WorkHaters, Inc.
I would actually love to not bring my Whole Self to work, thanks
In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes posited that increasing automation and prosperity meant we would all be enjoying five-day weekends by 2000. What happened with that? Bullshit Jobs has some thoughts. David Graeber not only reports anecdotes from people on the Bullshit Front Lines (people who spend their days copying the contents of one form into a different form or making hard copies of documents that are only ever looked up digitally, etc.) but also has some pretty insightful ideas about the causes of these great hordes of computer jobs that produce nothing, an economy where monetary value has actually largely derailed itself from actual productivity or meaning, where a whole portion of the population is living in the TPS-report purgatory that caused Mike Judge to make Office Space. This book is the current record-holder for book I have most urged my friends to read to the least possible effect.
The Cabinet is great Bullshit Job representation. A dispassionate young man literally does not know what his or anyone else’s job is supposed to be and subsequently has a lot of time to wander around his office building at all hours, eventually stumbling upon the titular Cabinet, filled with files on mutants like a man who has a ginkgo tree growing on his finger and a woman who randomly loses years of her life and a man who has come up with a plan to turn himself into a small cat. Peppered with stories about the occupants of the cabinet, this book is about a person who is so disconnected from every aspect of his life that he wouldn’t know Meaning if it hit him in the face.
Which brings me to Several People Are Typing. Office jobs seem to pair really well with absurdity, although I feel like being under pressure to write marketing copy while being haunted by the ghosts of a thousand dogs or optimizing spreadsheets after being physically sucked into your computer leaving your physical form behind is not as much of a stretched analogy for having a Computer Job while The Everything is happening as it should be.
If you’ve got a weirdly specific trope to request or have a book you think should’ve been included in this bundle, let me know at tropemachine@substack.com.