You’re Not Just Imagining It. Your Job Is Absolute BS

Getting rid of what the great economist and anthropologist David Graeber called ‘bullshit jobs’ is not anything to mourn.

The “art of skiving,” as it’s sometimes called in England, may be highly developed and even honored in certain working-class traditions, but proper shirking does seem to require something real to shirk. In a truly bullshit job, it’s often entirely unclear what one is really supposed to be doing, what one can say about what one is and isn’t doing, w

En dénonçant l’existence de bullshit jobs, David Graeber12 a mis en lumière le sentiment grandissant, chez certain·es salarié·es, d’exercer un emploi inutile, sans autre sens que de financer leur existence. La part des Français·es estimant occuper un emploi inutile est ainsi passée de 13 % avant la crise sanitaire à 29 % en mai 202013.

All I did in the essay was to pursue this insight: whenever you find someone doing something in the name of economic efficiency that

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 they