The world needs no more ‘silly made-up jobs’
In his book Bullshit Jobs, the late anthropologist David Graeber wrote how society is set up to create jobs that ‘don’t exist’. You know the ones: telemarketers and ‘team meetings’ with people drawing things on whiteboards, creating ‘mission statements’.
We don’t need jobs created to manipulate figures for government stats. We need more ‘real jobs’. carers and wildlife rescuers, dog walkers, carpenters, green builders, teachers, hospice workers, community chefs.
Many people in England are working on jobs they hate, simply to earn money. But money is not everything, it’s important to do work that you love and that makes a difference to your community.
Graeber grouped bullshit jobs into five types:
- Flunkies: roles that make someone else look or feel important. Think receptionists hired for empty foyers, or assistants to signal status.
- Goons: PR hit-squads or or aggressive sales teams.
- Duct tapers: roles created to fix problems that should not exist. Like staff paid to patch broken systems, rather than fix the system itself.
- Box tickers: roles that produce reports and metrics to prove work is happening, even when it is not.
- Taskmasters: managers who create work for others, or oversee teams that do not need oversight.
You have likely experience of this. Ever gone into a Lush or Next shop? You’re bombarded the minute you arrive, with people ‘greeting you”. They look bored out of their brain, and the first thing you do is leave the shop. It would be far better if Next spent money on improving their ethics score at Good on You.
The NHS budget is bursting. But we have managers and middle managers, who waste money and energy on lit-up appointment boards. That money could be used to fund nursing assistants, to take the load off nurses and doctors.
In a YouGov survey, 37% of British workers said their job did not make a meaningful contribution to the world. That is a lot of wasted potential.
Ask three simple questions, to determine if you’re in a silly job:
- What would break if I stopped doing this for a month?
- Who would notice, and why?
- Does my job help anyone or the community?
David Graeber was a fan of Universal Income. Rather than a society where the blue-collar workers got ill from exhaustion, and white-collar workers did ‘invented jobs’ going round with clipboards, to check how others were doing:
For some reason, we as a society have collectively decided to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives, pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings.
Rather than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes or sit in cafés arguing about politics.
