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Bullshit Jobs

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If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) — location: 152 ^ref-64393

the very fact that tube workers can paralyze London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. — location: 170 ^ref-7166

We essentially make viewers feel inadequate whilst they’re watching the main programs and then exaggerate the effectiveness of the “solutions” provided in the commercial breaks. — location: 858 ^ref-42721

Where honest illusions add joy into the world, dishonest ones are intentionally aimed toward convincing people their worlds are a tawdry and miserable sort of place. — location: 876 ^ref-31459

A fact-finding commission is a way of telling the public that the government is doing something it is not. — location: 989 ^ref-60398

once you introduce formal measures of success, “reality”—for the organization—becomes that which exists on paper, and the human reality that lies behind it is a secondary consideration at best. — location: 1004 ^ref-4532

Note here the importance of the physical attractiveness of the report. This is a theme that comes up frequently in testimonies about box-ticking operations and even more so in the corporate sector than in government. — location: 1035 ^ref-28623

“The entire job of middle management is to ensure the lower-level people hit their ‘productivity numbers’ ”—and will therefore start coming up with formal statistical metrics that his underlings can try to falsify. — location: 1089 ^ref-6753

Even in corporate environments, it is very difficult to remove an underling for incompetence if that underling has seniority and a long history of good performance reviews. — location: 1157 ^ref-47277

But of course, efficiency is not the point. — location: 1473 ^ref-20135

A successful student has to learn self-discipline, but this is not the same as learning how to operate under orders. — location: 1480 ^ref-38081

as Brendan points out, it is very much not preparation for work in today’s increasingly bullshitized workplace: — location: 1485 ^ref-40617

even when one is being paid to carry out tasks one does not enjoy, one also has to pretend to be enjoying it. — location: 1500 ^ref-14131

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. — location: 1504 ^ref-36194

if one first allows a child to discover and experience the delight in being able to cause a certain effect, and then suddenly denies it to them, the results are dramatic: first rage, refusal to engage, and then a kind of catatonic folding in on oneself and withdrawing from the world entirely. — location: 1576 ^ref-1351

It’s not just an assault on the person’s sense of self-importance but also a direct attack on the very foundations of the sense that one even is a self. A human being unable to have a meaningful impact on the world ceases to exist. — location: 1583 ^ref-5188

Being forced to pretend to work just for the sake of working is an indignity, since the demand is perceived—rightly—as the pure exercise of power for its own sake. — location: 1598 ^ref-37446

most people who have ever existed have assumed that normal human work patterns take the form of periodic intense bursts of energy, followed by relaxation, followed by slowly picking up again toward another intense bout. — location: 1607 ^ref-56856

the traditional student’s pattern of lackadaisical study leading up to intense cramming before exams and then slacking off again—I like to refer to it as “punctuated hysteria”—is typical of how human beings have always tended to go about necessary tasks if no one forces them to act otherwise. — location: 1611 ^ref-40225

Not only is it what humans will do if left to their own devices, but there is no reason to believe that forcing them to act otherwise is likely to cause greater efficiency or productivity. Often it will have precisely the opposite effect. — location: 1615 ^ref-443

the new conception of time was what made it possible. What I want to underline here is that this was both a technological and a moral change. — location: 1704 ^ref-9751

the very act of demanding “free time,” however understandable under the circumstances, had the effect of subtly reinforcing the idea that when a worker was “on the clock,” his time truly did belong to the person who had bought it—a concept that would have seemed perverse and outrageous to their great-grandparents, as, indeed, to most people who have ever lived. — location: 1713 ^ref-30042

Of course, we learned our lesson: if you’re on the clock, do not be too efficient. — location: 1729 ^ref-23511

the morality of “You’re on my time” has become so naturalized that most of us have learned to see the world from the point of view of the restaurant owner—to — location: 1777 ^ref-36988

Ultimately, the woman quit. When she did, my mother said to her, “Why? My mother looks great!” To which the woman responded famously, “Sure, she looks great. I’ve lost fifteen pounds, and my hair is falling out. I can’t take her anymore.” — location: 1791 ^ref-28773

The job wasn’t BS, but the need to construct a cover by way of creating so much BS busywork was deeply demeaning to her. — location: 1793 ^ref-34592

ultimately, the need to play a game of make-believe not of one’s own making, a game that exists only as a form of power imposed on you, is inherently demoralizing. — location: 1825 ^ref-63149

Humans are social beings that begin to atrophy—even to physically decay—if they are denied regular contact with other humans; — location: 1841 ^ref-25915

it is largely from conceiving themselves as capable of acting on the world and others in predictable ways. Deny humans this sense of agency, and they are nothing. — location: 1842 ^ref-58478

In the case of bullshit jobs, it’s rarely so clear-cut. Who exactly is forcing you to pretend to work? The company? Society? Some strange confluence of social convention and economic forces that insist no one should be given the means of life without working, even if there is not enough real work to go around? At least in the traditional workplace, there was someone against whom you could direct your rage. — location: 1852 ^ref-30450

Ask someone “What do you do?” and he or she will assume you mean “for a living.” — location: 2034 ^ref-14604

Where for some, pointlessness exacerbates boredom, for others it exacerbates anxiety. — location: 2077 ^ref-41543

pointlessness compounds stress. When I started working on those banners, I had patience for the process. Once I realized that the task was more or less meaningless, all that patience evaporated. — location: 2089 ^ref-48622

When, as with Greg, one’s bullshit job involves not just sitting around pretending to work but actually working on something everyone knows—but can’t say—is pointless, the level of ambient tension increases and often causes people to lash out in arbitrary ways. — location: 2093 ^ref-9865

the amount of workplace aggression and stress I see in people is inversely correlated with the importance of the work they’re doing: — location: 2100 ^ref-61201

It was a ritual of humiliation that allows the supervisor to show who’s boss in the most literal sense, and it puts the underling in her place, justified no doubt by the sense that underlings are generically guilty at the very least of spiritual insubordination, of resenting the boss’s tyranny, in the same way that police who beat suspects they know to be innocent will tell themselves the victim is undoubtedly guilty of something else. — location: 2122 ^ref-10928

One part of the experience I think about a lot is that I went from an environment where I was touched and touching all day long—picking kids up, getting hugs, giving piggybacks, rocking to sleep—into an environment where nobody talked to each other, let alone touched each other. I didn’t recognize the effect this had on my body while it was happening, but now in retrospect I see what a huge impact it had on my physical and mental health. — location: 2137 ^ref-6232

You might ask what kind of economic system creates a world where the only way to feed one’s children is to spend most of one’s waking hours engaged in useless box-ticking exercises or solving problems that shouldn’t exist. — location: 2209 ^ref-3454

more than two thousand were discovered to have died not long after having been found “fit to work”), — location: 2342 ^ref-45534

theater created under the midcentury welfare state. What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there’s nothing for them to do, they still can’t admit it openly. — location: 2414 ^ref-23002

in the professional world, playing the part is everything: form is always valued over content, — location: 2467 ^ref-10800

Recently I found someone very much like me online; we’ve become deep, deep friends, and as of last week, I find it so much easier to get into “the zone” for work. I think it’s because someone understands me. For all my other “close” friends, I’m an active listener, a sounding board—because they simply don’t understand the things I care about. Their eyes glaze over when I even mention my activism. — location: 2490 ^ref-7784

The question of why one player won a game rather than another is different from the question of how hard the game is to play. — location: 2615 ^ref-61075

One motive, he insists, for maintaining the existing market-based system is precisely its inefficiency, since it is better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to — location: 2690 ^ref-57473

in fact, administering complex global supply — location: 2811 ^ref-43221

The upper quintile is growing in size and income because all the value created by actual productive workers in the lower quintiles gets extracted by those at the top. When the top classes rob everybody else, they need a lot more guard labor to keep their stolen loot secure. — location: 2988 ^ref-33564

it was only with the first stirrings of industrial capitalism that anyone started talking about “the economy” as an autonomous sphere of human activity in the first place. — location: 2999 ^ref-62611

Efficiency” has come to mean vesting more and more power to managers, supervisors, and other presumed “efficiency experts,” so that actual producers have almost zero autonomy.27 At the same time, the ranks and orders of managers seem to reproduce themselves endlessly. — location: 3032 ^ref-39013

in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, there was a tacit understanding in much of the industrialized world that if productivity in a certain enterprise improved, a certain share of the increased profits would be redistributed to the workers in the form of improved wages and benefits. Since the eighties, this is no longer the case. — location: 3041 ^ref-47322

What this suggests is that what we are really dealing with here has nothing to do with efficiency but everything to do with changing understandings of the moral responsibilities of corporations. — location: 3053 ^ref-65534

Another considerable chunk of the benefits of increased productivity went to creating entirely new and basically pointless professional-managerial positions, usually—as we’ve seen in the case of universities—accompanied by small armies of equally pointless administrative staff. — location: 3061 ^ref-27447

Managerialism has become the pretext for creating a new covert form of feudalism, where wealth and position are allocated not on economic but political grounds—or rather, where every day it’s more difficult to tell the difference between what can be considered “economic” and what is “political.” — location: 3066 ^ref-20141

The vast majority said no, a high school education, they found, did not guarantee such things—they mainly expected the worker would be able to show up on time. Interestingly, the more advanced the level of education, however, the more autonomous the students and the more the old episodic pattern of work tends to reemerge. — location: 5088 ^ref-51339

the bourgeois obsession with prioritizing form over content has played havoc with the professions. Why is it, he asks, that Catch Me If You Can–style imposters can often successfully pretend to be airline pilots or surgeons without anyone noticing they have no qualifications for the job? The answer he suggests is that it’s almost impossible to get fired from a professional job—even pilot or surgeon—for mere incompetence, but very easy to get fired for defiance of accepted standards of external behavior, that is, for not properly playing the part. The imposters have zero competence, but play the part perfectly; hence, they are much less likely to be dismissed from their positions than, say, an accomplished pilot or surgeon who openly defies the unspoken codes of external comportment attendant on the role. — location: 5162 ^ref-19441

Psychological studies have shown that taking part in protests and street actions, at least, tend to have overall health benefits, reducing overall stress and with it rates of heart disease and other ailments: — location: 5168 ^ref-49525