Paper for Pilosophy

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018) Chapter 3: Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy?

In this chapter, I’d like to start exploring some of the moral and psychological effects of being trapped inside a bullshit job.

In particular, I want to ask the obvious question: Why is this even a problem? Or to phrase it more precisely: Why does having a pointless job so regularly cause people to be miserable? On the face of it, it’s not obvious that it should. After all, we’re talking about people who are effectively being paid—often very good money —to do nothing. One might imagine that those being paid to do nothing would consider themselves fortunate, especially when they are more or less left to themselves. But while every now and then I did hear testimonies from those who said they couldn’t believe their luck in landing such a position, the remarkable thing is how very few of them there were.1 Many, in fact, seemed perplexed by their own reaction, unable to understand why their situation left them feeling so worthless or depressed. Indeed, the fact that there was no clear explanation for their feelings—no story they could tell themselves about the nature of their situation and what was wrong about it—often contributed to their misery. At least a galley slave knows that he’s oppressed. An office worker forced to sit for seven and a half hours a day pretending to type into a screen for $18 an hour, or a junior member of a consultancy team forced to give the exact same seminar on innovation and creativity week in and week out for $50,000 a year, is just confused.

In an earlier book about debt, I wrote about the phenomenon of “moral confusion.” I took as my example the fact that throughout human history, most people seem to have agreed both that paying back one’s debts was the essence of morality and that moneylenders were evil. While the rise of bullshit jobs is a comparatively recent phenomenon, I think it creates a similar moral embarrassment. On the one hand, everyone is encouraged to assume that human beings will always tend to seek their best advantage, that is, to find themselves a situation where they can get the most benefit for the least expenditure of time and effort, and for the most part, we do assume this—especially if we are talking about such matters in the abstract. (“We can’t just give poor people handouts! Then they won’t have any incentive to look for work!”) On the other hand, our own experience, and those of the people we are closest to, tends to contradict these assumptions at many points. People almost never act and react to situations in quite the way our theories of human nature would predict. The only reasonable conclusion is that, at least in certain key essentials, these theories about human nature are wrong.

In this chapter, I don’t just want to ask why people are so unhappy doing what seems to them meaningless make-work, but to think more deeply about what that unhappiness can tell us about what people are and what they are basically about.

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ABOUT ONE YOUNG MAN APPARENTLY HANDED A SINECURE WHO NONETHELESS FOUND HIMSELF UNABLE TO HANDLE THE SITUATION

I will begin with a story. The following is the tale of a young man named Eric, whose first experience of the world of work was of a job that proved absolutely, even comically, pointless.

Eric: I’ve had many, many awful jobs, but the one that was undoubtedly pure, liquid bullshit was my first “professional job” postgraduation, a dozen years ago. I was the first in my family to attend university, and due to a profound naïveté about the purpose of higher education, I somehow expected that it would open up vistas of hitherto-unforeseen opportunity.

Instead, it offered graduate training schemes at PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, etc. I preferred to sit on the dole for six months using my graduate library privileges to read French and Russian novels before the dole forced me to attend an interview which, sadly, led to a job.

That job involved working for a large design firm as its “Interface Administrator.” The Interface was a content management system—an intranet with graphical user interface, basically—designed to enable this company’s work to be shared across its seven offices around the UK.

Eric soon discovered that he was hired only because of a communication problem in the organization. In other words, he was a duct taper: the entire computer system was necessary only because the partners were unable to pick up the phone and coordinate with one another:

Eric: The firm was a partnership, with each office managed by one partner. All of them seem to have attended one of three private schools and the same design school (the Royal College of Art). Being unbelievably competitive fortysomething public schoolboys, they often tried to outcompete one another to win bids, and on more than one occasion, two different offices had found themselves arriving at the same client’s office to pitch work and having to hastily combine their bids in the parking lot of some dismal business park. The Interface was designed to make the company supercollaborative, across all of its offices, to ensure that this (and other myriad fuckups) didn’t happen again, and my job was to help develop it, run it, and sell it to the staff.

The problem was, it soon became apparent that Eric wasn’t even really a duct taper. He was a box ticker: one partner had insisted on the project, and, rather 1

In earlier chapters, the author proposed categories of bullshit jobs. A “duct taper” is someone assigned to 1 inadequately repair something that was poorly designed in the first place, while a box ticker is someone assigned to complete forms confirming that things that didn’t need doing have been done. —GH

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than argue with him, the others pretended to agree. Then they did everything in their power to make sure it didn’t work.

Eric: I should have realized that this was one partner’s idea that no one else actually wanted to implement. Why else would they be paying a twenty-one-year- old history graduate with no IT experience to do this? They’d bought the cheapest software they could find, from a bunch of absolute crooks, so it was buggy, prone to crashing, and looked like a Windows 3.1 screen saver. The entire workforce was paranoid that it was designed to monitor their productivity, record their keystrokes, or flag that they were torrenting porn on the company internet, and so they wanted nothing to do with it. As I had absolutely no background in coding or software development, there was very little I could do to improve the thing, so I was basically tasked with selling and managing a badly functioning, unwanted turd. After a few months, I realized that there was very little for me to do at all most days, aside from answer a few queries from confused designers wanting to know how to upload a file, or search for someone’s email on the address book.

The utter pointlessness of his situation soon led to subtle—and then, increasingly unsubtle—acts of rebellion:

Eric: I started arriving late and leaving early. I extended the company policy of “a pint on Friday lunchtime” into “pints every lunchtime.” I read novels at my desk. I went out for lunchtime walks that lasted three hours. I almost perfected my French reading ability, sitting with my shoes off with a copy of Le Monde and a Petit Robert. I tried to quit, and my boss offered me a £2,600 raise, which I reluctantly accepted. They needed me precisely because I didn’t have the skills to implement something that they didn’t want to implement, and they were willing to pay to keep me. (Perhaps one could paraphrase Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 here: to forestall their fears of alienation from their own labor, they had to sacrifice me up to a greater alienation from potential human growth.)

As time went on, Eric became more and more flagrant in his defiance, hoping he could find something he could do that might actually cause him to be fired. He started showing up to work drunk and taking paid “business trips” for nonexistent meetings:

Eric: A colleague from the Edinburgh office, to whom I had poured out my woes when drunk at the annual general meeting, started to arrange phony meetings with me, once on a golf course near Gleneagles, me hacking at the turf in borrowed golf shoes two sizes too large. After getting away with that, I started arranging fictional meetings with people in the London office. The firm would put me up in a nicotine-coated room in the St. Athans in Bloomsbury, and I would meet old London friends for some good old-fashioned all-day drinking in Soho pubs, which often turned into all-night drinking in Shoreditch. More than once, I returned to my office the following Monday in last Wednesday’s work shirt. I’d long since stopped shaving, and by this point, my hair looked like it was robbed

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from a Zeppelin roadie. I tried on two more occasions to quit, but both times my boss offered me more cash. By the end, I was being paid a stupid sum for a job that, at most, involved me answering the phone twice a day. I eventually broke down on the platform of Bristol Temple Meads train station one late summer’s afternoon. I’d always fancied seeing Bristol, and so I decided to “visit” the Bristol office to look at “user take-up.” I actually spent three days taking MDMA at an anarcho-syndicalist house party in St. Pauls, and the dissociative comedown made me realize how profoundly upsetting it was to live in a state of utter purposelessness.

After heroic efforts, Eric did finally manage to get himself replaced:

Eric: Eventually, responding to pressure, my boss hired a junior fresh out of a computer science degree to see if some improvements could be made to our graphical user interface. On this kid’s first day at work, I wrote him a list of what needed to be done—and then immediately wrote my resignation letter, which I posted under my boss’s door when he took his next vacation, surrendering my last paycheck over the telephone in lieu of the statutory notice period. I flew that same week to Morocco to do very little in the coastal town of Essaouira. When I came back, I spent the next six months living in a squat, growing my own vegetables on three acres of land. I read your Strike! piece when it first came out. It might have been a revelation for some that capitalism creates unnecessary jobs in order for the wheels to merely keep on turning, but it wasn’t to me.

The remarkable thing about this story is that many would consider Eric’s a dream job. He was being paid good money to do nothing. He was also almost completely unsupervised. He was given respect and every opportunity to game the system. Yet despite all that, it gradually destroyed him.

Why?

To a large degree, I think, this is really a story about social class. Eric was a young man from a working-class background—a child of factory workers, no less—fresh out of college and full of expectations, suddenly confronted with a jolting introduction to the “real world.” Reality, in this instance, consisted of the fact that (a) while middle-aged executives can be counted on to simply assume that any twentysomething white male will be at least something of a computer whiz (even if, as in this case, he had no computer training of any kind), and (b) might even grant someone like Eric a cushy situation if it suited their momentary purposes, (c) they basically saw him as something of a joke. Which his job almost literally was. His presence in the company was very close to a practical joke some designers were playing on one another.

Even more, what drove Eric crazy was the fact there was simply no way he could construe his job as serving any sort of purpose. He couldn’t even tell himself he was doing it to feed his family; he didn’t have one yet. Coming from a background where most people took pride in making, maintaining, and fixing things, or

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anyway felt that was the sort of thing people should take pride in, he had assumed that going to university and moving into the professional world would mean doing the same sorts of thing on a grander, even more meaningful, scale. Instead, he ended up getting hired precisely for what he wasn’t able to do. He tried to just resign. They kept offering him more money. He tried to get himself fired. They wouldn’t fire him. He tried to rub their faces in it, to make himself a parody of what they seemed to think he was. It didn’t make the slightest bit of difference.

To get a sense of what was really happening here, let us imagine a second history major—we can refer to him as anti-Eric—a young man of a professional background but placed in exactly the same situation. How might anti-Eric have behaved differently? Well, likely as not, he would have played along with the charade. Instead of using phony business trips to practice forms of self- annihilation, anti-Eric would have used them to accumulate social capital, connections that would eventually allow him to move on to better things. He would have treated the job as a stepping-stone, and this very project of professional advancement would have given him a sense of purpose. But such attitudes and dispositions don’t come naturally. Children from professional backgrounds are taught to think like that from an early age. Eric, who had not been trained to act and think this way, couldn’t bring himself to do it. As a result, he ended up, for a time, at least, in a squat growing tomatoes.2

concerning the experience of falseness and purposelessness at the core of bullshit jobs, and the importance now felt of conveying the experience of falseness and purposelessness to youth

In a deeper way, Eric’s story brings together almost everything that those with bullshit jobs say is distressing about their situation. It’s not just the purposelessness— though certainly, it’s that. It’s also the falseness. I’ve already mentioned the indignation telemarketers feel when they are forced to try to trick or pressure people into doing something they think is against their best interests. This is a complicated feeling. We don’t even really have a name for it. When we think of scams, after all, we think of grifters, confidence artists; they are easy to see as romantic figures, rebels living by their wits, as well as admirable because they have achieved a certain form of mastery. This is why they make acceptable heroes in Hollywood movies. A confidence artist could easily take delight in what she’s doing. But being forced to scam someone is altogether different. In such circumstances, it’s hard not to feel you’re ultimately in the same situation as the person you’re scamming: you’re both being pressured and manipulated by your employer, only in your case, with the added indignity that you’re also betraying the trust of someone whose side you should be on. One might imagine the feelings sparked by most bullshit jobs would be very different. After all, if the employee is scamming anyone, it’s his employer, and he’s doing it with his employer’s full consent. But somehow, this is precisely what many report to be so disturbing about the situation. You don’t even have the satisfaction of knowing

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you’re putting something over on someone. You’re not even living your own lie. Most of the time, you’re not even quite living somebody else’s lie, either. Your job is more like a boss’s unzippered fly that everyone can see but also knows better than to mention.

If anything, this appears to compound the sense of purposelessness.

Perhaps anti-Eric would, indeed, have found a way to turn around that purposelessness and seen himself as in on the joke; perhaps if he were a real go- getter, he’d have used his administrative skills to effectively take over the office; but even children of the rich and powerful often find this difficult to pull off. The following testimony gives a sense of the moral confusion they can often feel:

Rufus: I got the job because my dad was a Vice President at the company. I was charged with handling complaints. Given that it was (in name) a biomedical company, all returned product was considered a biohazard. So I was able to spend a lot of time in a room all by myself, with no supervision and essentially no work to do. The bulk of my memory of the job involves either playing Minesweeper or listening to podcasts.

I did spend hours poring over spreadsheets, tracking changes on Word documents, etc., but I guarantee you that I contributed nothing to this company. I spent every minute at the office wearing headphones. I paid only the smallest attention possible to the people around me and the “work” I was assigned.

I hated every minute working there. In fact, more days than not, I went home early from work, took two- or three-hour lunch breaks, spent hours “in the bathroom” (wandering around), and nobody ever said a word. I was compensated for every minute.

Thinking back on it, it was kind of a dream job.
 Retrospectively, Rufus understands that he got a ridiculously sweet deal—he seems rather baffled, actually, why he hated the job so much at the time. But surely he couldn’t have been entirely unaware of how his coworkers must have seen him: boss’s kid getting paid to goof off; feels he’s too good to talk to them; supervisors clearly informed “hands off.” It could hardly have evoked warm feelings.

Still, this story raises another question: If Rufus’s father didn’t actually expect his son to do the job, why did he insist he take it in the first place? He could presumably just as easily have given his son an allowance, or, alternately, assigned him a job that needed doing, coached him on his duties, and taken some minimal effort to make sure those tasks were actually carried out. Instead, he seems to have felt it was more important for Rufus to be able to say he had a job than to actually acquire work experience.

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That’s puzzling. It’s all the more puzzling because the father’s attitude appears to be extremely common. It wasn’t always so. There was once a time when most students in college whose parents could afford it, or who qualified for scholarships or assistance, received a stipend. It was considered a good thing that there might be a few years in a young man’s or woman’s life where money was not the primary motivation; where he or she could thus be free to pursue other forms of value: say, philosophy, poetry, athletics, sexual experimentation, altered states of consciousness, politics, or the history of Western art. Nowadays it is considered important they should work. However, it is not considered important they should work at anything useful. In fact, like Rufus they’re barely expected to work at all, just to show up and pretend to do so. A number of students wrote just to complain to me about this phenomenon. Here Patrick reflects on his job as a casual retail assistant in a student union convenience store:

Patrick: I didn’t actually need the job (I was getting by financially without it), but after some pressure from my family, I applied for it out of some warped sense of obligation to get experience in work to prepare me for whatever lay ahead beyond university. In reality, the job just took away time and energy from other activities I had been doing, like campaigning and activism, or reading for pleasure, which I think made me resent it even more.

The job was pretty standard for a student union convenience store and involved serving people on the till (could have easily been done by a machine) with the explicitly stated requirement, in my performance review after my trial period, that I “should be more positive and happy when serving customers.” So not only did they want me to do work that could have been performed by a machine just as effectively, they wanted me to pretend that I was enjoying that state of affairs.

It was just about bearable if my shift was during lunchtime, when it got really busy, so time went by relatively quickly. Being on shift on a Sunday afternoon when nobody frequented the SU was just appalling. They had this thing about us not being able to just do nothing, even if the shop was empty. So we couldn’t just sit at the till and read a magazine. Instead, the manager made up utterly meaningless work for us to do, like going round the whole shop and checking that things were in date (even though we knew for a fact they were because of the turnover rate) or rearranging products on shelves in even more pristine order than they already were.

The very, very worst thing about the job was that it gave you so much time to think, because the work was so lacking in any intellectual demand. So I just thought so much about how bullshit my job was, how it could be done by a machine, how much I couldn’t wait for full communism, and just endlessly theorized the alternatives to a system where millions of human beings have to do that kind of work for their whole lives in order to survive. I couldn’t stop thinking about how miserable it made me.

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This is what happens, of course, when you first open the entire world of social and political possibility to a young mind by sending it to college and then tell it to stop thinking and tidy up already tidy shelves. Parents now feel it is important that young minds should have this experience. But what, precisely, was Patrick supposed to be learning through this exercise?

Here’s another example:

Brendan: I’m at a small college in Massachusetts training to be a high school history teacher. Recently I started work at the dining commons.

A coworker told me on my first day: “Half of this job is making things look clean, and the other half is looking busy.”

For the first couple of months, they had me “monitor” the back room. I would clean the buffet slider, restock the desserts, and wipe down tables when people left. It’s not a big room, so usually I could do all my tasks in five minutes out of every thirty. I ended up being able to get a lot of reading for my coursework done.

However, sometimes one of the less understanding supervisors would be working. In that case, I would have to keep the corner of my eye open at all times in order to make sure they would always see me acting busy. I have no idea why the job description couldn’t just acknowledge that I wouldn’t have much to do— if I didn’t have to spend so much time and energy looking busy, I could get my reading and the table cleaning done quicker and more efficiently.

But of course, efficiency is not the point. In fact, if we are simply talking about teaching students about efficient work habits, the best thing would be to leave them to their studies. Schoolwork is, after all, real work in every sense except that you don’t get paid for it (though if you’re receiving a scholarship or an allowance, you actually are getting paid for it). In fact, like almost all the other activities Patrick or Brendan might have been engaged in had they not been obliged to take on “real world” jobs, their classwork is actually more real than the largely make- work projects they ended up being forced to do. Schoolwork has real content. One must attend classes, do the readings, write exercises or papers, and be judged on the results. But in practical terms, this appears to be exactly what makes schoolwork appear inadequate to those authorities—parents, teachers, governments. administrators—who have all come to feel that they must also teach students about the real world. It’s too results-oriented. You can study any way you want to so long as you pass the test. A successful student has to learn self- discipline, but this is not the same as learning how to operate under orders. Of course, the same is true of most of the other projects and activities students might otherwise be engaged in: whether rehearsing for plays, playing in a band, political activism, or baking cookies or growing pot to sell to fellow students. All of which might be appropriate training for a society of self-employed adults, or even one made up primarily of the largely autonomous professionals (doctors, lawyers, architects, and so forth) that universities were once designed to produce.

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It might even be appropriate to train young people for the democratically organized collectives that were the subject of Patrick’s reveries about full communism. But as Brendan points out, it is very much not preparation for work in today’s increasingly bullshitized workplace:

Brendan: A lot of these student work jobs have us doing some sort of bullshit task like scanning IDs, or monitoring empty rooms, or cleaning already-clean tables. Everyone is cool with it, because we get money while we study, but otherwise there’s absolutely no reason not to just give students the money and automate or eliminate the work.

I’m not altogether familiar with how the whole thing works, but a lot of this work is funded by the Feds and tied to our student loans. It’s part of a whole federal system designed to assign students a lot of debt—thereby promising to coerce them into labor in the future, as student debts are so hard to get rid of— accompanied by a bullshit education program designed to train and prepare us for our future bullshit jobs.

Brendan has a point, and I’ll be returning to his analysis in a later chapter. Here, though, I want to focus on what students forced into these make-work jobs actually learn from them—lessons that they do not learn from more traditional student occupations and pursuits such as studying for tests, planning parties, and so on. Even judging by Brendan’s and Patrick’s accounts (and I could easily reference many others), I think we can conclude that from these jobs, students learn at least five things:

1. how to operate under others’ direct supervision;
 2. how to pretend to work even when nothing needs to done;
 3. that one is not paid money to do things, however useful or important, that one actually enjoys;
 4. that one is paid money to do things that are in no way useful or important and that one does not enjoy; and 
 5. that at least in jobs requiring interaction with the public, even when one is being paid to carry out tasks one does not enjoy, one also has to pretend to be enjoying it.

This is what Brendan meant by how make-work student employment was a way of “preparing and training” students for their future bullshit jobs. He was studying to be a high school history teacher—a meaningful job, certainly, but, as with almost all teaching positions in the United States, one where the proportion of hours spent teaching in class or preparing lessons has declined, while the total number of hours dedicated to administrative tasks has increased dramatically. This is what Brendan is suggesting: that it’s no coincidence that the more jobs requiring college degrees become suffused in bullshit, the more pressure is put on college students to learn about the real world by dedicating less of their time to self-organized goal-directed activity and more of it to tasks that will prepare them for the more mindless aspects of their future careers.

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WHY MANY OF OUR FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTIONS ON HUMAN MOTIVATION APPEAR TO BE INCORRECT

I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success . . . such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.

—Nikola Tesla

If the argument of the previous section is correct, one could perhaps conclude that Eric’s problem was just that he hadn’t been sufficiently prepared for the pointlessness of the modern workplace. He had passed through the old education system—some traces of it are left—designed to prepare students to actually do things. This led to false expectations and an initial shock of disillusionment that he could not overcome.

Perhaps. But I don’t think that’s the full story. There is something much deeper going on here. Eric might have been unusually ill-prepared to endure the meaninglessness of his first job, but just about everyone does see such meaninglessness as something to be endured—despite the fact that we are all trained, in one way or another, to assume that human beings should be perfectly delighted to find themselves in his situation of being paid good money not to work.

Let us return to our initial problem. We may begin by asking why we assume that someone being paid to do nothing should consider himself fortunate. What is the basis of that theory of human nature from which this follows? The obvious place to look is at economic theory, which has turned this kind of thought into a science. According to classical economic theory, homo oeconomicus, or “economic man”—that is, the model human being that lies behind every prediction made by the discipline— is assumed to be motivated above all by a calculus of costs and benefits. All the mathematical equations by which economists bedazzle their clients, or the public, are founded on one simple assumption: that everyone, left to his own devices, will choose the course of action that provides the most of what he wants for the least expenditure of resources and effort. It is the simplicity of the formula that makes the equations possible: if one were to admit that humans have complicated motivations, there would be too many factors to take into account, it would be impossible to properly weight them, and predictions could not be made. Therefore, while an economist will say that while of course everyone is aware that human beings are not really selfish, calculating machines, assuming that they are makes it possible to explain a very large proportion of what humans do, and this proportion—and only this—is the subject matter of economic science.

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This is a reasonable statement as far as it goes. The problem is there are many domains of human life where the assumption clearly doesn’t hold—and some of them are precisely in the domain of what we like to call the economy.

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