How to deal with Bullshit jobs
Amongst the many causes of young-adult angst that is driving the current growth of socialism’s popularity, a significant one is, in my opinion, the growing acceptance of the narrative of the so-called “bullshit jobs”. It briefly states that most white-collar, business-analyst type jobs are in reality just paper-pushing gigs, some sort of pointless rat-race, or even worse: a hunger game type tournament where the capitalist overlords pit us, the helpless but educated young professionals, into a fight for our survival. After years of pain and toil, the survivors are “meritocratically” admitted to their private islands, and anointed with the status of ruling class members, they proceed to act on their sole reason to exist, which is that of rent-seeking and profit extraction from the actual value creators (wherever and whoever they may be).
The appeal of this narrative is attractive on many levels and has manifested itself in many instances of pop culture such as Dilbert’s comics, The Office, and David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” (which I haven’t read). And it’s really easy to fall for it, seriously, if you have ever worked at a corporation or large organization.
I’m not here to offer any evidence against this powerful narrative, because I don’t have it, but I think I can offer an alternative one, convincing enough so as to alleviate to some degree the existential angst of those that feel hopeless, crushed by a system that they feel victims of.
I can start by pointing out that the entirety of this narrative rests on the idealized assumption that one's own work should have a certain degree of constant, predictable product every single day, as if one should consistently output X units of value every Y units of time, like a machine that churns 100.000 toothpicks every hour. Furthermore, a healthy company is one where every single employee has such a consistent and predictable output.
But life doesn’t really work this way. I’m drawing from my own experience here, both personal and professional, but I think most people will be able to relate: once your late teenage years are over, days start to go by ever more quickly, and it becomes harder and harder to tell most of them apart from each other. At the job you can have more or less productive days, on a personal level you may have a highlight like a particularly fun buzz you got at a bar or a particularly deep conversation with a friend. This cadence drones on until something unusual, big, and exciting happens, expected or not. It could be nailing a big breakthrough at work, meeting a girl you actually like, or attending a fun wedding party. I think Nassim Taleb would agree with me that the degree of importance of days in life follows a power-law distribution, being most of them mostly forgettable, except for a few instances of highly eventful ones.
And frankly, I don’t think there’s a reason to think that things were ever different, or even that they ought to be different. Maybe if you were thinking about your boring analyst job, where you are making boring reports day in day out, you could be seemingly justified to claim: “SEE? Nobody reads my stupid reports! How can this be the right state of affairs? At least a peasant in the middle ages could rest assured knowing that every single day that he spent pushing the plow in the fields would eventually materialize and he could hold the actual fruits of his labor ”. But, see, agriculture is not the gold standard to which we should measure our lives against.
Today, agriculture is mostly done by machines (humans working on agriculture are today less than 29% of the total population down from 45% in 1991 and bound to keep on going down), and 10.000 years ago that proportion was certainly lower (that’s when agriculture started to appear). Fast forward 1000 years in the future and scholars will probably consider engaging in agriculture as a blip in humanity’s timeline, something that a lot of people did during those funny 10.000 years which today we call history.
Way before that, homo sapiens were hunter-gatherers, and we did that for a looooong time. And in a sense, that looks a lot more like the way we live our lives today (very broadly, pls indulge with me). We used to roam the plains, or the hills, or the forests, or whatever, aimlessly, for days or weeks at a time, looking for the ever scarce energy sources, scavenging and surviving mostly, and, if there was any luck, hitting jackpot and feasting every now and then.
At this point you might be either thinking:
- “Well, duh, I already knew that” (this is especially obvious for people that work in sales, who unabashedly compare themselves to hunters on a daily basis) OR,
- “Nope, my job is still bs, I can attest that I haven’t produced any value whatsoever, ever”
And that might as well be right. But here’s the deal: it may very well be that companies treat hiring analysts as sort of bets, like monkeys throwing darts at a target, they just hire a bunch of randos, assign them to random tasks, and see which one sticks. Furthermore, it might be the case that this dynamic repeats itself up to a certain level in the corporate ladder, meaning that possibly even some middle managers are indeed just aimlessly ‘trying stuff’ by pushing all the allegorical buttons in the hopes of hitting a jackpot. Which unfortunately means that some people are buried under several layers of random, pointless tasks.
Let me indulge a little bit more in some magical-pseudo-evolutionary narrative by extending my hunter-gatherer theory and claiming that probably ancient tribes used to split themselves into teams to hunt, and most of them probably came back with nothing tasty or valuable most of the time. And the fact that some of them came back empty-handed by no means implies that they weren’t doing anything of value. Basically, they pooled risk, and that is a good thing.
Coming back to our modern, wasteful corporate life: isn’t this highly inefficient? Wouldn’t a healthy system remove these inefficient and wasteful employees, or even the full damn company? Further, isn’t the fact that these jobs still actually exist the definitive proof that the system is inherently broken, the rent-seeking billionaire class is definitely a thing, that they are totally engaged in sucking the blood out of the proletariat, and that therefore we must vote in left-wing social democrats in an effort to regulate them out of existence?
Well, maybe. But not necessarily. The free-market efficiency does not mean perfect efficiency in the sense that there is no slack to cut anywhere, there is no waste whatsoever, and every single expenditure around the system “makes sense”. You will always find waste, stupidity, useless products that nobody wants, bad marketing campaigns, WeWork’s, stupid paper mail brochures that nobody reads, and people using an unread newspaper to light up the grill. The free market is good because it allows experimentation. And failure. You cannot have one without the other. You want innovation? You’re gonna have to deal with failure (and waste).
So what I’m trying to say here is that the system in which we seem to be immersed in today may very well be a stable and healthy, albeit sometimes mind-numbingly stupid, equilibrium.
I think this is a positive enough note to leave the post at, but I can additionally attempt to offer the best heuristic I currently have to cope with this relatively unknown and mysterious value landscape in which we find ourselves in: acknowledge your humanity and the full extent of your limitations, and do your best to command your senses, instincts, and the full power of your intellect to pursue, find, and capture value, wherever it may be.
