Bullshit Jobs

by David Graeber

  It was really weird.

  Finally, there came a point where a few of us decided we just couldn’t take it anymore. We complained one day about one of the supervisors being rude, and the very next morning, we got a call from the agency saying we were no longer needed.

  Fortunately for Nigel, his fellow workers were all temps with no loyalty to the organization and no reason to keep quiet about what was going on—at least with one another. Often in more long-term assignments, it’s hard to know exactly who one can and can’t confide in.

  Where for some, pointlessness exacerbates boredom, for others it exacerbates anxiety. Greg spent two years working as a designer of digital display advertising for a marketing agency, “creating those annoying banner ads you see on most websites.” The entire enterprise of making and selling banner ads, he was convinced, is basically a scam. The agencies that sell the ads are in possession of studies that made clear that Web surfers largely didn’t even notice and almost never clicked on them. This didn’t stop them, however, from basically cooking the books and holding junkets with their clients where they presented them with elaborate “proof” of the ads’ effectiveness.

  Since the ads didn’t really work, client satisfaction was everything. Designers were told to indulge their clients’ every whim, no matter how technically difficult, self-indulgent, or absurd.

  Greg: High-paying clients generally want to reproduce their TV commercials within the banner ads and demand complex storyboards with multiple “scenes” and mandatory elements. Automotive clients would come in and demand that we use Photoshop to switch the steering wheel position or fuel tank cap on an image the size of a thumbnail.

  Such exacting demands were made, and had to be accommodated, as designers stewed in the knowledge that no Web surfer would possibly be able to make out such tiny details in a rapidly moving image from the corner of her eye. All this was barely tolerable, but once Greg actually saw the abovementioned studies, which also revealed that even if the surfer did see them, she wouldn’t click on the banner anyway, he began to experience symptoms of clinical anxiety.

  Greg: That job taught me that pointlessness compounds stress. When I started working on those banners, I had patience for the process. Once I realized that the task was more or less meaningless, all that patience evaporated. It takes effort to overcome cognitive dissonance—to actually care about the process while pretending to care about the result.

  Eventually the stress became too much for him, and he quit to take another job.

  • • •

  Stress was another theme that popped up regularly. When, as with Greg, one’s bullshit job involves not just sitting around pretending to work but actually working on something everyone knows—but can’t say—is pointless, the level of ambient tension increases and often causes people to lash out in arbitrary ways. We’ve already met Hannibal, who makes extraordinary amounts of money writing reports designed to be waved around in pharmaceutical marketing meetings and later thrown away. In fact, he confines the bullshit aspects of his employment to a day or two a week—just enough to pay the bills—and spends the rest of his time engaged in medical research aimed at eradicating tuberculosis in the Global South—which no one seems to want to pay for. This gives him the opportunity to compare behavior in both his workplaces:

  Hannibal: That’s the other thing I’ve noticed: the amount of workplace aggression and stress I see in people is inversely correlated with the importance of the work they’re doing: “The client’s going fucking apeshit because they’re under pressure from their boss to get this presentation ready for the Q3 planning meeting on Monday! They’re threatening to cancel the entire fucking contract unless we get it delivered by tomorrow morning! We’re all going to need to stay late to finish it! (Don’t worry, we’ll order some shitty junk food pizzas and pissy lager in so we can work through the night . . .).” This is typical for the bullshit reports. Whereas working on meaningful stuff always has more of a collaborative atmosphere, everyone working together toward a greater goal.

  Similarly, while few offices are entirely free of cruelty and psychological warfare, many respondents seemed to feel they were particularly prevalent in offices where everyone knew, but did not wish to admit, that they weren’t really doing much of anything.8

  Annie: I worked for a medical care cost management firm. I was hired to be part of a special tasks team that performed multiple functions within the company.

  They never provided me with this training, and instead my job was to:

  • pull forms from the pool into the working software;

  • highlight specific fields on those forms;

  • return the forms to the pool for someone else to do something with them.

  This job also had a very rigid culture (no talking to others), and it was one of the most abusive environments I ever worked in.

  In particular, I made one highlighting error consistently during my first two weeks of employment. I learned this was wrong and immediately corrected it. However, for the entire remainder of my time at this company, every time someone found one of these mis-highlighted forms, I would be pulled aside to talk about it. Every time, like it was a new issue. Every time, like the manager didn’t know these were all done during the same period, and it wasn’t happening anymore—even though I told her every time.

  Such minor acts of sadism should be familiar to most of us who have worked in office environments. You have to ask yourself: What was the supervisor who called in Annie time and time again to “talk to her” about a mistake that she knew perfectly well had long since been corrected, actually thinking? Did she somehow forget, each time, that the problem had been resolved? That seems unlikely. Her behavior appears to be a pure exercise of power for its own sake. The pointlessness of the exercise—both Annie and her boss knew nothing would really be achieved by telling someone to fix a problem that’s already been fixed—made it nothing more than a way for the boss to rub that fact—that this was a relation of pure arbitrary power—in Annie’s face. It was a ritual of humiliation that allows the supervisor to show who’s boss in the most literal sense, and it puts the underling in her place, justified no doubt by the sense that underlings are generically guilty at the very least of spiritual insubordination, of resenting the boss’s tyranny, in the same way that police who beat suspects they know to be innocent will tell themselves the victim is undoubtedly guilty of something else.

  Annie: I did this for six months before deciding I’d rather die than continue. This was also, however, the first time I made a living wage doing anything. Before that, I was a preschool teacher, and while what I was doing was very important, I made $8.25 an hour (in the Boston area).

  This leads us to another issue: the effects of such situations on employees’ physical health. While I lack statistical evidence, if the testimonials are anything to go by, stress-related ailments seem a frequent consequence of bullshit jobs. I’ve read multiple reports of depression, anxiety overlapping with physical symptoms of every sort, from carpal tunnel syndrome that mysteriously vanishes when the job ends, to what appears, while it’s happening, like autoimmune breakdown. Annie, too, became increasingly ill. Part of the reason, she felt in retrospect, was the extreme contrast between the work environments of her previous job and this one:

  David: I’m trying to imagine what it must have been like to move from a real job, teaching and taking care of children, to something so entirely pointless and humiliating, just to pay the rent. Do you think there are a lot of people in that situation?

  Annie: I imagine it has to be pretty common! Low-paying childcare jobs have really high turnover. Some people get additional training and can move on to something more sustaining, but a lot of the ones I’ve watched leave (mostly women) end up in some office or retail management.

  One part of the experience I think about a lot is that I went from an environment where I was touched and touching all day long—picking kids up, getting hugs, giving piggybacks, rocking
to sleep—into an environment where nobody talked to each other, let alone touched each other. I didn’t recognize the effect this had on my body while it was happening, but now in retrospect I see what a huge impact it had on my physical and mental health.

  I suspect that not only is Annie right, but she is describing an unusually dramatic example of what is, in fact, a very common dynamic. Annie was convinced that not only was her particular job pointless but also that the entire enterprise shouldn’t really exist: at best, it was a giant exercise in duct taping, making up for some bits of the damage caused by the notoriously dysfunctional American health care system, of which it was an intrinsic part. But of course, no one was allowed to discuss such matters in the office. No one was allowed to discuss anything in the office. The physical isolation was continuous with the social isolation. Everyone there was forced to become a little bubble unto himself or herself.

  In such minimal, but clearly unequal, social environments, strange things can start to happen. Back in the 1960s, the radical psychoanalyst Erich Fromm first suggested that “nonsexual” forms of sadism and necrophilia tend to pervade everyday affairs in highly puritanical and hierarchical environments.9 In the 1990s, the sociologist Lynn Chancer synthesized some of these ideas with those of feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin to devise a theory of Sado-Masochism in Everyday Life.10 What Chancer found was that unlike members of actual BDSM subcultures, who are entirely aware of the fact that they are playing games of make-believe, purportedly “normal” people in hierarchical environments typically ended up locked in a kind of pathological variation of the same sadomasochistic dynamic: the (person on the) bottom struggles desperately for approval that can never, by definition, be forthcoming; the (person on the) top going to greater and greater lengths to assert a dominance that both know is ultimately a lie—for if the top were really the all-powerful, confident, masterly being he pretends to be, he wouldn’t need to go to such outrageous lengths to ensure the bottom’s recognition of his power. And, of course, there is also the most important difference between make-believe S&M play—and those engaged in it actually do refer to it as “play”—and its real-life, nonsexual enactments. In the play version, all the parameters are carefully worked out in advance by mutual consent, with both parties knowing the game can be called off at any moment simply by invoking an agreed-on safe-word. For example, just say the word “orange,” and your partner will immediately stop dripping hot wax on you and transform from the wicked marquis to a caring human being who wants to make sure you aren’t really hurt. (Indeed, one might argue that much of the bottom’s pleasure comes from knowing she has the power to affect this transformation at will.11) This is precisely what’s lacking in real-life sadomasochistic situations. You can’t say “orange” to your boss. Supervisors never work out in advance in what ways employees can and cannot be chewed out for different sorts of infractions, and if an employee is, like Annie, being reprimanded or otherwise humiliated, she knows there is nothing she can say to make it stop; no safe-word, except, perhaps, “I quit.” To pronounce these words, however, does more than simply break off the scenario of humiliation; it breaks off the work relationship entirely—and might well lead to one’s ending up playing a very different game, one where you’re desperately scrounging around to find something to eat or how to prevent one’s heat from being shut off.

  on the misery of not feeling entitled to one’s misery

  I am suggesting, then, that the very meaninglessness of bullshit employment tends to exacerbate the sadomasochistic dynamic already potentially present in any top-down hierarchical relationship. It’s not inevitable; some supervisors are generous and kind. But the lack of any feeling of common purpose, any reason to believe one’s collective actions in any way make life better for those outside the office or really have any significant effect on anyone outside the office, will tend to magnify all the minor indignities, distempers, resentments, and cruelties of office life, since, ultimately, office politics is all that’s really going on.

  Many, like, Annie, were terrified by the health effects. Just as a prisoner in solitary confinement inevitably begins to experience brain damage, the worker deprived of any sense of purpose often experiences mental and physical atrophy. Nouri, whom we met in chapter 2, repairing code for an incompetent Viennese psychologist, kept something of a diary of each of his successive bullshit jobs and their effects upon his mind and body:

  Nouri:

  Job 1: Programmer, (pointless) start-up.

  Effect on me: I first learned self-loathing. Got a cold every month. Imposter syndrome killed my immune system.

  Job 2: Programmer, (vanity project) start-up.

  Effect on me: I pushed myself so hard that I damaged my eye, forcing me to relax.

  Job 3: Software Developer, (scam) small business.

  Effect on me: usual depression, unable to find energy.

  Job 4: Software developer, (doomed, dysfunctional) ex-start-up.

  Effect on me: relentless mediocrity and fear due to my inability to focus crippled my mind; I got a cold every month; warping my consciousness to motivate myself killed my immune system. PTSD. My thoughts were thoroughly mediocre . . .

  Nouri had the misfortune to stumble through a series of relentlessly absurd and/or abusive corporate environments. He managed to keep himself sane—at least to the degree of fending off complete mental and physical breakdown—by finding a different sense of purpose: he began to carry out a detailed analysis of the social and institutional dynamics that lie behind failed corporate projects. Effectively, he became an anthropologist. (This has been very useful to me. Thanks, Nouri!) Then he discovered politics, and began diverting time and resources toward plotting to destroy the very system that created such ridiculous jobs. At this point, he reports, his health began to markedly improve.

  Even in relatively benign office environments, the lack of a sense of purpose eats away at people. It may not cause actual physical and mental degeneration, but at the very least, it leaves workers struggling with feelings of emptiness or worthlessness. These feelings are typically in no sense mitigated, but actually compounded by the prestige, respect, and generous compensation that such positions often confer. Like Lilian, bullshit jobholders can be secretly tortured by the suspicion that they are being paid more than their actually productive underlings (“How bullshit would that be?”), or that others have legitimate reason to hate them. This left many genuinely confused about how they should feel. No moral compass was available. One might consider this a kind of moral scriptlessness.

  Here is a relatively mild case. Finn works for a company that licenses software on a subscription basis:

  Finn: From the moment I first read the “Bullshit Jobs” essay a couple of years back, it resonated with me. I continue to pull it out occasionally to read and refer friends to.

  I’m a manager of technical support for a software-as-a-service company. My job seems to mostly consist of sitting in meetings, emailing, communicating coming changes to my team, serving as an escalation point for client issues, and doing performance reviews.

  Performance reviews, Finn admits, are bullshit, explaining, “Everyone already knows who the slackers are.” Actually, he acknowledges readily that most of his responsibilities are bullshit. The useful work he performs consists mainly of duct taping: solving problems caused by various unnecessarily convoluted bureaucratic processes within the company. Plus, the company itself is fairly pointless.

  Finn: Still, sitting down to write this, there’s part of my brain that wants to defend my bullshit job. Mostly because the job provides for me and my family. I think that’s where the cognitive dissonance comes in. From an emotional standpoint, it’s not like I’m invested in my job or the company in any way. If I showed up on Monday and the building had disappeared, not only would society not care, I wouldn’t, either. If there’s any satisfaction that comes from my job, it’s being an expert in navigating the waters of our disorganized organization and being able
to get things done. But being an expert in something that is unnecessary is, as you can imagine, not all that fulfilling.

  My preference would be to write novels and opinion essays, which I do in my spare time, but I fear the leap from my bullshit job will mean being incapable of making ends meet.

  This is, of course, a commonplace dilemma. The job itself may be unnecessary, but it’s hard to see it as a bad thing if it allows you to feed your children. You might ask what kind of economic system creates a world where the only way to feed one’s children is to spend most of one’s waking hours engaged in useless box-ticking exercises or solving problems that shouldn’t exist. But, then, you can equally well turn this question on its head and ask whether all this can really be as useless as it seems if the economic system that created these jobs also enables you to feed your children. Do we really want to second-guess capitalism? Perhaps every aspect of the system, no matter how apparently pointless, is just the way it has to be.

  Yet at the same time, one cannot also dismiss one’s own experience that something is terribly amiss.

  Many others spoke, like Lilian, of the agonizing disparity between the outward respect they received from society and the knowledge of what they actually did. Dan, an administrative contractor for a British corporation’s offices in Toronto, was convinced he did only about an hour or two of real work a week—work he could have easily done from home. The rest was entirely pointless. Putting on the suit and coming to the office was, he felt, just an elaborate sacrificial ritual; a series of meaningless gestures he had to perform in order to prove himself worthy of a respect he did not deserve. At work, he wondered constantly if his coworkers felt the same way:

  Dan: It felt like some Kafkaesque dream sequence that only I had the misfortune of realizing how stupid so much of what we were doing was, but deep down inside, I felt as if this experience had to be a silently shared one. We must have all known! We were an office of six people, and we were all “managers” . . . There were easily more managers in the building than actual employees. The situation was completely absurd.