- Bullshit jobs, I define, as a job where
even the person doing
the job secretly believes
the job really shouldn't exist.
But, nonetheless, part of
the conditions of employment
is that you have to pretend that it does.
It's important to distinguish between
bullshit jobs and shit jobs.
Mostly when we say bullshit jobs
people at first assume you mean jobs
that just you really don't want to have.
Jobs where they don't treat you well,
jobs where they don't pay you well,
jobs where you work under difficult,
or humiliating, or onerous conditions.
But most of the jobs that are shit jobs
actually aren't bullshit jobs.
Most of the jobs that oppress
you are jobs like cleaners,
or ditch diggers, or nurses, servants
of various kinds who are mistreated.
Still they're doing something.
A bullshit job is actually
kind of the opposite of that.
A bullshit job, you're
often given a lot of money,
you're treated very well,
a great deal of respect,
often seen as the person in your family
who most made something of yourself.
But at the same time
you're secretly haunted
by the knowledge that you're
not actually doing anything,
that if your job didn't exist at all,
the world would either
would change in no way,
or actually it might become
a slightly better place.
This is one of the great
mysteries of our time
as far as I'm concerned,
because we usually associate,
make- or stupid made-up
jobs with state socialism,
and the Soviet Union,
and they used to say,
"Well, we pretend to work,
and they pretend to pay us."
They would make up jobs which
were completely unnecessary.
That makes sense because they had
an ideology of full employment.
On the other hand,
capitalism, that's exactly
the thing that isn't supposed to happen.
A private firm would never hire someone
and put out good money to someone
who they don't actually need, but in fact,
if you talk to people who
work for large corporations,
they do it all the time.
How does that happen?
I think part of it has to be explained by
political pressure, and in a way,
just as in the Soviet Union, there's
a central directive saying,
"We need full employment."
Didn't say, "Therefore, make
up bullshit jobs," right?
But they didn't say don't do it.
In a similar way, we
have pressure from both
the left and the right to
create jobs all the time.
On the one hand, we have the left saying,
"We need public works, we need more money
being given to the consumers
to stimulate the economy."
On the right, they're
saying, "Give money to
capitalists and they'll hire people."
But the one thing the left
and right totally agree on
is the solution to all
problems is more jobs,
but they never say jobs
that actually do something.
Jobs that are worthwhile in any way.
So it's assumed that if
jobs are created they will
necessarily serve a purpose,
and if you don't specify that,
if you don't have a self
conscious policy of trying to
make sure that jobs actually do something,
you're going to end up with useless
make work, it's just going to happen.
A lot of bosses, people who hire people,
get very angry at this, at me about this.
They're probably the only people
that get angry at this process.
They say, "Look, I would
never hire someone if they
didn't serve a purpose, this
is a stupid, insulting."
They don't understand
how capitalism works.
But bosses are the last people
to know what's really going on.
I trust people to understand
what they're really doing,
or at least if anybody
does, they would know.
