Bullshit Jobs: A Theory Quotes
"Provisional Definition: a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence."
"This might sound like a classic example of ridiculous military red tape... except for one key element: almost nobody in this story actually works for the military."
"Kurt’s job might be considered a paradigmatic example of a bullshit job for one simple reason: if the position were eliminated, it would make no discernible difference in the world."
"The main thing I would like to do in this first chapter is to define what I mean by bullshit jobs."
"Some jobs are so pointless that no one even notices if the person who has the job vanishes."
"Contemporary capitalism seems riddled with such jobs."
"We have created societies where much of the population, trapped in useless employment, have come to resent and despise equally those who do the most useful work in society, and those who do no paid work at all."
"My research has revealed five basic types of bullshit jobs."
"Flunky jobs are those that exist only or primarily to make someone else look or feel important."
"Duct tapers are employees whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or fault in the organization."
"Box tickers are employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing."
"If a government’s employees are caught doing something very bad... the first reaction is invariably to create a 'fact-finding commission' to get to the bottom of things."
"This mentality seems to increase, not decrease, when government functions are reorganized to be more like a business, and citizens, for example, are redefined as 'customers'."
"I got a better idea. Why don’t you pretend like I’m working? You get paid more than me." - Bill Hicks comedy routine
"I was able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy meeting." - Hannibal
"Everyone is cool with it, because we get money while we study, but otherwise there’s absolutely no reason not to just give students the money and automate or eliminate the work." - Brendan
"In my experience, this is how most policy works in local government." - Mark
"I have a bullshit job, and it happens to be in middle management. Ten people work for me, but from what I can tell, they can all do the work without my oversight." - Ben
"As one might imagine, it is especially difficult to gather testimonies from taskmasters. Even if they do secretly think their jobs are useless, they are much less likely to admit it."
"You’re on my time; I’m not paying you to lounge around."
"I don’t care if there are no more dishes coming in right now, you’re on my time! You can goof around on your own time. Get back to work!" - Restaurant Boss
"By this moral logic, it’s not that idleness is dangerous. Idleness is theft."
"Workplaces are fascist. They’re cults designed to eat your life; bosses hoard your minutes jealously like dragons hoard gold." - Nouri
"It's hard to imagine anything more soul destroying than being forced to commit acts of arbitrary bureaucratic cruelty against one's will."
"The fact that so many people are being paid to do nothing in the first place defies all our assumptions about how market economies are supposed to work."
"The most common complaint among those trapped in offices doing nothing all day is just how difficult it is to repurpose the time for anything worthwhile."
"Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense."
"It’s hard enough nowadays being taken seriously when asking for things you’re already supposed to have."
"The situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media: basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else."
"My job was useless and harmful. So many NGOs profit from the misery created by inequality."
"The fact that they are paid to do it as proof that their efforts do indeed have some kind of meaningful effect."
"Under such conditions, it’s understandable that demanding an entirely new, unfamiliar, right—such as the right to meaningful employment—might seem a hopeless project."
"Almost all of the jobs mentioned in this chapter can be considered soul destroying in different ways."
"Often it’s assumed that the decline of manufacturing... simply meant that factories were relocated to poorer countries."
"The real problem here is with the concept of a 'service economy' itself."
"The number of industrial jobs has remained constant or increased slightly, but otherwise the picture is not so very different."
"Describing a country’s economy as dominated by the service sector leaves one with the impression that people in that country are supporting themselves principally by serving each other iced lattes or pressing one another’s shorts."
"The vast majority of those others included in the service sector were really administrators, consultants, clerical and accounting staff, IT professionals, and the like."
"These days, it’s hard to recall the almost mystical aura with which the financial sector had surrounded itself in the years leading up to 2008."
"In a way, one could argue that the whole financial sector is a scam of sorts, since it represents itself as largely about directing investments toward profitable opportunities in commerce and industry, when, in fact, it does very little of that."
"One must, then, seek a different sort of explanation: access to education, for example, or the fact that the poorest Swedish children aren’t nearly as poor as the poorest American ones."
"There have been moralists throughout the ages who have argued that the poor are poor because of their moral turpitude."
"The question of why one player won a game rather than another is different from the question of how hard the game is to play."
"When someone describes his job as pointless or worthless, he is necessarily operating within some sort of tacit theory of value."
"Economists measure value in terms of what they call 'utility': the degree to which a good or service is useful in satisfying a want or need."
"Still, there’s an obvious problem with the concept of utility. Saying that something is 'useful' is just saying it’s effective as a way of getting something else."
"To a large degree, needs are just other people’s expectations."
"Most economists conclude therefore that there’s no point in sitting in judgment about what people should want; better to just accept that they do want."
"The solid rock on which their idea of the good society rested, was that labor created all wealth."
"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed."
"Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
"Even if we don’t like what the world looks like, the fact remains that the conscious aim of most of our actions, productive or otherwise, is to do well by others; often, very specific others."
"Our actions are caught up in relations of caring. But most caring relations require we leave the world more or less as we found it."
"The fact that it does remains something of a stubborn paradox because the 'Gospel of Wealth' and subsequent rise of consumerism was supposed to have changed all that."
"Most people’s sense of dignity and self-worth is caught up in working for a living."
"To be denied work is to be denied far more than the things that work can buy; it is to be denied the ability to define and respect one’s self."
"The entire discipline of the sociology of work, not to mention industrial relations, has largely been concerned with trying to understand how both these things can be true at the same time."
"Work is not just a course of livelihood, it is also one of the most significant contributing factors to an inner life."
"If you’re not destroying your mind and body via paid work, you’re not living right."
"Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
"We’re not working harder because we’re spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving one another sushi."
"Sitting around in cafés all day arguing about politics or gossiping about our friends’ complex polyamorous love affairs takes time."
"This is what happens when we watch a politician on television say 'What shall we do about the less fortunate?' even though at least half of us would almost certainly fit that category ourselves."
"Human life is a process by which we, as humans, create one another."
"The economy is ultimately just the way we provide ourselves with the necessary material provisions with which to do so."
"If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all, how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labor more inefficient than the one we already have?"