Chapter 4: What Is It Like to Have a Bullshit Job? (On Spiritual Violence, Part 2)

The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smallest details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent or disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace.

—Bob Black, “The Abolition of Work”

In the last chapter, we asked why it was that human beings so regularly find being paid to do nothing an exasperating, insufferable, or oppressive experience—often, even when the conditions of employment are quite good. I suggested the answer reveals certain truths about human nature largely overlooked by economic science and even by the more cynical versions of popular common sense. Humans are social beings that begin to atrophy—even to physically decay—if they are denied regular contact with other humans; insofar as they do have a sense of being an autonomous entity separate from the world and from others, it is largely from conceiving themselves as capable of acting on the world and others in predictable ways. Deny humans this sense of agency, and they are nothing. What’s more, in bullshit jobs, the ability to perform acts of make-believe, which under ordinary circumstances might be considered the highest and most distinctly human form of action—especially to the extent that the make-believe worlds so created are in some way actually brought into reality—is turned against itself. Hence, my inquiry into the history of pretend work and the social and intellectual origins of the concept that one’s time can belong to someone else. How does it come to seem morally wrong to the employer that workers are not working, even if there is nothing obvious for them to do?

If being forced to pretend to work is so infuriating because it makes clear the degree to which you are entirely under another person’s power, then bullshit jobs are, as noted above, entire jobs organized on that same principle. You’re working, or pretending to work—not for any good reason, at least any good reason you can find—but just for the sake of working. Hardly surprising it should rankle.

But there’s one obvious difference, too, between bullshit jobs and a dishwasher being made to clean the baseboards in a restaurant. In the latter case, there is a demonstrable bully. You know exactly who is pushing you around. In the case of bullshit jobs, it’s rarely so clear-cut. Who exactly is forcing you to pretend to work? The company? Society? Some strange confluence of social convention and economic forces that insist no one should be given the means of life without working, even if there is not enough real work to go around? At least in the traditional workplace, there was someone against whom you could direct your rage.

This is one of the things that comes through strongly in the testimonies I assembled: the infuriating ambiguity. There is something terrible, ridiculous, outrageous going on, but it’s not clear whether you are even allowed to acknowledge it, and it’s usually even less clear who or what can be blamed.

why having a bullshit job is not always necessarily that bad

Before exploring these themes, though, it’s important to acknowledge that those who hold bullshit jobs are not uniformly miserable. As I mentioned in the last chapter, there were a handful of largely positive testimonials from workers who were quite satisfied with their bullshit jobs. It’s hard to generalize about their common features because there really weren’t all that many of them, but perhaps we can try to tease out a few:

Warren: I work as a substitute teacher in a public school district in Connecticut. My job just involves taking attendance and making sure the students stay on task with whatever individual work they have. Teachers rarely if ever actually leave instructions for teaching. I don’t mind the job, however, since it allows me lots of free time for reading and studying Chinese, and I occasionally have interesting conversations with students. Perhaps my job could be eliminated in some way, but for now I’m quite happy.

It’s not entirely clear this is even a bullshit job; as public education is currently organized, someone does have to look after the children in a given class period if a teacher calls in sick.[95] The bullshit element seems to lie in pretending that instructors such as Warren are there to teach, when everyone knows they’re not: presumably this is so the students will be more likely to respect their authority when they tell them to stop running around and do their assignments. The fact that the role isn’t entirely useless must help somewhat. Crucially, too, it is unsupervised, nonmonotonous, involves social interaction, and allows Warren to spend a lot of time doing whatever he likes. Finally, it’s clearly not something he envisions doing for the rest of his life.

This is about as good as a bullshit job is likely to get.

Some traditional bureaucratic jobs can also be quite pleasant, even if they serve little purpose. This is especially true if by taking the job one becomes part of a great and proud tradition, such as the French civil service. Take Pauline, a tax official in Grenoble:

Pauline: I’m a technical bankruptcy adviser in a government ministry equivalent to Britain’s Inland Revenue Service. About 5 percent of my job is giving technical advice. The rest of the day, I explain incomprehensible procedures to my colleagues, help them locate directives that serve no purpose, cheer up the troops, and reassign files that “the system” has misdirected.

Oddly enough, I enjoy going to work. It’s as if I were being paid sixty thousand dollars a year to do the equivalent of Sudoku or crossword puzzles.[96]

This sort of carefree, happy-go-lucky government office environment is not as common as it used to be. It appears to have been extremely common in the mid-twentieth century, before internal market reforms (“reinventing government,” as the Clinton administration put it) massively increased the degree of box-ticking pressure on public officials; but it still exists in certain quarters.[97] What makes Pauline’s job so pleasant, it seems, is that she clearly gets along with her coworkers and is running her own show. Combine that with the respect and security of government employment and then the fact that she’s aware it’s ultimately a rather silly show becomes not nearly so much of a problem.

Both of these examples share another factor in common: everyone knows that jobs like substitute teacher (in America) or tax official (in France) are mostly bullshit—so there’s little room for disillusionment or confusion. Those who apply for such jobs are well aware of what they’re getting into, and there are already clear cultural models in their heads for how a substitute teacher or tax official is supposed to behave.

There does seem to be a happy minority, then, who enjoy their bullshit jobs. It is difficult to estimate their total numbers. The YouGov poll found that while 37 percent of all British workers felt their work served no purpose, only 33 percent of workers found it unfulfilling. Logically, then, at least 4 percent of the working population feel their jobs are pointless but enjoy them anyway. Probably the real number is somewhat higher.[98] The Dutch poll reported roughly 6 percent—that is, 18 percent of the 40 percent of workers who considered their jobs pointless also said they were at least somewhat happy doing them.

No doubt there are many reasons why this might be true in any individual case. Some people hate their families or find domestic life so stressful they treasure any excuse to get away from it. Others simply like their coworkers and enjoy the gossip and camaraderie. A common problem in large cities, especially in the North Atlantic world, is that most middle-class people now spend so much time at work that they have few social ties outside it; as a result, much of the day-to-day drama of gossip and personal intrigue that makes life entertaining for inhabitants of a village or small town or close-knit urban neighborhood, insofar as it exists at all, comes to be confined largely to offices or experienced vicariously through social media (which many mostly access in the office while pretending to work). But if that’s true, and people’s social life really is often rooted in the office, then it’s all the more striking that the overwhelming majority of those in bullshit occupations claim to be so miserable.

on the misery of ambiguity and forced pretense

Let us return to the subject of make-believe. Obviously, a lot of jobs require make-believe. Almost all service jobs do to a certain extent. In a classic study of Delta Airlines flight attendants, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild introduced the notion of “emotional labor.” Hoschschild found air hostesses typically had to spend so much effort creating and maintaining a perky, empathetic, good-natured persona as part of their conditions of employment that they often became haunted by feelings of emptiness, depression, or confusion, unsure of who or what they really were. Emotional labor of this sort is not limited to service workers, of course: many firms expect such work even in inward-facing office workers—especially women.

In the last chapter, we observed Patrick’s indignation at first encountering the demand to pretend to enjoy being a cashier. Now, flight attendant is not a bullshit job—as I’ve observed, few service workers feel that the services they provide are entirely pointless. The kind of emotional labor required by those in most bullshit jobs, however, is usually rather different. Bullshit jobs, too, require maintaining a false front and playing a game of make-believe—but in their case, the game has to be played in a context where one is rarely quite sure what the rules are, why it is being played, who’s on your team, and who isn’t. At least flight attendants know exactly what’s expected of them. What is expected of bullshit jobholders is usually far less onerous, but it is complicated by the fact that they are never sure exactly what it is. One question I asked regularly was “Does your supervisor know that you’re not doing anything?” The overwhelming majority said they didn’t know. Most added that they found it hard to imagine their supervisors could be totally oblivious, but they couldn’t be sure because discussing such matters too openly appeared to be taboo. But tellingly, they weren’t even entirely sure about exactly how far that taboo extended.

To every rule there must be exceptions. Some did report supervisors who were relatively open about the fact that there was nothing to do and who would tell their underlings that it was acceptable to “pursue their own projects.” But even then, such tolerance was only within reasonable parameters and what sort of parameters were considered reasonable was rarely self-evident; such matters had to be worked out by trial and error. I never heard a single case of a supervisor just sitting down with an employee and spelling out the rules, simply and honestly, regarding when she had to work, when she didn’t, and how she could and could not behave when she wasn’t working.

Some managers communicate indirectly, by their own behavior. In the local British government office in which Beatrice worked, for example, supervisors indicated the appropriate level of pretense (just a little) during the week by livestreaming important sports events and similar acts of self-indulgence. On weekend shifts, in contrast, no pretense was required:

Beatrice: On other occasions, my role models known as “senior management” would stream World Cup football matches live into the office onto their desktops. I understood this gesture to be a form of multitasking, so I started to research my own projects whenever I had nothing to do at work.

On the other hand, my weekend role was a breeze. It was quite a sought-after position in the authority because of the high rate of overtime pay. In that office, we did nothing. We made Sunday dinners, and I even heard stories of someone bringing a sunbed-recliner into work so they could relax on it whilst we put the TV on. We surfed the internet, watched DVDs—but more often, we just went to sleep, as there was nothing to do. We would get some rest in before Monday morning started.

In other cases, the rules are set out explicitly, but in such a way that they are clearly made to be broken.[99] Robin, hired as a temp in North Carolina but not assigned any duties, managed to turn technical competence into a way to mitigate the experience—to a degree:

Robin: I was told that it was very important that I stay busy, but I wasn’t to play games or surf the Web. My primary function seemed to be occupying a chair and contributing to the decorum of the office.

At first, this seemed pretty easy, but I quickly discovered that looking busy when you aren’t is one of the least pleasant office activities imaginable. In fact, after two days, it was clear that this was going to be the worst job I had ever had.

I installed Lynx, a text-only Web browser that basically looks like a DOS [disk operating system] window. No images, no Flash, no JavaScript—just monospaced text on an endless black background. My absentminded browsing of the internet now appeared to be the work of a skilled technician, the Web browser a terminal into which diligently typed commands signaled my endless productivity.

This allowed Robin to spend most of his time editing Wikipedia pages.

As far as temporary jobs are concerned, the worker is often effectively being tested for his or her ability to just sit there and pretend to work. In most cases, one is not, like Robin, told explicitly whether they are allowed to play computer games; but if there are a lot of temporary hires, it’s usually possible to make discreet inquiries of one’s fellows and get some sense of what the ground rules are and just how flagrantly one has to violate them to actually get fired.

Sometimes in longer-term positions, there is enough camaraderie among employes that they can discuss the situation openly and find common strategies to use against supervisors. Solidarity in such circumstances can bring a sense of common purpose. Robert speaks of the legal aides at a crooked law firm:

Robert: The weirdest thing about this job is how, in a twisted way, it was kind of enjoyable. The legal assistants were all smart and interesting people, and working a job that was so clearly meaningless led to a great deal of bonding and gallows humor among the team. I managed to maneuver my way into a desk with its back to the wall, so I could spend as much time as possible surfing the internet or teaching myself computer programming. Much of what we did was obviously inefficient, like manually relabeling thousands of files, so I’d automate it and then use the time it would have taken me to complete it manually to do whatever I wanted. I also always made sure to have at least two projects run by different bosses, so that I could tell both of them that I was spending a lot of time on the other project.

At the very least, there can be a conspiracy of silence on such shirking strategies; sometimes, active cooperation. In other cases, one can be lucky enough to find a supervisor who is both willing to be fairly honest and agreeable enough to set almost explicit parameters for loafing. The emphasis here is on “almost.” One can never simply ask. Here’s someone who has an on-call job at a travel insurance company. He’s basically a duct taper, there to straighten out things once every month or two when something goes predictably awry in their relation to their partner company. Otherwise:

Calvin: Any given week, there will be a few situations where [our partner company] is supposed to reach out to my team for advisory. So for up to twenty minutes a week, we have actual work to do. Ordinarily, though, I send five or eight fifteen-word emails a day, and every few days, there’s a ten-minute team meeting. The rest of the workweek is functionally mine, though not in any way I can flaunt. So I flit through social media, RSS aggregation, and coursework in a wide but short browser window I keep discreetly on the second of my two monitors. And every few hours, I’ll remember I’m at a workplace and respond to my one waiting email with something like: “We agree with the thing you said. Please proceed with the thing.” Then I only have to pretend to be visibly overworked for seven more hours each day.

David: So if you didn’t look busy, who would notice? Does that person know there’s nothing really to do and just wants you to look busy, do you think, or do they actually believe it’s a real full-time job?

Calvin: Our team manager seems to know what’s up, but she’s never let on to having problems with it. Occasionally, I will have days with zero work at all, so I’ll let her know that and volunteer to help out another department if they’re bogged down in some way. That help is never needed, it seems, so my letting her know is my way of declaring, “I’m going to be on Twitter a full eight hours, but I told you in advance, so it’s actually extremely noble of me.” She schedules hourlong weekly meetings that haven’t once had ten minutes of content—we spend the rest of them chatting casually. And since her bosses, up however high, are aware of the genuine problems the other company can cause, I think it’s presumed we’re wrangling their nonsense, or at least might have to at any given second.

Not all supervisors, then, subscribe to the ideology of “You’re on my time.” Particularly in large organizations where managers don’t have much of a proprietary feeling anyway and don’t have reason to believe they’ll get in much trouble with their own superiors if they notice one of their subordinates slacking off, they might well let matters take their own course.[100] This kind of polite, coded, mutual consideration is perhaps about as close to honesty in such situations as one is likely to get. But even in such maximally benevolent circumstances, there is a taboo on being too explicit. The one thing that could never, apparently, happen, is for anyone to actually say, “Basically, you’re just here in case of emergencies. Otherwise, do what you like and try not to get in anybody’s way.” And even Calvin feels obliged to pretend to be overworked, just as a reciprocal gesture of appreciation and respect.

More typically supervisors simply find subtle ways to say “Just shut up and play along.”

Maria: My first meeting on arriving to start this job was with my line manager, who was very quick to explain that she had absolutely no idea what the person who used to do my job actually did. But luckily for me, that predecessor was still around. She had just moved up inside the team and would be able to show me everything that she had done in her former role. She did. It took about an hour and a half.

“Everything she had done” also turned out to be virtually nothing. Maria couldn’t handle the idleness. She begged her coworkers to let her do a share of their work; something to make herself feel she had some reason to be around. Driven to distraction, she finally made the mistake of openly complaining to her manager:

Maria: I spoke to my manager, who very clearly told me not to “advertise the fact” that I wasn’t mega busy. I asked her to at least send any unclaimed work my way, and she told me she would show me a few of the things she does, but never did.

This is as close to being told directly to pretend to work as one is likely to get. Even more dramatic, but in no way unusual, is the experience of Lilian, hired as Digital Product Project Manager in the IT department of a major publishing house. Despite the somewhat pretentious-sounding title, Lilian insists that such positions are not necessarily bullshit—she’d had a similar gig before, and while it was relatively undemanding, she did get to work with a small, friendly team solving genuine problems. “This new place, however…”

As best she could reconstruct what happened (much of it had occurred just before she arrived), her immediate supervisor, an arrogant blowhard obsessed with the latest business fads and buzzwords, had sent out a series of bizarre and contradictory directives that had the unintended consequence of leaving Lilian with no responsibilities at all. When she gently pointed out there was a problem, her concerns were brushed aside with eye rolls and similar gestures of impatient dismissal.

Lilian: One would think that, as a Project Manager, I would somehow be “running” the process. Except there is no room in the process for that to happen. No one is running this process. Everyone is confused.

Other people expect me to help them and organize things and give them the confidence that people usually look to a Project Manager for because I’ve been given that title. But I have no authority and no control over anything.

So I read a lot. I watch TV. I have no idea what my boss thinks I do all day.

As a result of her situation, Lilian has to come up with two quite difficult false fronts: one for her superior and another for her underlings. In the first case, because she can only speculate what, if anything, her supervisor actually wants her to do; in the second, in the fact that about the only positive contribution she is allowed to make is to adopt an air of cheerful confidence that might inspire her subordinates to do a better job. (“Cheer up the troops,” as Pauline might put it.) Or at least not infect them with her own desperation and confusion. Underneath, Lilian was riddled with anxiety. It’s worth quoting her comments at length because they give a sense of the spiritual toll such a situation can take:

Lilian: What’s it like to have a job like this? Demoralizing. Depressing. I get most of the meaning in my life from my job, and now my job has no meaning or purpose.

It gives me anxiety because I think that at any moment someone is actually going to realize that nothing would change if I were not here and they could save themselves the money.

It also trashes my confidence. If I’m not constantly being met by challenges that I am overcoming, how do I know that I’m capable? Maybe all my ability to do good work has atrophied. Maybe I don’t know anything useful. I wanted to be able to handle bigger and more complex projects, but now I handle nothing. If I don’t exercise those skills, I’ll lose them.

It also makes me afraid that other people in the office think the problem is me; that I’m choosing to slack off or I’m choosing to be useless, when nothing about this is my choice, and all my attempts to make myself more useful or give myself more work are met with rejection and not a small amount of derision for attempting to rock the boat and challenge my boss’s authority.

I have never been paid so much to do so little, and I know I’m not earning it. I know my coworkers with other job titles do significantly more work. I might even get paid more than them! How bullshit would that be? I’d be lucky if they didn’t hate me on that basis alone.

Lilian testifies eloquently to the misery that can ensue when the only challenge you can overcome in your own work is the challenge of coming to terms with the fact that you are not, in fact, presented with any challenges; when the only way you can exercise your powers is in coming up with creative ways to cover up the fact that you cannot exercise your powers; of managing the fact that you have, completely against your choosing, been turned into a parasite and fraud. An employee would have to be confident indeed not to begin to doubt herself in such a situation. (And such confidence can be pernicious in itself: it was her boss’s idiotic cocksureness, after all, that created the situation to begin with.)

Psychologists sometimes refer to the kind of dilemmas described in this section as “scriptlessness.” Psychological studies, for instance, find that men or women who had experienced unrequited love during adolescence were in most cases eventually able to come to terms with the experience and showed few permanent emotional scars. But for those who had been the objects of unrequited love, it was quite another matter. Many still struggled with guilt and confusion. One major reason, researchers concluded, was precisely the lack of cultural models. Anyone who falls in love with someone who does not return their affections has thousands of years’ worth of romantic literature to tell them exactly how they are supposed to feel; however, while this literature provides detailed insight on the experience of being Cyrano, it generally tells you very little about how you are supposed to feel—let alone what you’re supposed to do—if you’re Roxane.[101]

Many, probably most, bullshit jobs involve a similar agonizing scriptlessness. Not only are the codes of behavior ambiguous, no one is even sure what they are supposed to say or how they are supposed to feel about their situation.

on the misery of not being a cause

Whatever the ambiguities, almost all sources concur that the worst thing about a bullshit job is simply the knowledge that it’s bullshit. As noted in chapter 3, much of our sense of being a self, a being discrete from its surrounding environment, comes from the joyful realization that we can have predictable effects on that environment. This is true for infants and remains true throughout life. To take away that joy entirely is to squash a human like a bug. Obviously, the ability to affect one’s environment cannot be taken away completely—rearranging objects in one’s backpack or playing Fruit Mah-jongg is still acting on the world in some way—but most people in the world today, certainly in wealthy countries, are now taught to see their work as their principal way of having an impact on the world, and the fact that they are paid to do it as proof that their efforts do indeed have some kind of meaningful effect. Ask someone “What do you do?” and he or she will assume you mean “for a living.”

Many speak of the intense frustration of learning gradually that they are instead paid to do nothing. Charles, for instance, started out of college working in the video game industry. In his first job, at Sega, he began as a tester but was soon promoted to “localization,” only to discover it was a typical on-call job where he was expected to sit around pretending to work in between dealing with problems that came up only once a week, on average. Like Lilian, the situation made him doubt his own value: “Working for a company that essentially was paying me to sit around doing nothing made me feel completely worthless.” He quit after superiors bawled him out for being late to work and threw himself instead into a whirlwind romance. A month later, he tried again.

At first, he thought the new job, also for a gaming company, was going to be different:

Charles: In 2002 I was hired by [BigGameCo], in LA, as an associate producer. I was excited about this job because I was told I would be in charge of writing the design document that bridged the desires of the artists with the realities of what the programmers could do. For the first few months, though, there was nothing to do. My big duty every day was ordering dinner from a delivery place for the rest of the staff.

Again, just sitting around, doing emails. Most days, I would go home early, because, why the fuck not?

With so much time on my hands, I started dreaming of having my own business and began using all the free time to start making the website for it. Eventually the producer above me threatened to report me to the owner for doing this though. So I had to stop.

Finally, I was allowed to start work on the sound design document. I threw myself into this work. I was so happy to be doing it. When it was done, the producer told me to upload it to the shared server for everyone working on the game.

Immediately there was uproar. The producer who hired me hadn’t realized there was a sound design department a floor below us that makes these documents for each game. I had done someone else’s job. This producer had already made some other big mistake, so he asked me to take the blame for this so he wouldn’t get fired. Every ounce of my soul rebelled against doing this. My friends in programming, though, who were actually enjoying having an incompetent producer because it meant they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted, asked me to take the bullet for them. They didn’t want the producer replaced by someone that would rein them in. So I accepted responsibility, quit the next day, and haven’t worked for someone else since then.

Thus did Charles say farewell to the world of formal paid employment and began playing guitar for a living and sleeping in his van.

Things are rarely quite as obvious as this: cases where the worker is basically doing nothing at all (though as we’ve seen, this certainly can happen). It’s more common for there to be at least a modicum of work, and for the worker to either immediately, or gradually, come to understand that work is pointless. Most employes do think about the social value of what they do, and whatever tacit yardstick they apply, once they judge their work to be pointless, this judgment cannot fail but affect the experience of doing that work—whatever the nature of the work or conditions of employment. Of course, when those conditions are also bad, matters often become intolerable.

Let’s look at a worst-case scenario: unpleasant work, bad conditions, obvious uselessness. Nigel was a temp worker hired by a company that had won a contract to scan the application forms for hundreds of thousands of company loyalty cards. Since the scanning equipment the company used was imperfect, and since its contract stated that each form would be checked for errors no fewer than three times before being approved, the company was obliged to bus in a small army of temps every day to act as “Data Perfecters.” This is how he describes his work:

Nigel: It is hard to explain what this level of entranced boredom was like. I found myself conversing with God, pleading for the next record to contain an error, or the next one, or the next. But the time seemed to pass quickly, like some kind of near-death experience.

There was something about the sheer purity of the social uselessness of this job, combined with the crippling austerity of the process, that united the Data Perfecters. We all knew that this was bullshit. I really think that if we had been processing applications for something that had a more obvious social value—organ transplant registration, say, or tickets to [the] Glastonbury [rock festival]—then it would have felt different. I don’t mean that the process would have been any less tedious—an application form is an application form—but the knowledge that no one cared about this work, that there was really nothing of any value riding on how we did the job, made it feel like some sort of personal test of stamina, like Olympic endurance boredom for its own sake.

It was really weird.

Finally, there came a point where a few of us decided we just couldn’t take it anymore. We complained one day about one of the supervisors being rude, and the very next morning, we got a call from the agency saying we were no longer needed.

Fortunately for Nigel, his fellow workers were all temps with no loyalty to the organization and no reason to keep quiet about what was going on—at least with one another. Often in more long-term assignments, it’s hard to know exactly who one can and can’t confide in.

Where for some, pointlessness exacerbates boredom, for others it exacerbates anxiety. Greg spent two years working as a designer of digital display advertising for a marketing agency, “creating those annoying banner ads you see on most websites.” The entire enterprise of making and selling banner ads, he was convinced, is basically a scam. The agencies that sell the ads are in possession of studies that made clear that Web surfers largely didn’t even notice and almost never clicked on them. This didn’t stop them, however, from basically cooking the books and holding junkets with their clients where they presented them with elaborate “proof” of the ads’ effectiveness.

Since the ads didn’t really work, client satisfaction was everything. Designers were told to indulge their clients’ every whim, no matter how technically difficult, self-indulgent, or absurd.

Greg: High-paying clients generally want to reproduce their TV commercials within the banner ads and demand complex storyboards with multiple “scenes” and mandatory elements. Automotive clients would come in and demand that we use Photoshop to switch the steering wheel position or fuel tank cap on an image the size of a thumbnail.

Such exacting demands were made, and had to be accommodated, as designers stewed in the knowledge that no Web surfer would possibly be able to make out such tiny details in a rapidly moving image from the corner of her eye. All this was barely tolerable, but once Greg actually saw the abovementioned studies, which also revealed that even if the surfer did see them, she wouldn’t click on the banner anyway, he began to experience symptoms of clinical anxiety.

Greg: That job taught me that pointlessness compounds stress. When I started working on those banners, I had patience for the process. Once I realized that the task was more or less meaningless, all that patience evaporated. It takes effort to overcome cognitive dissonance—to actually care about the process while pretending to care about the result.

Eventually the stress became too much for him, and he quit to take another job.

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Stress was another theme that popped up regularly. When, as with Greg, one’s bullshit job involves not just sitting around pretending to work but actually working on something everyone knows—but can’t say—is pointless, the level of ambient tension increases and often causes people to lash out in arbitrary ways. We’ve already met Hannibal, who makes extraordinary amounts of money writing reports designed to be waved around in pharmaceutical marketing meetings and later thrown away. In fact, he confines the bullshit aspects of his employment to a day or two a week—just enough to pay the bills—and spends the rest of his time engaged in medical research aimed at eradicating tuberculosis in the Global South—which no one seems to want to pay for. This gives him the opportunity to compare behavior in both his workplaces:

Hannibal: That’s the other thing I’ve noticed: the amount of workplace aggression and stress I see in people is inversely correlated with the importance of the work they’re doing: “The client’s going fucking apeshit because they’re under pressure from their boss to get this presentation ready for the Q3 planning meeting on Monday! They’re threatening to cancel the entire fucking contract unless we get it delivered by tomorrow morning! We’re all going to need to stay late to finish it! (Don’t worry, we’ll order some shitty junk food pizzas and pissy lager in so we can work through the night…).” This is typical for the bullshit reports. Whereas working on meaningful stuff always has more of a collaborative atmosphere, everyone working together toward a greater goal.

Similarly, while few offices are entirely free of cruelty and psychological warfare, many respondents seemed to feel they were particularly prevalent in offices where everyone knew, but did not wish to admit, that they weren’t really doing much of anything.[102]

Annie: I worked for a medical care cost management firm. I was hired to be part of a special tasks team that performed multiple functions within the company.

They never provided me with this training, and instead my job was to:

• pull forms from the pool into the working software;

• highlight specific fields on those forms;

• return the forms to the pool for someone else to do something with them.

This job also had a very rigid culture (no talking to others), and it was one of the most abusive environments I ever worked in.

In particular, I made one highlighting error consistently during my first two weeks of employment. I learned this was wrong and immediately corrected it. However, for the entire remainder of my time at this company, every time someone found one of these mis-highlighted forms, I would be pulled aside to talk about it. Every time, like it was a new issue. Every time, like the manager didn’t know these were all done during the same period, and it wasn’t happening anymore—even though I told her every time.

Such minor acts of sadism should be familiar to most of us who have worked in office environments. You have to ask yourself: What was the supervisor who called in Annie time and time again to “talk to her” about a mistake that she knew perfectly well had long since been corrected, actually thinking? Did she somehow forget, each time, that the problem had been resolved? That seems unlikely. Her behavior appears to be a pure exercise of power for its own sake. The pointlessness of the exercise—both Annie and her boss knew nothing would really be achieved by telling someone to fix a problem that’s already been fixed—made it nothing more than a way for the boss to rub that fact—that this was a relation of pure arbitrary power—in Annie’s face. It was a ritual of humiliation that allows the supervisor to show who’s boss in the most literal sense, and it puts the underling in her place, justified no doubt by the sense that underlings are generically guilty at the very least of spiritual insubordination, of resenting the boss’s tyranny, in the same way that police who beat suspects they know to be innocent will tell themselves the victim is undoubtedly guilty of something else.

Annie: I did this for six months before deciding I’d rather die than continue. This was also, however, the first time I made a living wage doing anything. Before that, I was a preschool teacher, and while what I was doing was very important, I made $8.25 an hour (in the Boston area).

This leads us to another issue: the effects of such situations on employes’ physical health. While I lack statistical evidence, if the testimonials are anything to go by, stress-related ailments seem a frequent consequence of bullshit jobs. I’ve read multiple reports of depression, anxiety overlapping with physical symptoms of every sort, from carpal tunnel syndrome that mysteriously vanishes when the job ends, to what appears, while it’s happening, like autoimmune breakdown. Annie, too, became increasingly ill. Part of the reason, she felt in retrospect, was the extreme contrast between the work environments of her previous job and this one:

David: I’m trying to imagine what it must have been like to move from a real job, teaching and taking care of children, to something so entirely pointless and humiliating, just to pay the rent. Do you think there are a lot of people in that situation?

Annie: I imagine it has to be pretty common! Low-paying childcare jobs have really high turnover. Some people get additional training and can move on to something more sustaining, but a lot of the ones I’ve watched leave (mostly women) end up in some office or retail management.

One part of the experience I think about a lot is that I went from an environment where I was touched and touching all day long—picking kids up, getting hugs, giving piggybacks, rocking to sleep—into an environment where nobody talked to each other, let alone touched each other. I didn’t recognize the effect this had on my body while it was happening, but now in retrospect I see what a huge impact it had on my physical and mental health.

I suspect that not only is Annie right, but she is describing an unusually dramatic example of what is, in fact, a very common dynamic. Annie was convinced that not only was her particular job pointless but also that the entire enterprise shouldn’t really exist: at best, it was a giant exercise in duct taping, making up for some bits of the damage caused by the notoriously dysfunctional American health care system, of which it was an intrinsic part. But of course, no one was allowed to discuss such matters in the office. No one was allowed to discuss anything in the office. The physical isolation was continuous with the social isolation. Everyone there was forced to become a little bubble unto himself or herself.

In such minimal, but clearly unequal, social environments, strange things can start to happen. Back in the 1960s, the radical psychoanalyst Erich Fromm first suggested that “nonsexual” forms of sadism and necrophilia tend to pervade everyday affairs in highly puritanical and hierarchical environments.[103] In the 1990s, the sociologist Lynn Chancer synthesized some of these ideas with those of feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin to devise a theory of Sado-Masochism in Everyday Life.[104] What Chancer found was that unlike members of actual BDSM subcultures, who are entirely aware of the fact that they are playing games of make-believe, purportedly “normal” people in hierarchical environments typically ended up locked in a kind of pathological variation of the same sadomasochistic dynamic: the (person on the) bottom struggles desperately for approval that can never, by definition, be forthcoming; the (person on the) top going to greater and greater lengths to assert a dominance that both know is ultimately a lie—for if the top were really the all-powerful, confident, masterly being he pretends to be, he wouldn’t need to go to such outrageous lengths to ensure the bottom’s recognition of his power. And, of course, there is also the most important difference between make-believe S&M play—and those engaged in it actually do refer to it as “play”—and its real-life, nonsexual enactments. In the play version, all the parameters are carefully worked out in advance by mutual consent, with both parties knowing the game can be called off at any moment simply by invoking an agreed-on safe-word. For example, just say the word “orange,” and your partner will immediately stop dripping hot wax on you and transform from the wicked marquis to a caring human being who wants to make sure you aren’t really hurt. (Indeed, one might argue that much of the bottom’s pleasure comes from knowing she has the power to affect this transformation at will.[105]) This is precisely what’s lacking in real-life sadomasochistic situations. You can’t say “orange” to your boss. Supervisors never work out in advance in what ways employes can and cannot be chewed out for different sorts of infractions, and if an employee is, like Annie, being reprimanded or otherwise humiliated, she knows there is nothing she can say to make it stop; no safe-word, except, perhaps, “I quit.” To pronounce these words, however, does more than simply break off the scenario of humiliation; it breaks off the work relationship entirely—and might well lead to one’s ending up playing a very different game, one where you’re desperately scrounging around to find something to eat or how to prevent one’s heat from being shut off.

on the misery of not feeling entitled to one’s misery

I am suggesting, then, that the very meaninglessness of bullshit employment tends to exacerbate the sadomasochistic dynamic already potentially present in any top-down hierarchical relationship. It’s not inevitable; some supervisors are generous and kind. But the lack of any feeling of common purpose, any reason to believe one’s collective actions in any way make life better for those outside the office or really have any significant effect on anyone outside the office, will tend to magnify all the minor indignities, distempers, resentments, and cruelties of office life, since, ultimately, office politics is all that’s really going on.

Many, like, Annie, were terrified by the health effects. Just as a prisoner in solitary confinement inevitably begins to experience brain damage, the worker deprived of any sense of purpose often experiences mental and physical atrophy. Nouri, whom we met in chapter 2, repairing code for an incompetent Viennese psychologist, kept something of a diary of each of his successive bullshit jobs and their effects upon his mind and body:

Nouri:

Job 1: Programmer, (pointless) startup.

Effect on me: I first learned self-loathing. Got a cold every month. Impostor syndrome killed my immune system.

Job 2: Programmer, (vanity project) startup.

Effect on me: I pushed myself so hard that I damaged my eye, forcing me to relax.

Job 3: Software Developer, (scam) small business.

Effect on me: usual depression, unable to find energy.

Job 4: Software developer, (doomed, dysfunctional) ex-startup.

Effect on me: relentless mediocrity and fear due to my inability to focus crippled my mind; I got a cold every month; warping my consciousness to motivate myself killed my immune system. PTSD. My thoughts were thoroughly mediocre…

Nouri had the misfortune to stumble through a series of relentlessly absurd and/or abusive corporate environments. He managed to keep himself sane—at least to the degree of fending off complete mental and physical breakdown—by finding a different sense of purpose: he began to carry out a detailed analysis of the social and institutional dynamics that lie behind failed corporate projects. Effectively, he became an anthropologist. (This has been very useful to me. Thanks, Nouri!) Then he discovered politics, and began diverting time and resources toward plotting to destroy the very system that created such ridiculous jobs. At this point, he reports, his health began to markedly improve.

Even in relatively benign office environments, the lack of a sense of purpose eats away at people. It may not cause actual physical and mental degeneration, but at the very least, it leaves workers struggling with feelings of emptiness or worthlessness. These feelings are typically in no sense mitigated, but actually compounded by the prestige, respect, and generous compensation that such positions often confer. Like Lilian, bullshit jobholders can be secretly tortured by the suspicion that they are being paid more than their actually productive underlings (“How bullshit would that be?”), or that others have legitimate reason to hate them. This left many genuinely confused about how they should feel. No moral compass was available. One might consider this a kind of moral scriptlessness.

Here is a relatively mild case. Finn works for a company that licenses software on a subscription basis:

Finn: From the moment I first read the “Bullshit Jobs” essay a couple of years back, it resonated with me. I continue to pull it out occasionally to read and refer friends to.

I’m a manager of technical support for a software-as-a-service company. My job seems to mostly consist of sitting in meetings, emailing, communicating coming changes to my team, serving as an escalation point for client issues, and doing performance reviews.

Performance reviews, Finn admits, are bullshit, explaining, “Everyone already knows who the slackers are.” Actually, he acknowledges readily that most of his responsibilities are bullshit. The useful work he performs consists mainly of duct taping: solving problems caused by various unnecessarily convoluted bureaucratic processes within the company. Plus, the company itself is fairly pointless.

Finn: Still, sitting down to write this, there’s part of my brain that wants to defend my bullshit job. Mostly because the job provides for me and my family. I think that’s where the cognitive dissonance comes in. From an emotional standpoint, it’s not like I’m invested in my job or the company in any way. If I showed up on Monday and the building had disappeared, not only would society not care, I wouldn’t, either. If there’s any satisfaction that comes from my job, it’s being an expert in navigating the waters of our disorganized organization and being able to get things done. But being an expert in something that is unnecessary is, as you can imagine, not all that fulfilling.

My preference would be to write novels and opinion essays, which I do in my spare time, but I fear the leap from my bullshit job will mean being incapable of making ends meet.

This is, of course, a commonplace dilemma. The job itself may be unnecessary, but it’s hard to see it as a bad thing if it allows you to feed your children. You might ask what kind of economic system creates a world where the only way to feed one’s children is to spend most of one’s waking hours engaged in useless box-ticking exercises or solving problems that shouldn’t exist. But, then, you can equally well turn this question on its head and ask whether all this can really be as useless as it seems if the economic system that created these jobs also enables you to feed your children. Do we really want to second-guess capitalism? Perhaps every aspect of the system, no matter how apparently pointless, is just the way it has to be.

Yet at the same time, one cannot also dismiss one’s own experience that something is terribly amiss.

Many others spoke, like Lilian, of the agonizing disparity between the outward respect they received from society and the knowledge of what they actually did. Dan, an administrative contractor for a British corporation’s offices in Toronto, was convinced he did only about an hour or two of real work a week—work he could have easily done from home. The rest was entirely pointless. Putting on the suit and coming to the office was, he felt, just an elaborate sacrificial ritual; a series of meaningless gestures he had to perform in order to prove himself worthy of a respect he did not deserve. At work, he wondered constantly if his coworkers felt the same way:

Dan: It felt like some Kafkaesque dream sequence that only I had the misfortune of realizing how stupid so much of what we were doing was, but deep down inside, I felt as if this experience had to be a silently shared one. We must have all known! We were an office of six people, and we were all “managers”… There were easily more managers in the building than actual employes. The situation was completely absurd.

In Dan’s case, everyone played along with the charade. The environment was in no way abusive. The six managers and their supervising managers-of-managers were polite, friendly, mutually supportive. They all told one another what a terrific job they were doing and what a disaster it would be for everyone else if they weren’t there as part of the team—but only, Dan felt, as a way of consoling one another in the secret knowledge they were hardly doing anything, that their work was of no social value, and that if they weren’t there, it would make no difference. It was even worse outside the office, where he began to be treated as the member of his family who had really made something of his life. “It’s honestly hard to describe how mad and useless I felt. I was being taken seriously as a ‘young professional’—but did any of them know what it was I really did?”

Eventually Dan quit to become a science teacher in a Cere Indian community in northern Quebec.

---

It doesn’t help that higher-ups in such situations will regularly insist that perceptions of futility are self-evidently absurd. It doesn’t always happen. Some managers, as we’ve seen, will basically wink and smile; a precious few might honestly discuss at least part of what’s going on. But since middle managers generally see their role as one of maintaining morale and work discipline, they will often feel they have little choice but to rationalize the situation. (In effect, doing so is the only part of their jobs that isn’t bullshit.) Plus, the higher you climb in the hierarchy, the more oblivious the managers are likely to be—but at the same time, the more formal authority they tend to have.

Vasily works as a research analyst for a European foreign affairs office: his office, he reports, has just as many supervisors as researchers, and every sentence of any document produced by a researcher invariably ends up being passed up two levels of hierarchy to be read, edited, and passed down again, repeatedly, until it makes no sense. Granted, this would be more of a problem if there were a chance that anyone outside the office would ever read them, or, for that matter, be aware they existed. Vasily does occasionally try to point all this out to his superiors:

Vasily: If I question the utility or sense of our work, my bosses look at me as if I’m from another planet. Of course they do: for them, it is crucial that the work we’re doing is not seen as total nonsense. If that would be the case, the positions would be canceled, and the result would be having no job.

In this case, it’s not the capitalist economic system but the modern international state system that between the various consular services, United Nations, and Bretton Woods instututions, creates untold thousands of (usually high-paid, respectable, comfortable) jobs across the planet. One can argue, as in all things, about which of these positions are truly useful and for what. Presumably some do important work—preventing wars, for instance. Others arrange and rearrange furniture. What’s more, there are pockets inside the apparatus that appear, to their low-ranking denizens, at least, as entirely superfluous. This perception, says Vasily, creates feelings of guilt and shame:

Vasily: When I am in public and people ask me about my job, I don’t want to. There is nothing to say, nothing to be proud of. Working for the foreign ministry has a high reputation, so when I am saying, “ I am working for the foreign ministry,” people usually react with a mix of respect and not really knowing what I am doing. I think the respect makes it even worse.

There are a million ways to make a human feel unworthy. The United States, so often a pioneer in such areas, has, among other things, perfected a quintessentially American mode of political discourse that consists in lecturing others about what jerks they are to think they have a right to something. Call it “rights-scolding.” Rights-scolding has many forms and manifestations. There is a right-wing version, which centers on excoriating others for thinking the world owes them a living, or owes them medical treatment when they are gravely ill, or maternity leave, or workplace safety, or equal protection under the law. But there is also a left-wing version, which consists of telling people to “check their privilege” when they feel they are entitled to pretty much anything that some poorer or more oppressed person does not have.

According to these standards, even if one is beaten over the head by a truncheon and dragged off to jail for no reason, one can only complain about the injustice if one first specifies all the categories of people to which this is more likely to occur. Rights-scolding may have seen its most baroque development in North America, but it has spread all over the world with the rise of neoliberal market ideologies. Under such conditions, it’s understandable that demanding an entirely new, unfamiliar, right—such as the right to meaningful employment[106]—might seem a hopeless project. It’s hard enough nowadays being taken seriously when asking for things you’re already supposed to have.

The burden of rights-scolding falls above all on the younger generations. In most wealthy countries, the current crop of people in their twenties represents the first generation in more than a century that can, on the whole, expect opportunities and living standards substantially worse than those enjoyed by their parents. Yet at the same time, they are lectured relentlessly from both left and right on their sense of entitlement for feeling they might deserve anything else. This makes it especially difficult for younger people to complain about meaningless employment.

Let us end, then, with Rachel, to express the horror of a generation.

Rachel was a math whiz with an undergrad degree in physics, but from a poor family. She aspired to pursue a graduate degree, but with British university tuition fees having tripled, and financial assistance cut to the bone, she was forced to take a job as Catastrophe Risk Analyst for a big insurance company to raise the requisite funds. A year out of her life, she told herself, but hardly the end of the world:

Rachel: “It’s not the worst thing in the world: learn some new skills, earn some money, and do a bit of networking while you’re at it.” Such was my thinking. “Realistically, how bad is it going to be?” And obviously, in the back of your head, the resounding, “Loads of people spend their whole lives doing boring, backbreaking work for barely any money. What on earth makes you too special for one year in a boring office job?”

That last one is an overarching fear for self-aware millennials. I can barely scroll through Facebook without hitting some preachy think piece about my generation’s entitlement and reluctance to just do a bloody day’s work, for Christ’s sake! It is sort of hard to gauge whether my standards for an “acceptable” job are reasonable or just the result of ridiculous, Generation Snowflakey “entitled bollix” (as my grandma likes to say).

This is, incidentally, a particularly British variation of rights-scolding (though it increasingly infects the rest of Europe): older people who grew up with cradle-to-grave welfare state protections mocking young people for thinking they might be entitled to the same thing. There was also another factor, much though Rachel was slightly embarrassed to admit it: the position paid extremely well; more than either of her parents was making. For someone who’d spent her entire adult existence as a penniless student supporting herself through temping, call center, and catering jobs, it would be refreshing to finally get a taste of bourgeois life.

Rachel: I’d done the “office thing” and the “crap job thing,” so how bad could a crap office job be, really? I had no concept of the bottom-of-the-ocean black depths of boredom I would sink to under a bulk of bureaucracy, terrible management, and myriad bullshit tasks.

Rachel’s job was necessitated by various capital holding requirement regulations which, like all corporations in a similar situation, her employer had no intention of respecting. Thus, a typical day consisted of taking in emails each morning with data on how much money different branches of the firm would expect to lose in some hypothetical catastrophe scenario, “cleaning” the data, copying the data into a spreadsheet (whereupon the spreadsheet program invariably crashed and had to be rebooted), and coming up with a figure for overall losses. Then, if there was a potential legal problem, Rachel was expected to massage the numbers until the problem went away. That’s when things were going well. On a bad day, or bad month, when there was nothing else to do, her supervisors would make up elaborate and obviously pointless exercises to keep her busy, such as constructing “mind maps”[107]. Or just leave her with nothing—but always with the proviso that while doing nothing, she had to actively pretend not to be:

Rachel: The weirdest and (apart from the title) maybe most bullshitty thing about my job was that while it was generally acknowledged that there wasn’t really enough work to do, you weren’t allowed to conspicuously not work. In a hark back to the days of the early internet, even Twitter and Facebook were banned.

My academic degree was pretty interesting and involved a lot of work, so, again, I had no concept of the horrible dread I would feel getting up in the morning to spend all day sitting in an office trying to inconspicuously waste time.

The final straw came after months of complaining, when I met my friend Mindy for a drink after a week of peak bullshit. I had just been asked to color coordinate a mind map to show “the nice-to-haves, must-haves, and would-like-to-have-in-futures.” (No, I have no idea what that means, either.) Mindy was working on a similarly bullshit project, writing branded content for the pages of a company newspaper nobody reads.

She ranted at me, and I ranted at her. I made a long, impassioned speech that ended with me shouting, “I cannot wait for the sea levels to rise and the apocalypse to come because I would rather be out hunting fish and cannibals with a spear I’d fashioned out of a fucking pole than doing this fucking bollix!” We both laughed for a long time, and then I started crying. I quit the next day. That is one massive benefit of having done all manner of weird menial jobs through university: you can almost always find work quickly.

So, yes, I am the queen crystal of Generation Snowflake, melting in the heat of a pleasantly air-conditioned office, but, good Lord, the working world is crap.

From thinking a “crap office job” was hardly the end of the world, Rachel was finally forced to the conclusion that the end of the world would, in fact, be preferable.[108]

on the misery of knowing that one is doing harm

There is one other, slightly different form of social suffering that ought to be acknowledged: the misery of having to pretend you’re providing some kind of benefit to humanity, when you know the exact opposite is in fact the case. For obvious reasons, this is most common among social service providers who work for government or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Most are engaged in box-ticking rituals, at least to a certain degree, but many are aware that what they’re doing is worse than useless: they are harming the people they are supposedly there to help. Shihi is now an artist, but she was once a community therapist in New York City:

ShÍhi: I used to work as a therapist in a community mental health center in the Bronx in the 1990s and 2000s. I have a social work degree.

My clients ended up either being mandated to “treatment” after being incarcerated for minor stuff (Clinton’s crime bill), lost their jobs and apartments after being jailed, or just needed to prove to welfare-to-work or Social Security offices that they need SSI [Supplemental Security Income] or other food/rent subsidies because they were mentally ill.

Some were indeed severely mentally ill, but many others were just extremely poor people who were constantly being harassed by the police. Their living conditions would make anyone “mentally ill.”

My job was to do therapy to essentially tell them it was their own fault and their responsibility to make their lives better. And if they attended the program daily, so the company could bill their Medicaid, staff would copy their medical records to send to the Social Security office so they could be reviewed for disability payments. The more paperwork in their charts, the better their chances.

I had groups to run like “anger management,” “coping skills” . . . They were so insulting and irrelevant! How do you cope with lack of decent food or control your rage toward the police when they abuse you?

My job was useless and harmful. So many NGOs profit from the misery created by inequality. I made a very poor living doing what I did, but it still pains me deeply that I was a poverty pimp.

It is interesting and important to note that many of the petty officials who do absurd and terrible things in the name of paperwork are keenly aware of what they are doing and of the human damage that is likely to result—even if they usually feel they must remain stone-faced when dealing with the public. Some rationalize it. A few take sadistic pleasure. But any victim of the system who has ever asked herself, “How can such people live with themselves?” might take some comfort in the fact that, in many cases, they can’t. Meena’s job for a local government council in an English town sometimes referred to as “Little Skidrow-by-the-Sea” was represented to her, when she took it, as working with the homeless. She found this was true in a sense:

Meena: My job was not to place, to advise, or help homeless people in any way. Instead, I had to try to collect their paperwork (proof of ID, National Insurance number, proof of income, etc.) so that the temporary homeless unit could claim back housing benefit. They had three days to provide it. If they couldn’t or wouldn’t provide the necessary paperwork, I had to ask their caseworkers to kick them out of their temporary accommodations. Obviously, homeless people with drug addictions tend to have difficulties providing two proofs of income, among many other things. But so do fifteen-year-olds whose parents have abandoned them, and veterans with PTSD, and women fleeing domestic violence.

So ultimately, Meena explains, her role was to threaten to make formerly homeless people homeless again, “all so that one department could claim a cash transfer from another.” What was it like? “Soul destroying.” After six months, she couldn’t take it and gave up on government service entirely.

Meena quit. Beatrice, who worked for a different local authority, also couldn’t take it after witnessing colleagues laughing over letters sent to pensioners that contained intentional errors designed to confuse the recipients so as to allow the council to falsely bill them for late payment. Only a handful of her coworkers, she said, took an active pleasure in defrauding the public they were hired to serve, but it cast a terrible pall upon an otherwise easygoing and friendly office environment. She tried to complain to higher-ups (“Surely this isn’t right!”), but they looked at her as if she were crazy. So Beatrice took her first opportunity to find another job.

George, who worked for Atos, a French firm hired by the British government to knock as many citizens as possible from the disability rolls (in the years following, more than two thousand were discovered to have died not long after having been found “fit to work”),[109] soldiers on. He reports that everyone who works for the company does understand what’s going on and “hates Atos with a quiet desperation.” In other cases, government workers are convinced that they are the only ones in their office who’ve figured out how useless or destructive the work they’re doing is—though when asked if they have ever presented their views to colleagues directly, most invariably say they haven’t, leaving open the possibility that their coworkers are equally convinced they are the only ones who know what’s really going on.[110]

In all this, we are moving into somewhat different territory. Much of what happens in such offices is simply pointless, but there is an added dimension of guilt and terror when it comes to knowing you are involved in actively hurting others. Guilt, for obvious reasons. Terror, because in such environments, dark rumors will always tend to circulate about what is likely to happen to whistle-blowers. But on a day-to-day basis, all this simply deepens the texture and quality of the misery attendant on such jobs.

coda: on the effects of bullshit jobs on human creativity, and on why attempts to assert oneself creatively or politically against pointless employment might be considered a form of spiritual warfare

Let me conclude by returning to the theme of spiritual violence.

It’s hard to imagine anything more soul destroying than, as Meena put it, being forced to commit acts of arbitrary bureaucratic cruelty against one’s will. To become the face of the machine that one despises. To become a monster. It has not escaped my notice, for example, that the most frightening monsters in popular fiction do not simply threaten to rend or torture or kill you but to turn you into a monster yourself: think here of vampires, zombies, werewolves. They terrify because they menace not just your body but also your soul. This is presumably why adolescents in particular are drawn to them: adolescence is precisely when most of us are first confronted with the challenge of how not to become the monsters we despise.

Useless or insidious jobs that involve pretenses to public service are perhaps the worst, but almost all of the jobs mentioned in this chapter can be considered soul destroying in different ways. Bullshit jobs regularly induce feelings of hopelessness, depression, and self-loathing. They are forms of spiritual violence directed at the essence of what it means to be a human being.

If what I have argued in the last chapter—that the integrity of the human psyche, even human physical integrity (insofar as these two can ever be entirely distinguished), is caught up in relations with others, and the sense of one’s capacity to affect the world—then such jobs could hardly be anything other than spiritual violence.

This is not to say, however, that the soul has no means for resistance. It might be well to conclude this chapter by taking note of the resulting spiritual warfare, and document some of the ways workers keep themselves sane by involving themselves in other projects. Call it, if you like, guerrilla purpose. Robin, the temp who fixed his screen to look like he was programming when, in fact, he was surfing the Web, used that time to perform free editorial work for a number of Wikipedia pages he monitored (including, apparently, mine), and to help maintain an alternative-currency initiative. Others start businesses, write film scripts and novels, or secretly run sexy maid services.

Yet others escape into Walter Mitty–style reverie, a traditional coping mechanism for those condemned to spend their lives in sterile office environments. It’s probably no coincidence that nowadays many of these involve fantasies not of being a World War I flying ace, marrying a prince, or becoming a teenage heartthrob, but of having a better—just utterly, ridiculously better—job. Boris, for instance, works for “a major international institution” writing bullshit reports. Here is his (obviously somewhat self-mocking) report:

Boris: It is clearly a bullshit job because I have tried everything, self-help books, sneaky onanistic breaks, calling my mother and crying, realizing all my life choices have been pure shite—but I keep carrying on because I have a rent to pay.

What’s more, this situation, which causes me a mild to severe depression, also obliges me to postpone my true life’s calling: being J. Lo’s or Beyoncé’s Personal Assistant (either separately or concomitantly). I am a hardworking, results-driven person so I believe I could handle it well. I would be willing to work for one of the Kardashians, too, particularly Kim.

Still, most testimonies focus on creativity as a form of defiance—the dogged fortitude with which many attempt to pursue art, or music, or writing, or poetry, serves as an antidote to the pointlessness of their “real” paid work. Obviously, sample bias may be a factor here. The testimonies sent to me were largely drawn from my followers on Twitter, a population likely to be both more artsy and more politically engaged than the public at large. So I will not speculate on how common this is. But certain interesting patterns emerge.

For instance, workers hired for a certain skill, but who are then not really allowed to exercise it, rarely end up exercising that skill in a covert way when they discover they have free time on their hands. They almost invariably end up doing something else. We’ve already observed in chapter 3 how Ramadan, the engineer who dreamed of working at the cutting edge of science and technology, simply gave up when he discovered he was really expected to sit around doing paperwork all day. Rather than pursuing scientific projects on the sly, he threw himself into film, novels, and the history of Egyptian social movements. This is typical. Faye, who has been contemplating writing a pamphlet on “how to keep your soul intact in corporate environments,” falls back on music:

Faye: The frustrated musician in me has come up with ways of silently learning music while stuck at my corporate desk. I studied Indian classical music for a while and have internalized two of their rhythmic systems. Indian approaches are abstract, numerical, and nonwritten, and so open up ways for me to silently and invisibly practice in my head.

This means I can improvise music while stuck in the office, and even incorporate inputs from the world around me. You can groove off the ticking clock as dull meetings drag on or turn a phone number into a rhythmic poem. You can translate the syllables of corporate jargon into quasi hip-hop, or interpret the proportions of the filing cabinet as a polyrhythm. Doing this has been a shield to more aggregate boredom in the workplace than I can possibly explain. I even gave a talk to friends a few months ago about using rhythm games to alleviate workplace boredom, demonstrating how you can turn aspects of a dull meeting into a funk composition.

Lewis, who describes himself as a “fake investment banker” for a financial consulting firm in Boston, is working on a play. When he realized his role in the company was basically pointless, he began to lose motivation and with it the ability to concentrate on the one or two hours per day he actually did need to work. His supervisor, a stickler for time and “optics” who seemed remarkably indifferent to productivity, didn’t seem to mind what Lewis did so long as he didn’t leave the office before she did, but what he describes as his Midwestern American guilt complex drove him to come up with a means to carry on:

Lewis: Happily, I have an automatic standing desk and lots of mildly guilt-ridden BS-free time. So, over the last three months, I’ve used that time to write my first play. Strangely, the creative output began out of necessity rather than desire. I found that I’m way more productive and efficient once I’ve chewed on a scene or dialogue. In order to do the seventy minutes or so of actual work I need to get done in a given day, I’ll need another three to four hours of creative writing.

Faye and Lewis are unusual. 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. One might imagine that leaving millions of well-educated young men and women without any real work responsibilities but with access to the internet—which is, potentially, at least, a repository of almost all human knowledge and cultural achievement—might spark some sort of Renaissance. Nothing remotely along these lines has taken place. Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter): basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. I am convinced this is the primary reason for the rise of social media, especially when one considers it in the light not just of the rise of bullshit jobs but also of the increasing bullshitization of real jobs. As we’ve seen, the specific conditions vary considerably from one bullshit job to another. Some workers are supervised relentlessly; others are expected to do some token task but are otherwise left more or less alone. Most are somewhere in between. Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one’s shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others—all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock ’n’ roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created under the midcentury welfare state. What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there’s nothing for them to do, they still can’t admit it openly.

Some testimonies similarly bemoaned the fact that traditional forms of artistic expression simply cannot be pursued under bullshit conditions. Padraigh, an Irish art school graduate shepherded into a pointless job at a foreign tech multinational owing to the complexities of the Irish welfare and tax system—which, he says, makes it almost impossible to be self-employed unless you’re already rich—has been forced to abandon his life’s calling:

Padraigh: But what kills me most is the fact that outside of work, I have been unable to paint, to follow my creative impulses to draw or scrape out ideas on canvas. I was quite focused on it whilst I was unemployed. But that didn’t pay. So now I have the money and not the time, energy, or headspace to be creative.[111]

He still manages to keep up a political life as an anarchist determined to destroy the economic system that does not allow him to pursue his life’s true calling. Meanwhile, a New York legal aide, James, is reduced to acts of subtle protest: “Spending all day in a sterile office environment, I’m too mentally numb to do anything but consume meaningless media,” he says. “And on occasion, yeah, I do feel quite depressed about it all: the isolation, the futility, the tiredness. My one small act of rebellion is wearing a black-and-red-star pin into work every day—they have no fucking idea!”

Finally, a British psychologist who, owing to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s higher education reforms of the 1990s, was laid off as a teacher and rehired as a “Project Assessor” to determine the effects of laying off teachers:

Harry: What surprises me is that it’s astonishingly difficult to repurpose time for which one is being paid. I’d have felt guilty if I’d dodged the BS work and, say, used the time to have a go at writing a novel. I felt obliged to do my best to carry out the activities I was contracted to carry out—even if I knew those activities were entirely futile.

David: You know, that’s one theme that keeps cropping up in the testimonies I’ve been reading: jobs that should be wonderful, since they pay you lots of money to do little or nothing and often don’t even insist you pretend to work, somehow drive people crazy anyway because they can’t figure out a way to channel the time and energy into anything else.

Harry: Well here’s one thing that bears out your assertion. These days, I work as Training Manager in a bus depot. Not all that glamourous, of course, but much more purposeful work. And I actually do more freelance work for pleasure now (short stories, articles) than I did in that completely unchallenging BS job.

David: Maybe we’re onto something here!

Harry: Yes, it’s really interesting.

So utilizing a bullshit job to pursue other projects isn’t easy. It requires ingenuity and determination to take time that’s been first flattened and homogenized—as all work time tends to be in what James calls “sterile office environment[s]”—then broken randomly into often unpredictably large fragments, and use that time for projects requiring thought and creativity. Those who manage to do so have already sunk a great deal of their—presumably finite—creative energies just into putting themselves in a position where they can use their time for anything more ambitious than cat memes. Not that there’s anything wrong with cat memes. I’ve seen some very good ones. But one would like to think our youth are meant for greater things.

About the only accounts I received from workers who felt they had largely overcome the mental destruction caused by bullshit jobs were from those that had found a way to keep those jobs down to one or two days a week. Needless to say, this is logistically extremely difficult, and usually impossible, for either financial or career reasons. Hannibal might serve as a success story in this regard. The reader may recall him as the man who writes bullshit reports for marketing agencies for as much as £12,000 a go and tries to limit this work if possible to one day a week. During the rest of the week, he pursues projects that he considers utterly worthwhile but knows that he couldn’t possibly self-finance:

Hannibal: One of the projects I’m working on is to create an image-processing algorithm to read low-cost diagnostic strips for TB patients in the developing world. Tuberculosis is one of the world’s biggest killers, causing one and a half million deaths a year with up to eight million infected at any one time. Diagnosis is still a significant problem, so if you can improve the treatment of just one percent of those eight million infected patients, then you can count lives improved in the tens of thousands per year. We’re already making a difference. This work is rewarding for all those involved. It’s technically challenging, involves problem solving and working collaboratively to achieve a greater goal that we all believe in. It is the antithesis of a bullshit job. However, it is proving virtually impossible to raise more than a very small amount of money to do this.

Even after spending much time and energy trying to convince various health executives there might be potentially lucrative spin-offs of one sort or another, he only raised enough to pay the expenses of the project itself, certainly not enough to provide any sort of compensation for those working on it, including himself. So Hannibal ends up writing meaningless word spaghetti for marketing forums in order to fund a project that will actually save lives.

Hannibal: If I get the opportunity, I ask people who work in PR or for global pharmaceutical companies what they think of this state of affairs, and their reactions are interesting. If I ask people more junior than me, they tend to think I am setting them some kind of test or trying to catch them out. Perhaps I’m just trying to get them to admit that what they do is worthless so I can persuade their boss to make them redundant? If I ask people more senior than me what they think about this, they will usually start by saying something along the lines of “Welcome to the real world,” like I’m some teenage dropout yet to “get it,” and accept that I can’t stay at home playing video games and smoking weed all day. I must admit that I spent quite a lot of time doing that as a teenager, but I’m no longer a teenager. In fact, I’m usually charging them a huge amount of money to write bullshit reports, so I often then detect that there’s a moment of reflection as they internally question who it is that really doesn’t “get it.”

Hannibal is at the top of his game: an accomplished researcher who can walk with confidence in the corridors of corporate power. He’s aware, too, that in the professional world, playing the part is everything: form is always valued over content, and from all indications, he can perform the role with consummate skill.[112] Thus, he can see his bullshit activities as basically a kind of scam; something he’s putting over on the corporate world. He can even see himself as a kind of modern-day Robin Hood in a world where, as he put it, merely “doing something worthwhile is subversive.”

Hannibal’s is a best-case scenario. Others turn to political activism. This can be extremely beneficial to a worker’s emotional and physical health,[113] and is usually easier to integrate with the fragmented nature of office time—this is true of digital activism, at least—than more conventional creative pursuits. Still, the psychological and emotional labor required to balance meaningful interests and bullshit work is often daunting. I’ve already mentioned Nouri’s work-related health problems, which began to improve markedly when he began working to unionize his workplace. It required definite mental discipline, yes, but not nearly so great as the mental discipline required to operate effectively in a high-pressure corporate environment where one knew one’s work had no effect at all:

Nouri: I used to have to go literally “insane” to get into work. Scrub away “me” and become the thing that can do this work. Afterwards, I’d often need a day to recover; to remember who I am. (If I didn’t, I’d become an acerbic, nitpicky person to people in my private life, enraged over tiny things.)

So I’d have to find all sorts of mental technologies to make my work bearable. The most effective motivations were deadlines and rage. (For example, pretending I was slighted, so I’d “show them” with my excellent productivity.) But as a result, it was hard to organize the different parts of me, the ancient things which cohere into “me”; they quickly went off-kilter.

In contrast, I could stay up late for hours working on workplace organizer stuff, like teaching coworkers how to negotiate, programming, project management… I was most fully myself then. My imagination and logic worked in concert. Until I saw dreams and had to sleep.

Nouri, too, experienced working on something meaningful as entirely different. True, unlike Hannibal, he wasn’t working with a collaborative team. But even working toward a larger meaningful purpose, he felt, allowed him to reintegrate a shattered self. And eventually he did begin to find the seeds of a community, at least in the minimal form of a fellow isolated workplace organizer:

Nouri: I began to introduce myself to people by saying that programming is my day job, and workplace organizer is my real job. My workplace subsidizes my activism.

Recently I found someone very much like me online; we’ve become deep, deep friends, and as of last week, I find it so much easier to get into “the zone” for work. I think it’s because someone understands me. For all my other “close” friends, I’m an active listener, a sounding board—because they simply don’t understand the things I care about. Their eyes glaze over when I even mention my activism.

But even now, I still must empty my mind for work. I listen to Sigur Rós—“Varðeldur,” which my new friend sent me. Then I go into a sort of meditative trance. When the song’s done, my mind’s empty, and I can run fairly nimbly through work.

It’s always a good idea to end a bleak chapter on a note of redemption, and these stories demonstrate that it is possible to find purpose and meaning despite even the worst of bullshit jobs. It also makes clear that this takes a great deal of doing. The “art of skiving,” as it’s sometimes called in England, may be highly developed and even honored in certain working-class traditions, but proper shirking does seem to require something real to shirk. In a truly bullshit job, it’s often entirely unclear what one is really supposed to be doing, what one can say about what one is and isn’t doing, who one can ask and what one can ask them, how much and within what parameters one is expected to pretend to be working, and what sorts of things it is or is not permissible to do instead. This is a miserable situation. The effects on health and self-esteem are often devastating. Creativity and imagination crumble.

Sadomasochistic power dynamics frequently emerge. (In fact, I would argue they will almost invariably emerge within top-down situations devoid of purpose unless explicit efforts are made to ensure that they do not—and sometimes even despite such efforts.) It is not for nothing that I’ve referred to the results as spiritual violence. This violence has affected our culture. Our sensibilities. Above all, it has affected our youth. Young people in Europe and North America in particular, but increasingly throughout the world, are being psychologically prepared for useless jobs, trained in how to pretend to work, and then by various means shepherded into jobs that almost nobody really believes serve any meaningful purpose.[114]

How this has come to happen, and how the current situation has become normalized or even encouraged, is a topic we will explore in chapter 5. It needs to be addressed, because this is a genuine scar across our collective soul.