On Meaningless Careers

There was something special about a group of guys struggling towards a common goal, building something together, knowing that their individual efforts played an important role in the success or failure of the team.

Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers - as the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do. Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which the... See more

The problem isn't that the youngest generation hates work; the problem is that many of the jobs offered to the youngest generation aren't work at all. The spreadsheet-heavy, mid-level-manager-dominated, buzzword-filled roles offered to us are jobs, but they are hardly "work."

So yeah, football sucked. Anyone who played college football will tell you that it sucked. And guess what else? I loved it. Most former players loved it. There was beauty in this struggle. A beauty in the "suck".

The paradox of modern work is that the most prestigious jobs often involve the least actual work. If you can grind on tedious tasks longer than anyone else, you can get paid a lot of money. You gain material riches at the loss of your individualistic drive.

Football was overbearing, painful, and straight-up frustrating at times, but from day one on the football team, I felt like my contributions mattered.The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. And I was aggressively indifferent to my work.

An idea that I increasingly believe is that half of all white-collar jobs could disappear tomorrow, and there would be no decline in productivity. In fact, productivity might increase.

Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried.

For any gamers out there, one of the oldest tricks in the book is giving your younger sibling an unplugged/disconnected controller, so they feel like they are "playing", while you are in control the whole time. Many "jobs" today are simply unplugged controllers. The work would get done, whether or not we take part in the process. We are simply movi... See more