Note 9: Bullshit jobs
I recently read two great pieces about jobs: “Bullshit Jobs” by anthropologist David Graeber, and ”Workism Is Making Americans Miserable” by The Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson.
While both of these focus on the American culture, which arguably has more bullshit jobs than my native Sweden, I see a lot of bullshit jobs here as well. I’m not making this judgment on anyone else’s behalf than my own, but my work in communication/marketing was mostly adding more noise to the already deafening cacophony. There were few projects that actually contributed to making the world a better place. Sure, I made a good salary and paid taxes, but “paying taxes” does not a meaningful life make (even if I’m really happy to pay my taxes because we get real value out of it as a society).
Serendipity would have it that I stumbled across a related flyer in Stockholm the other day. The headline says “What should you do of your life?” and the group is called “Reflection”. It talks about finding meaning within, and not chasing it through work, partners and riches.
So far so good.
But the sentence baffled me: “Note: spiritual theories, new age and other dopey reasoning are banned”. I have no idea how you arrive at a meaningful life without any metaphysical assumptions. And metaphysical assumptions overlap very much with spirituality and “other dopey reasoning”. Talking about a meaningful life while avoiding metaphysics is like having sex and avoiding touching your partner.
My intention is not to deride those who organize or attend these meetups (I assume the group is designed to be a first step for people not yet comfortable with spirituality, who got stuck in the default materialistic view we are programmed to hold and are looking for a way out), but it is another sign of how sick western society has become. We are so indoctrinated by the systems that David Graeber describes, so proud of our rationality and logic, that we don’t want to touch spirituality with a ten foot pole. At the same time, we are starved of deeper meaning and identity outside our jobs. Suicide rates in the US are at the highest point since World War II, and this puts the US on par with Sweden in suicides, where 14 out of every 100,000 people choose to end their life. Interestingly enough, the number of psychiatric drug users is the same as well (around 17% of the population in both countries). I don’t believe that this mental health crisis is a result of better reporting. I believe it’s a result of bullshit jobs, existential isolation (due to our anxiety buffers weakening without replacement), lack of future prospects, and lack of hope for the future. A world where emotions are seen as inferior to rationality and logic (when they should be equal) makes matters even worse. We use the best tools at our disposal (drugs) to help people cope, because these fixes are good-ish enough, and fast compared to deprogramming individuals from the destructive cultural programming.
Finding meaning means more than switching jobs or working less, but since we spend so much time at work, it’s a big component of meaning (or lack thereof). Even if you have a meaningful job, but nothing meaningful in the rest of your life, the crash will eventually come — when you retire if not before. We have to learn how to foster several meaningful identities, instead of one coherent “personal brand”. Going all in for one single identity, whether that is “work” or “parenthood” or something else, will eventually result in some sort of crisis.
The note here is: In my experience, getting out of the rat race doesn’t solve these problems. If anything, some of these became even worse for me after the initial inebriation of having found my place in the universe (which is hard to realize in our current medieval systems) wore off. It’s as if the way out of the rat race leads through hell. But if you ask me “was it worth it?” today, my answer is an unambiguous “hell yeah!”.
