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

Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense.

But unlike in the industrial sector, in this invisible factory we’d constructed for ourselves we didn’t have reform legislation or unions to identify the most draining aspects of this setup and fight for limits. Knowledge work was free to totalize our existence: colonizing as much of our time, from evenings to weekends to vacations, as we could bea

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

David Graeber était convaincu de la facilité avec laquelle on pourrait se passer de certains emplois et considérait même que la suppression des bullshit jobs nous permettrait globalement de travailler moins. S’il faut nuancer cette thèse et considérer avec prudence les chiffres que Graeber avance sur la question222, on peut tout de même facilement

How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?

If the existence of bullshit jobs seems to defy the logic of capitalism, one possible reason for their proliferation might be that the existing system isn’t capitalism—or at least, isn’t any sort of capitalism that would be recognizable from the works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or, for that matter, Ludwig von Mises or Milton Friedman. It is increasi