Summary

I read this book a few months ago called Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. What led me to read the book was most likely something I had seen on YouTube. Here is an example on YouTube of David Graeber explaining 5 types of Bullshit jobs:

The paperback book I read was almost 300 pages long without the Notes section at the end. The book was printed well with a font a little on the small size, maybe a 9 or 10 pitch, but readable. The author starts in the first chapter defining what a “Bullshit” job is.

Having worked in corporations for the vast majority of my life I had seen my own share of bullshit jobs up close and personal. The author goes on in subsequent chapters to elaborate on what kinds of jobs are bullshit jobs, why most people that have a bullshit job are unhappy, what it is like to have a bullshit job, and why are bullshit jobs proliferating. After you have a good understanding of what these bullshit jobs are the author in Chapter 6 and 7 goes into a decent amount of detail into what impact these jobs have on society.

There is also what the author calls the working definition of a bullshit job.

Provisional Definition: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.

One of the things that Mr. Graeber elaborates on is the rise of the management role in industrialized capitalism. This of course created its own layer of bullshit jobs as management roles proliferated and left the actual producers (people doing the work) with almost zero autonomy.

Working Definition: 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.

Of course bullshit jobs do not only exist in our capitalist enterprises. Academia has taken what used to be a Dean and the majority of employee’s at a university being faculty to what exists today more administrators than faculty.

What the hell?

Wonder why your tuition is so expensive?

Graeber also goes into detail on how these bullshit jobs invent processes that justify their existence such as multiple levels of approvals, pointless reports, and metrics with little to no meaning. Such is the surge in organizational bloat. So instead of donating the profits to charities, paying the real workers more, or investing into capital equipment, the modern goliath of a company builds additional layers and can’t understand why they are not more profitable and nimble.

Recommendation

I would recommend this book to most people that want to learn more about what is going on in corporate, government, and educational institutions. If you were starting a business you might look at this book as uncovering what you don’t want to do. For me it confirmed a lot of things I had thought for some time, but I also learned a lot about what these types of jobs do to the people that hold them.

The fact that we as a society are so utterly oblivious to the existence of these bullshit jobs is very telling. They say we are approaching a demographic tipping point, where in many countries we are not replacing the elderly with sufficient amounts of younger people to be consumers, drive growth, and work for our institutions. If this is so then maybe this will become the demise of bullshit jobs as we know it today.

Why is it we get so much satisfaction from accomplishing real work on the weekends, such as doing lawn work, building something? Is it because the work we do is often mundane and meaningless?

About the Author

David Rolfe Graeber; (February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist and anarchist activist. His influential work in economic anthropology, particularly his books Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Bullshit Jobs (2018), and The Dawn of Everything (2021), and his leading role in the Occupy movement, earned him recognition as one of the foremost anthropologists and left-wing thinkers of his time.

Born in New York to a working-class Jewish family, Graeber studied at Purchase College and the University of Chicago, where he conducted ethnographic research in Madagascar under Marshall Sahlins and obtained his doctorate in 1996. He was an assistant professor at Yale University from 1998 to 2005, when the university controversially decided not to renew his contract before he was eligible for tenure. Unable to secure another position in the United States, he entered an “academic exile” in England, where he was a lecturer and reader at Goldsmiths’ College from 2008 to 2013, and a professor at the London School of Economics from 2013.

In his early scholarship, Graeber specialized in theories of value (Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, 2002), social hierarchy and political power (Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 2004, Possibilities, 2007, On Kings, 2017), and the ethnography of Madagascar (Lost People, 2007). In the 2010s he turned to historical anthropology, producing his best-known book, Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), an exploration of the historical relationship between debt and social institutions, as well as a series of essays on the origins of social inequality in prehistory. In parallel, he developed critiques of bureaucracy and managerialism in contemporary capitalism, published in The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs (2018). He coined the concept of bullshit jobs in a 2013 essay that explored the proliferation of “paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”.

Although exposed to radical left politics from a young age, Graeber’s direct involvement in activism began with the global justice movement of the 1990s. He attended protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001 and the World Economic Forum in New York in 2002, and later wrote an ethnography of the movement, Direct Action (2009). In 2011, he became well known as one of the leading figures of Occupy Wall Street and is credited with coining the slogan “We are the 99%“. His later activism included interventions in support of the Rojava revolution in Syria, the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and Extinction Rebellion.

David Graeber died unexpectedly in September 2020, while on vacation in Venice. His last book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, co-written with archaeologist David Wengrow, was published posthumously in 2021.^[5]

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber

Namaste

Let me know if you think you have a bullshit job.

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