Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? – Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber
Middle Management Performance Analyst Consultant Team Effiency Customer Satisfaction Specialist Diversity Officer Employee Relations Manager knob-end, Billy No-Mates, is still attempting to convince his fellow barstoolers of his indispensability to “his firm”. Although his perceived self-importance causes much weeping and gnashing of teeth amongst customers, paradoxically, the insufferable arsehole actually increases pub revenue as punters desperately attempt to numb the pain of listening to his dirge.
“There is still nothing I love more than drinking a skinful and boring the absolute pants off whoever I can find about my dull and utterly redundant white-collar job. Commodity fetishism defines who I am, with comparing Arklow property prices to Dublin as the topic du jour.
The more conspicuous consumption I engage in, the hollower my dead soul becomes. Every piece of blockbuster garbage I see in the cinema, from the latest Bond to Top Gun, is a religious experience only comparable to buying my first album by The Script. Bland middle-of-the-road banality seeps from every pore of my caricature superficiality.
The boundaries between my Linkedin profile and the Baudriallian reality I plod through ceased to exist long ago, I simultaneously represent nothing, but yet everything, of late capitalist vacousness. Machines and automation should have replaced my repetitive office “work” decades ago , but then what would self-important twats like me do? Work a tangible job? I don’t think so!
Instead, I will gleefully and endlessly droll on about the minutiae of how I order some shit over the phone, type up some spreadsheets or have some Zoom meetings with other pompous cunts that could easily have been a circular email.”
”A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.” – Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber
“In rare moments of clarity, it has occurred to me that the only reason I am employed is to appear that my bloodsucking corporate overlords are somehow providing gainful employment here, as they shift their global profits beyond the reach of international tax authorities. To concede this though would indeed shatter the illusion of the self and carefully cultivated fiction that is my dull existence.
Instead, a lethal cerebral cocktail of false consciousness and cognitive dissonance allows me to fool myself of my delusions of grandeur. Staging a phone call from mid pint certainly assuages any potential doubters of my significance, as I proceed to intimate the peerless instructions of “yeah, call him back Monday” to one of my many hapless subordinates.”
Billy No Mates is suddenly interrupted from his soliloquy by a notification on his iPhone 29 and a half Special Edition. His chipper facial expression suddenly plunges into that of utter dismay.
“No bad news, I hope?” I interject, secretly hoping the opposite. “I heard some multinational layoffs are coming here, perish the thought you were one of those poor souls, Billy.”
“I may have to pivot, touch base later with you…,” he glumly responded.
To be continued………
There is something very wrong with what we have made ourselves. We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities. It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement. The main political reaction to our awareness that half the time we are engaged in utterly meaningless or even counterproductive activities—usually under the orders of a person we dislike—is to rankle with resentment over the fact there might be others out there who are not in the same trap. As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion have become the glue that holds society together. Bullshit Jobs. David Graeber
