do it so that they have work. Some people like bullshit jobs. For example, we know of someone with a PhD who became a road sweeper because it gave him time to think. I'm not saying that I would like such a job, but it strikes me that this is a matter of degree and nuance. Because, looked at from one perspective, ALL jobs are bullshit jobs, or most of them.
I'm more concerned with bullshit tasks. For example, in one place I worked the powers-that-be decided we all had to submit time sheets to show what we'd been doing all week. That took an hour last thing on a Friday. I was convinced that nobody ever read them, or would be able to query them even if they did. I designed the time sheet in an Excel spreadsheet, and set the spreadsheet up to complete the timesheet randomly. It didn't look much different from the real thing, and took only a few seconds to do. I never quite had the courage to use it though. I wish I had now.
In England, despite the government telling schools they no longer needed to assign 'levels' to students' work, some headteachers still ask for that to be done. So I created a random Levels generator, which I describe in a forthcoming (11th Feb 23) post called 6 ways to respond to requests for pointless data.
What Sam says about the high and mighty looking down their noses at the people doing the jobs nobody really wants. They had a bit of a come-uppance in the 1970s when the garbage collectors went on strike. There's nothing like mounds of uncollected rubbish to make people re-evaluate their attitudes.
Sam, What a fab way to open our posting weeks with guests on Fridays: Hurrah! We already have a line-up on the arts in the broadest sense—and that means folks working hard in this difficult world where it’s hard to make a living. Having done my “time,” so to speak, in corporate America before I could afford to write fiction and memoir and teach again, I so get this. I’ve been trying to line up two Substack-ers doing great work and whether I get them or not, I want to give shoutouts to https://austenconnection.substack.com (still hoping, Jane!--write me!) and https://dadadrummer.substack.com. ~ Mary @ mltabor@me.com
This lines up rather well with my disillusionment with academe, which is supposed to be one of those places of refuge for poet-musicians and other idealists, but which more often resembles something like a factory. This owes in part to the tenure system, a 4-6 year window in which an academic feverishly strives to demonstrate their worth by publishing little-read essays in niche journals, serving on committees, and trying to toe the line between acceptable rigor and pleasing a student audience not much interested in intellectual rigor. The sheer scale of writing produced by the tenure system vastly outpaces any demand from readers. If you are lucky, you stumble upon a research agenda that you find personally meaningful and that attracts a following, of sorts. But there is a good deal of work produced by the publish-or-perish imperative that is never meaningfully consumed. Even some of the work that manages to get cited is poorly read -- indexed through or mined for a salient line or two rather than absorbed in the way that true reading requires. And, as in book publishing, there is an enormous degree of gatekeeping that conspires against anyone who is not either born into privilege or ushered through the gate after attracting the favor of a powerful person (see Tara Westover).
In the proper arrangement, one's burning research questions line up with one's teaching, and the whole arrangement complements itself. The life of the mind -- the spirit of this collaborative -- is answer enough to why the work matters to all involved. But the more one looks to college for particular skills, and the more one demands a predictable return on investment, the more bullshit the job becomes from the faculty side, at least in many non-applied disciplines. At this point the question of why the work matters to faculty is often thoroughly divorced from why academic teaching matters to students. Faculty are then often placed the position of endlessly justifying work that they initially found instinctually and inherently meaningful, while those tasked with the ever-ballooning raft of administrative duties are rarely required to justify their work. Hence my comparison last year of academe to Communist-occupied Czechoslovakia.
The sad fact about this is that those of us who chose academe initially were explicitly trying to avoid bullshit jobs. In my case, the immediate choice was between a permanent position in fire suppression with the Forest Service (which I knew would be a desk job with endless Environmental Impact Statements, etc, and nothing like the seasonal field work that I still remember fondly) and graduate school in literature. I had lost faith in the philosophy of fire suppression, having personally snuffed many a lightning strike that ought to have been allowed to burn for the health of the forest, but that was only extinguished to protect merchantable timber. One of my USFS supervisors had a poster in his office that read, "Occupants are lifers with nothing left to lose." How sad, yet darkly funny, that the same could be said for many mid-career or late-career academics, who have also lost faith in the master narratives that drive their enterprise.
What you call "bullshit jobs" generally seem to be "bureaucratic jobs." That is, jobs mandated by social, cultural, and or legal expectations whose duties are not productive in and of themselves.
Interesting piece and great idea for a series.
Graeber’s essay is still quite readable and captures what many people intuitively suspect about their own jobs, but it does so without much evidence and employs an alarming number of abstractions (whenever somebody writes “the ruling class” or “our society” without expanding on what they mean, watch out).
The Economist interviewed Graeber in 2018:
https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/06/29/bullshit-jobs-and-the-yoke-of-managerial-feudalism
Yet they also concluded a few years later that his thesis was ultimately not supported by data:
https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullshit-jobs-thesis-may-be-well-bullshit
But I think what Graeber does usefully touch on is the vital psychological role that work has for many of us. I’m generally in agreement with Freud on that:
“No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work.”
I sometimes define real work as something where you shower afterwards, not beforehand like most of the rest of us do. I suspect there’s something about that kind of work that’s more inherently satisfying than, say, pushing paper. Perhaps it’s just the physical activity involved.
But at the same time, some of these jobs really do need to be automated. Think of agricultural stoop labor. One reason why there’s always a chronic labor shortage in California agriculture is because the work is so physically demanding. The recent immigrants who do most of this work sensibly go on to other jobs as soon as possible.
Freud also thought the examination dream so many of us have had was a recent development in human history. That seems reasonable. Our forebears were probably too busy surviving, gleaning a potato field in Poland, for example, to have that kind of anxiety dream; likely they dreamed about food, not exams or jobs.
As for superfluous jobs, when Musk eliminated half of Twitter’s workforce, many hated him for that. But isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work?
And look at some of the WPA work of the 30s: many of those national park lookouts and rock walls are still there, in good shape, now part of the park system’s aesthetic. Yet those were so-called “make work” jobs.
Boots Riley’s 2018 movie, Sorry to Bother You, deals with telemarketers in a slightly alternative universe and efforts to unionize them. One of my favorite lines is when Steven Yeun’s union organizer mentions that they organized the LA sign twirlers the year before. That’s so funny: is sign twirling, a goofy kind of advertising, a necessary job, or a superfluous one?
The movie is currently on the Amazon Prime streaming service:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XthLQZWIshQ
As for the number of poet-musicians, I think most people are indifferent to poetry and many of the rest actively dislike it, so maybe we have about the right number, if not a surplus.
In the Chinese short story Folding Beijing, someone from the working class discovers that all the work they do could be performed by machines, but the rulers allow people to do it so that they have work. Some people like bullshit jobs. For example, we know of someone with a PhD who became a road sweeper because it gave him time to think. I'm not saying that I would like such a job, but it strikes me that this is a matter of degree and nuance. Because, looked at from one perspective, ALL jobs are bullshit jobs, or most of them.
I'm more concerned with bullshit tasks. For example, in one place I worked the powers-that-be decided we all had to submit time sheets to show what we'd been doing all week. That took an hour last thing on a Friday. I was convinced that nobody ever read them, or would be able to query them even if they did. I designed the time sheet in an Excel spreadsheet, and set the spreadsheet up to complete the timesheet randomly. It didn't look much different from the real thing, and took only a few seconds to do. I never quite had the courage to use it though. I wish I had now.
In England, despite the government telling schools they no longer needed to assign 'levels' to students' work, some headteachers still ask for that to be done. So I created a random Levels generator, which I describe in a forthcoming (11th Feb 23) post called 6 ways to respond to requests for pointless data.
What Sam says about the high and mighty looking down their noses at the people doing the jobs nobody really wants. They had a bit of a come-uppance in the 1970s when the garbage collectors went on strike. There's nothing like mounds of uncollected rubbish to make people re-evaluate their attitudes.
Sam, What a fab way to open our posting weeks with guests on Fridays: Hurrah! We already have a line-up on the arts in the broadest sense—and that means folks working hard in this difficult world where it’s hard to make a living. Having done my “time,” so to speak, in corporate America before I could afford to write fiction and memoir and teach again, I so get this. I’ve been trying to line up two Substack-ers doing great work and whether I get them or not, I want to give shoutouts to https://austenconnection.substack.com (still hoping, Jane!--write me!) and https://dadadrummer.substack.com. ~ Mary @ mltabor@me.com
This lines up rather well with my disillusionment with academe, which is supposed to be one of those places of refuge for poet-musicians and other idealists, but which more often resembles something like a factory. This owes in part to the tenure system, a 4-6 year window in which an academic feverishly strives to demonstrate their worth by publishing little-read essays in niche journals, serving on committees, and trying to toe the line between acceptable rigor and pleasing a student audience not much interested in intellectual rigor. The sheer scale of writing produced by the tenure system vastly outpaces any demand from readers. If you are lucky, you stumble upon a research agenda that you find personally meaningful and that attracts a following, of sorts. But there is a good deal of work produced by the publish-or-perish imperative that is never meaningfully consumed. Even some of the work that manages to get cited is poorly read -- indexed through or mined for a salient line or two rather than absorbed in the way that true reading requires. And, as in book publishing, there is an enormous degree of gatekeeping that conspires against anyone who is not either born into privilege or ushered through the gate after attracting the favor of a powerful person (see Tara Westover).
In the proper arrangement, one's burning research questions line up with one's teaching, and the whole arrangement complements itself. The life of the mind -- the spirit of this collaborative -- is answer enough to why the work matters to all involved. But the more one looks to college for particular skills, and the more one demands a predictable return on investment, the more bullshit the job becomes from the faculty side, at least in many non-applied disciplines. At this point the question of why the work matters to faculty is often thoroughly divorced from why academic teaching matters to students. Faculty are then often placed the position of endlessly justifying work that they initially found instinctually and inherently meaningful, while those tasked with the ever-ballooning raft of administrative duties are rarely required to justify their work. Hence my comparison last year of academe to Communist-occupied Czechoslovakia.
The sad fact about this is that those of us who chose academe initially were explicitly trying to avoid bullshit jobs. In my case, the immediate choice was between a permanent position in fire suppression with the Forest Service (which I knew would be a desk job with endless Environmental Impact Statements, etc, and nothing like the seasonal field work that I still remember fondly) and graduate school in literature. I had lost faith in the philosophy of fire suppression, having personally snuffed many a lightning strike that ought to have been allowed to burn for the health of the forest, but that was only extinguished to protect merchantable timber. One of my USFS supervisors had a poster in his office that read, "Occupants are lifers with nothing left to lose." How sad, yet darkly funny, that the same could be said for many mid-career or late-career academics, who have also lost faith in the master narratives that drive their enterprise.
Just an explication.
What you call "bullshit jobs" generally seem to be "bureaucratic jobs." That is, jobs mandated by social, cultural, and or legal expectations whose duties are not productive in and of themselves.