Tag: on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

qbdp episode #4: Being employed in the 21st Century

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In Coffee House, Sofia - Bulgaria
In Coffee House, Sofia – Bulgaria. Picture by Zanda

Is employment still relevant today? What is there left than needs doing? What’s going to happen to the world’s unemployed? What does automation have to do with all this? Is there an alternative? This and more in this episode of qbdp.

In addition, I mention this episode of The Cracked Podcast (it’s called “What America can’t admit about the Millennial generation” – trust me, it applies even more to the European South). You really need to give it a listen, it’s a must if you’d like to hear more about what unemployment means today, what more it could mean in the following years and why you shouldn’t be listening to your parents when they’re telling you that when they were your age they had already gone through 14 jobs or so. You should check out the rest of their episodes too, they’re doing a fantastic job.

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

Bullshit Jobs Rage

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it…

Excellent article by David Graeber that had been sitting on my tab stack for a few months now waiting for me to post it here. It confirms my suspicion that we don’t need to work as much as we do and that much of what people are paid to do is purposefully not useful.

Of course, it could also be that I’m looking for further evidence and support to ground my avoidance of these bullshit jobs, what has made me prefer unemployment to -in my idealistic, INFP eyes- ridding my life of meaning. Some people would call such behaviour laziness, but I suspect those people probably wouldn’t agree with the article anyway.