Existential Consequences of Bullshit Jobs

The forgotten factor

What I’m Going to Say

I’m not sure if my points come through in the following text, so I thought I’d just spell out my thesis in a bulleted list:

• White-collar workers often seem interested in a set of relatively niche issues that have little to do with their jobs. Workers then attempt to connect their work to these issues.

• White-collar workers seem perpetually uneasy with their life circumstances, unhappy with their careers, and obsessively inward-looking as to why this unease occurs (see: Imposter Syndrome)

  • I’m not dismissing the role of basic economic issues (debt, housing costs, inequality, etc.), but I think the concept of bullshit jobs helps to explain what’s occurring.

• As one example, the elite overproduction hypothesis seeks to explain similar issues, and versions of this hypothesis often falter by omitting the role of bullshit jobs.

LinkedIn Overproduction

I’ve started volunteering at the local animal shelter, where I enjoy walking dogs in the morning. During my latest shift, I saw a new cohort of volunteers onboarding. A more enlightened version of me may have thought “that’s awesome; this will help further the mission of this organization that I believe in!” The real me, unfortunately, thought, “shit, what if all these people join and they don’t need me?” I imagine that I’m not alone in these sorts of thoughts. More importantly, I think these unenlightened thoughts can tell us something about the 21st century office.

I’m not the first to note some recent cultural changes in Corporate America, best exemplified by the heightened focus on diversity, mental health, and climate change:

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Tackle Burnout in the Workplace

Turning ESG intentions into action: ‘The most important thing is to just get started’

Culture shift: Young workers prioritize companies with green policies over salaries

This isn’t limited to news articles. My LinkedIn feed consists mostly of layoffs right now, but, before that, I saw tons of posts about corporate responsibility initiatives. It’s no harder to find people ridiculing this stuff. I’m going to avoid discussing the issues themselves and instead focus on why these issues seem ubiquitous in workplace contexts. For the record, I think the increased focus on diversity, mindfulness, and climate change is probably good, but not that good, and also sometimes bad at the extremes. Sorry for getting technical.

I’ve read various explanations for why we see this cultural shift. Yes, much of this serves as PR, but that doesn’t explain why mid-level employees post similar material. The average employee doesn’t care about the bottom line. I’ve also heard that companies tout their diversity programs to defend against discrimination lawsuits. I think this only tells part of the story. Companies may act conservatively, but are discrimination lawsuits that frequent? And, if one occurs, will corny LinkedIn content win over the jury? This explanation also offers nothing with respect to mindfulness and climate change. Sure, companies can face a lawsuit for racial discrimination, but have any gotten sued for insufficient Zen?

I understand why some people connect these topics to their work. I don’t see any mystery behind a therapist talking about mental health or a nuclear engineer centering climate change. Still, it’s hard to understand why so many professions focus on these items when their day-to-day work has little to do with them. Or, more accurately, it would be hard to understand if so many jobs weren’t bullshit.

Elite Misallocation

Our work often defines us, and we’d like to define ourselves as productive and useful. In older times, our professions defined us in a literal sense: see the surnames “Carpenter,” “Smith”, and “Miller.”¹ Small talk often beings with the question “what do you do?” It's kind of a big deal if people lack meaningful work, so it's not something we should ignore if we want to understand our culture.

Consider the elite overproduction hypothesis. The concept goes something like this: the American economy produced too many college graduates, and it promised elite positions (lawyer, consultant, professor) to too many people. Demand didn’t meet the supply, leading to a ton of pissed-off, credentialed people who cause a variety of social unrest. Granted, terms like “social unrest” can serve as a Rorschach test for anything you don’t like, so I’ll avoid them here. Instead, I want to understand why 1) white-collar workers connect their work to irrelevant issues, and 2) why I sense a general malaise among my middle-class and upper-middle-class brethren. To keep this article focused, I’ll concentrate on this elite overproduction piece from economics commentator Noah Smith. I chose Smith’s article because it’s recent and provides a solid overview of the topic, despite its unfair dismissiveness of the socialist movement. One of the main points concerns the unfulfilling nature of white-collar life:

Various polls throughout the decade showed that young Americans with college degrees were a bit less happy at work than their high-school-educated peers, despite making a lot more money.

Smith attributes to this the gap between expectations and reality. You’ve heard this story before: a generation was promised that a college degree would guarantee a comfortable spot in the middle class, but it didn’t. Let me repeat myself: I agree, but I don’t think that’s the full story. The expectations-reality gap also tells us nothing about those who have “made it.” I don’t see any less unease among people with impressive career trajectories. Additionally, it doesn’t account for the power of “sour grapes.” When we don’t get what we want, it’s often easy to convince ourselves that we didn’t want it anyway. Most importantly, though, Smith makes a mistake that I see across the elite overproduction discourse:

First, let’s start with the most important one — the humanity major’s ultimate fallback, the legal profession. Starting around 1970, there was a massive boom in the number of lawyers per capita in the U.S., but by the turn of the century it had started to level off:

How about [newspaper and magazine] publishing? Here, the decline of titans like Conde Nast is no mere anecdote. The industry also suffered from the Great Recession, but it was probably in long-term decline since the turn of the century[.]

As for academia, tenure-track hiring in the humanities was never exactly robust, but with the decline in higher education funding after the Great Recession, it went into deep decline[.]

Lawyers, journalists, and professors exist, but focusing on them draws a cartoony picture of the modern workforce. Few white-collar employees work or plan to work in these archetypal professions. For example, have you ever thought about becoming a Customer Success Manager? No? Well, if you do, here are 76,000 open slots. Are you familiar with the concept of a Business Process Analyst? If not, the first bullet point ought to clear it up:

Collaborate with team members to continuously improve capabilities, quality and efficiency that will improve team productivity, quality, and customer experience.

Got it? Meanwhile, GrubHub needs someone for the following roles:

• Growth Strategy and Analytics Manager - New Verticals

• Sr. Strategic Initiatives Managers

• Sr. Associate - Paid Research

• Manager, Integrated Marketing

• Learning and Development Specialist

If you’re a Growth Strategy and Analytics Manager for GrubHub’s New Verticals, it’s easy to see why you’d boast that company’s management is 1.3% more diverse than the industry average.

To be clear, I don’t want to ridicule anyone! I can’t blame anyone for trying to find meaning in the activity that constitutes the plurality of their waking life. I’m also not saying that a Senior Strategic Initiatives Manager is necessarily a bullshit job. I just find that people with those sorts of titles are the ones most likely to tell you that they produce nothing of value. They’re the type of people who messaged Graeber.

Yes, members of the middle and upper-middle class say a lot of weird stuff. I, too, have rolled my eyes at corporate Pride Month statements and dubious claims about carbon offsets. Before you hit send on that quip, though, you should recognize this behavior as a search for meaning. In addition, I’m not proposing bullshit jobs as a theory of everything. Bread-and-butter economic issues (cost of living, job opportunities, etc.) often explain more than all other issues combined. I intend a smaller point. No major problems reduce to bullshit jobs, but if we want to understand why our white-collar class acts, talks, and feels the way it does, we must acknowledge the role of bullshit jobs.

1. And the German versions: Zimmerman, Schmidt, and Mueller.