Bullshit Jobs

Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latte

did not need to be performed—that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse?

very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees.

Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed

anyone who would rather be doing something useful with themselves.

we also hanker after meaning’

Over the course of the last several thousand years there have been untold thousands of human groups that might be referred to as “societies,” and the overwhelming majority of them managed to figure out ways to distribute those tasks that needed to be done to keep them alive in the style to which they were accustomed in such a fashion that most everyone had some way to contribute, and no one had to spend the majority of their waking hours performing tasks they would rather not be doing, in the way that people

Over the course of the last several thousand years there have been untold thousands of human groups that might be referred to as “societies,” and the overwhelming majority of them managed to figure out ways to distribute those tasks that needed to be done to keep them alive in the style to which they were accustomed in such a fashion that most everyone had some way to contribute, and no one had to spend the majority of their waking hours performing tasks they would rather not be doing, in the way that people

All these are examples of what I like to call “compensatory consumerism.” They are the sorts of things you can do to make up for the fact that you don’t have a life, or not very much of one.

the case of bullshit jobs, this means we can ask three questions:

On the individual level, why do people agree to do and put up with their own bullshit jobs?
On social and economic levels, what are the larger forces that have led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs?
On the cultural and political levels, why is the bullshitization of the economy not seen as a social problem, and why has no one done anything about it?6