Bullshit Jobs – The Rise of Pointless Work and what we can do about it by David Graeber

March 25, 2022 – Thornbury

Such a good book to read in the lead up to starting a new job...

This starts with an inventory of different types of bullshit jobs, interwoven with testimonies of various people. Kind of amusing. But when I got past this section and into the real guts of this book I put it down and said out loud, "Wow, this just got super interesting."

After the inventory, which honestly was not the strongest opener, Graeber starts to properly build a case for why more of us than ever are working in jobs we know don't need to exist, at the cost of our own happiness and sanity. And that means starting at the foundations: what is work? Why do we do it? When did we start doing it?

The effect of this is to kind of wake you up from a trance. Once you accept that the idea of labour, and moreover, wage labour and salaries are simply recent inventions and not necessarily the only way to make the world go round, new perspectives start emerging.

The act of renting oneself out as something relatively recent; management as an invention; school as training for the factory; "productive" vs "reproductive" work; "labour" as both employment and childbirth; the nature of all not-bullshit work as being fundamentally care work; the influence of religion and Puritanism; the sadomasochistic dynamics of power in office politics (& Foucault's near breakthrough on the need for a safe word to escape the powerplay of capitalism); the role of automation and why we aren't all living in full automated luxury communism; why maybe communism's failure was a data problem that we no longer have; how bullshit jobs enable massive state driven inefficient structures to persist because they create jobs; how we continually recreate capitalism every day and of course, eventually, inevitably Universal Basic Income and how it might liberate us.

If you find yourself looking for meaning in work or, like many people, joining The Great Resignation, this is worth reading. We spend a long time at work and even more thinking about the power dynamics of our jobs — this felt like a timely reminder that the whole game is really not only make-believe but relatively recently accepted as normal.