Olivia: A recent poll found that 37% of British workers believe their job makes no meaningful contribution to the world. Jackson: Hold on, thirty-seven percent? That can't be right. That’s more than a third of the workforce. You're telling me one in three people walking into an office today secretly thinks their job is completely and utterly pointless? Olivia: That’s exactly what they think. And it’s not just in Britain. A similar poll in Holland found the number was 40%. This isn't just a case of the Monday blues; it’s a silent, global crisis of meaning. And it’s the central mystery at the heart of the book we’re diving into today: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by the late David Graeber. Jackson: David Graeber… I know that name. Wasn't he more than just an academic? Olivia: He was. And that’s what makes his perspective so powerful. He was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, but he was also a major figure in the global justice movement and one of the key organizers behind Occupy Wall Street. He wasn't just observing society from an ivory tower; he was on the front lines trying to change it. Jackson: That definitely adds some weight to it. So, coming from that background, what on earth does he mean by a "bullshit job"? I feel like we’ve all had jobs we hated, but he’s clearly talking about something more specific. Olivia: He is, and the distinction he makes is absolutely crucial. It’s the foundation for everything else. He argues there are two kinds of terrible jobs. There are "shit jobs," and then there are "bullshit jobs." Jackson: Okay, I'm listening. What's the difference? Olivia: A shit job is a job that is genuinely necessary and useful for society, but it’s awful to do. Think of a hospital cleaner, a garbage collector, or a farm worker. The work is physically demanding, the pay is terrible, the conditions are poor, but if they stopped working, society would grind to a halt almost immediately. We need them. Jackson: Right, that makes total sense. Hard, essential work. Olivia: A bullshit job, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. It’s a job that is so pointless, unnecessary, or even pernicious that the person doing it cannot secretly justify its existence. And here’s the kicker: these jobs are often highly respected and well-paid. Think of some corporate lawyers, PR executives, lobbyists, or middle managers who just seem to create paperwork for other people. If they vanished tomorrow, the world would, at best, not notice, and at worst, might actually be a better place. Jackson: Wow. So a shit job is useful but awful, and a bullshit job is useless but often comfortable. The misery is different. One is physical, the other is… what, existential? Olivia: Exactly. It's a crisis of purpose. And Graeber collected hundreds of testimonies from people in these roles. The stories are both hilarious and horrifying.

Jackson: You have to give me an example. I need to understand what this looks like in the wild. Olivia: Okay, here’s a perfect one from the book. It’s the story of a guy named Kurt who worked for a subcontractor… of a subcontractor… of the German military. Jackson: Oh boy, I can already see where this is going. The layers of bureaucracy. Olivia: Precisely. The German military had outsourced its IT department to a private company. That company then outsourced its logistics to another company. And that second company outsourced its personnel management to the firm that hired Kurt. Jackson: It’s like a Russian doll of inefficiency. So what did Kurt actually do? Olivia: His job was to move office equipment. For example, if a soldier on a base needed to move their computer from one office to another, just down the hall, they couldn't just pick it up and move it. They had to fill out a digital form. That form would go to the first company, the IT firm. They would approve it and forward it to the second company, the logistics firm. They would approve it and forward it to Kurt’s company. Jackson: Let me guess. Kurt would then get an email telling him to go move the computer. Olivia: Exactly. He would have to rent a car, drive sometimes for two or three hours to the military base, fill out more paperwork to get on the base, find the office, unplug the computer, put it in a box, and then have a logistics guy—from the other company—carry the box fifty feet down the hall to the new office. Jackson: You're kidding me. He didn't even carry the box? Olivia: Nope. His job was just to oversee the process. Then he’d unbox it, plug it in, fill out a final form saying the task was complete, and drive two hours back home. A process that should have taken five minutes took days of paperwork and a full day of Kurt’s time, plus a rental car and gas, all billed to the German government. Jackson: That is the most beautifully, tragically absurd thing I have ever heard. His entire job was to be a human cog in a machine that was designed to be broken. Olivia: And Kurt knew it. He told Graeber, "I could have just stayed home and said I did it. No one would have ever known the difference." That is the essence of a bullshit job. The person doing it knows, with absolute certainty, that their role is a complete waste of time and resources. Jackson: And the scary part is that 37% statistic you mentioned. It suggests there are millions of Kurts out there, all driving their rental cars to move computers fifty feet, all knowing it's a sham. Olivia: It’s a huge, unacknowledged part of our modern economy. Graeber argues that technology, which Keynes predicted would give us a 15-hour work week, has instead been used to create and manage these pointless administrative and managerial roles. We didn't get more leisure; we got more bullshit.

Jackson: Okay, I'm sold on the absurdity. It’s wild. But I have to be honest, a part of my brain is still thinking, "Getting paid a good salary to drive around and watch someone else move a box… where do I sign up?" Why does Graeber insist this is so profoundly miserable? It sounds like a pretty sweet deal on the surface. Olivia: This is the most counterintuitive and, I think, the most important argument in the book. Graeber calls the experience of being in a bullshit job a form of "spiritual violence." Jackson: "Spiritual violence." That's a heavy term. What does he mean by that? Olivia: He argues that human beings have a fundamental, deep-seated need to feel that they have an effect on the world. The German psychologist Karl Groos called it "the pleasure at being the cause." It’s the joy a baby feels when they realize they can knock over a stack of blocks. It’s the satisfaction an engineer feels seeing a bridge they designed being built. It’s the core of what makes us feel alive and real. A bullshit job is a systematic denial of that feeling. Jackson: So it’s not about being lazy. It’s about being rendered completely ineffectual. Your actions have no meaning, no impact. Olivia: Worse than that. You have to actively pretend they do. You're forced to participate in a charade, a lie that your work matters. And that constant state of pretense, of falseness, is what grinds people down. It creates a profound sense of worthlessness, confusion, and despair. Jackson: That’s dark. Is there a story from the book that shows this in action? Olivia: There's a devastating one about a young man named Eric. He was a bright university graduate, the first in his working-class family to get a degree. He landed what he thought was a dream first job as an "Interface Administrator" at a big, fancy design firm. Jackson: "Interface Administrator." That already sounds like a made-up title. Olivia: It basically was. His job was to manage the company's new intranet, a system designed to help the seven different offices collaborate. The problem was, the partners at the firm were intensely competitive and had no interest in collaborating. The intranet was a top-down project that nobody wanted or used. It was also poorly designed and full of bugs Eric had no idea how to fix. Jackson: So he was the captain of a ghost ship. Olivia: A ghost ship that was taking on water. He quickly realized his job served no purpose. So he started testing the limits. He’d come in late, leave early, take three-hour lunches. Nobody noticed. He tried to quit multiple times, but his boss, who also seemed to know the job was pointless, just kept offering him more money to stay. Jackson: That’s the dream, right? Getting paid more to do less! Olivia: That’s what he thought. But it drove him into a spiral. He started showing up to work drunk. He stopped shaving. He became openly defiant. He said he was living in a state of "utter, baffling purposelessness." The breaking point came one day when he was standing on a train platform and just broke down, overwhelmed by the profound misery of his fake existence. He eventually had to orchestrate his own replacement just to escape. Jackson: Wow. That's actually heartbreaking. It’s not a comedy about slacking off; it's a tragedy about a mind being destroyed by meaninglessness. The misery comes from the pretense, doesn't it? Having to smile and nod and act like you're contributing when you know, in your soul, that you are a ghost in the machine. Olivia: That’s the spiritual violence. It’s the feeling that your life, the one and only one you have, is being spent on something that amounts to absolutely nothing. And you have to lie about it every single day.

Jackson: Okay, so these jobs are absurd, they're everywhere, and they make people secretly miserable. That brings up the biggest question of all. If they're so economically irrational and psychologically damaging, why do they exist? Why are there so many of them? It doesn't make any sense from a capitalist perspective. Olivia: This is where Graeber’s critique gets really sharp. He argues that the proliferation of bullshit jobs isn't an economic accident. It's a political and moral phenomenon. He says our system is no longer primarily about producing value, but about maintaining a certain kind of social order. Jackson: What kind of social order? Olivia: One built on the idea that work, especially suffering through work, is a moral virtue in itself. It doesn't matter what the work produces; the act of labor, of being disciplined and busy, is what's important. He calls it "managerial feudalism," where the administrative class exists not to support productive workers, but to control them and justify its own existence by creating endless layers of bureaucracy. Jackson: So it's about control, not efficiency. And that leads to this completely upside-down world of value he talks about, right? Olivia: Exactly. This is maybe the most infuriating point in the book: the inverse relationship between a job's social value and its pay. The more obviously your work benefits other people, the less you are likely to be paid for it. Jackson: Give me the starkest example. Olivia: A study he cites from the New Economics Foundation in the UK tried to calculate the social return on investment for different professions. They found that for every pound a hospital cleaner is paid, they generate about ten pounds in social value through public health and well-being. Jackson: Okay, that makes sense. They're creating a huge positive impact. Olivia: Now, compare that to a top advertising executive. The study estimated that for every pound they are paid, they destroy eleven and a half pounds in social value, by promoting overconsumption, anxiety, and feelings of inadequacy. A tax accountant destroyed about eleven pounds for every pound earned. Jackson: Wait, they destroy value? That’s an incredible claim. So the person cleaning up the mess is creating value, and the person creating the mess is getting paid millions and celebrated on the cover of magazines. Olivia: That is the perverse logic of our economy in a nutshell. And we've all been taught to accept it as normal, even right. Jackson: Hold on, though. I have to push back a little here, because this is where some critics take issue with Graeber. They argue that his numbers, like the 37% or 50% figure he sometimes uses, are exaggerated. Some studies suggest the real number of people who feel their jobs are useless is much lower, maybe 10-20%, and that it's more about toxic management and a bad work culture than the job itself being inherently bullshit. Is he just being provocative for the sake of a headline? Olivia: That's a completely fair point, and the empirical data is definitely debated. Graeber himself was an anthropologist, not a statistician, and he built his theory more on qualitative evidence—the stories people told him—than on large-scale quantitative surveys. But I think his response would be twofold. Jackson: Okay, what's the first part? Olivia: First, even if the number is "only" 20%, that is still tens of millions of people in a state of quiet despair. It's a massive social problem that no one was talking about before him. He gave it a name and a framework. Jackson: And the second part? Olivia: The second part is that the distinction between a "bullshit job" and a "bullshit work culture" might not matter as much as we think. The experience for the worker is the same: a feeling of profound pointlessness and alienation. Graeber’s core diagnosis is that our system is generating this feeling on an industrial scale. He saw it as a fundamental feature of modern financialized capitalism, not a bug that can be patched with better management.

Jackson: So, if this is a feature and not a bug, what's the big takeaway here? Are we all just doomed to our little cubicles of absurdity, pretending our work matters until we retire? Olivia: I think the takeaway is that we need to fundamentally question our relationship with work itself. Graeber argues that we live in a society that has embraced what the historian Thomas Carlyle called the "Worship of Sorrow." We've been taught that work is supposed to be a bit miserable, that suffering for a paycheck is what makes you a responsible adult. Jackson: "If you’re not destroying your mind and body via paid work, you’re not living right." I think he quotes someone saying that. Olivia: Exactly. It's a deeply ingrained moral belief. And because of it, we've created an economic system that invents pointless tasks just to keep everyone busy, because the alternative—a population with free time and a sense of security—is seen as politically dangerous by those in power. Jackson: So what’s the way out? Did he offer any hope? Olivia: He did. He was a huge advocate for Universal Basic Income, or UBI. The idea is to give every citizen a basic, unconditional income to cover their essential needs. This would sever the link between survival and work. It would give people the power to say "no" to bullshit jobs. Jackson: And the freedom to pursue things that are actually meaningful, whether they're paid or not. Like caring for family, creating art, starting a small business, or volunteering. Olivia: Precisely. It would allow us to finally have the conversation we should have had a century ago: now that we have the technology to provide for everyone, what do we actually want to spend our time doing? Jackson: That really forces you to ask a deeply uncomfortable question, doesn't it? If you didn't have to do your job to survive, would that job still exist? And what would you do with your life instead? Olivia: That is the question Graeber leaves us with. And it’s one that might just change everything. Jackson: A question to ponder on your commute—whether it’s a real one or a pointless one. This is Aibrary, signing off.