Bullshit Jobs: A Theory

the more one’s work benefits others, the less one tends to be paid for it.

All of the gratuitous sadism of workplace politics depends on one’s inability to say “I quit” and feel no economic consequences.

What this meant in human terms was, first of all, that millions of young people found themselves trapped in permanent social adolescence. As the guild structures broke down, apprentices could become journeymen, but journeymen could no longer become masters, which meant that, in traditional terms, they would not be a position to marry and start fami

Shullenberger speaks of an emerging “voluntariat,” with capitalist firms increasingly harvesting the results not of paid labor but of unpaid interns, internet enthusiasts, activists, volunteers, and hobbyists, and “digitally sharecropping” the results of popular enthusiasm and creativity to privatize and market the results.

Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of—as Kathi Weeks h

And that, in turn, means that love for others—people, animals, landscapes—regularly requires the maintenance of institutional structures one might otherwise despise.

Much of the bullshitization of real jobs, I would say, and much of the reason for the expansion of the bullshit sector more generally, is a direct result of the desire to quantify the unquantifiable.

What Basic Income ultimately proposes is to detach livelihood from work.

Sitting around in cafés all day arguing about politics or gossiping about our friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs takes time (all day, in fact); in contrast pumping iron or attending a yoga class at the local gym, ordering out for Deliveroo, watching an episode of Game of Thrones, or shopping for hand creams or consumer electronics can all be