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The 21st Century Salonnière's avatar

I think we need a category for people who do tasks that are created to decrease liability -- endless reports and trainings that no one cares about; and they create endless rules about what you can't do (top of the list, you can't fire anyone). All the money they spend on all those bullshit jobs could just be used to pay off lawsuits, if there were actually any.

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Mari, the Happy Wanderer's avatar

Great article, Klaus! I enjoyed both Debt and Bullshit Jobs, even though there were problems in each, because both books are genuinely provocative and get you to understand that phenomena that we had assumed were just normal and the way life is, are in fact invented and likely pernicious.

I depart from Bullshit Jobs, though, when Graeber says it’s a phenomenon of capitalism. It’s not. The Soviets, famously, insisted that every person have a job. No stay-at-home moms for them! (Or early retirement, or people taking time off between college and work or during a midlife crisis to “find themselves” either.) The cynical Russian joke ran, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

You can still see remnants of that system, in which there are way more workers than are necessary for the work that needs doing, in countries that used to be Communist like Czechia. You can’t imagine the layers of bureaucracy in situations where at most one worker could handle things. A trip to the main post office to pick up a package could take you all day because you would have to go to like eight different counters to conduct this simple transaction. (I used to beg people in the US never to send me a package, ever. Nothing could possibly be that important.)

Or, I once bought a dress for my BIL’s wedding at a fancy department store in Prague. I picked out a dress and handed it to a saleswoman. She sent it down a chute to a central processing area. I went downstairs and got in line. Someone in the processing area packaged up the dress and gave it to a cashier, who eventually rang up the purchase and handed over the dress and the receipt--which I had to wait in line to show to a checker to exit the store.

I think that bullshit jobs are a product of something else entirely--our deep-down feeling that everyone needs to be working hard, all the time. As a SAHM and housewife, I get this pushback all the time. People are really bugged that I don’t hold a paying job. In my case it’s social pressure, in the case of Americans with bullshit jobs it’s economic pressure, and in the case of people living under Communism it’s government force. But no matter the situation, we humans have a very tough time watching other people living at a slower pace, and so we set up systems to make it as difficult as possible to live that way.

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