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The Purpose of Work is to Sustain Survival
Ideologically fueled disinformation campaigns during the 1930’s sought to discredit the WPA. These campaigns employed people in bullshit jobs that posed a constant threat to those who performed real work for the WPA.
Twenty-first century jobs created by media outlets that produce propaganda, misinformation and disinformation exemplify “Bullshit Jobs” . Such jobs are not only useless but harmful to society. If the perpetrators are ideologically motivated enthusiasts, however, then they may derive considerable sense of meaning from their work. Any self-loathing that arises in perpetrators may be suppressed or repressed. The question of whether it is best to conceive of the “Bullshit Job” as an objective or subjective phenomenon has not been conclusively addressed.
If there were no problems, there would be no work. Humans and other organisms evolved the capacity to work to counter threats to individual and group survival.
For at least ninety percent of human history, most human work entailed hunting and foraging. While life as a hunter or forager wasn’t easy, no band of foragers ever had to cope with a pandemic of meaningless work. To ask a band of foragers “Why Work?” would be like asking them “Why Survive?”
Might the problem of meaningless work be attributable to the fact that much of the work now performed is irrelevant – and even downright antithetical to – group survival?
The Problem of Meaning Arises in an Atmosphere of Abundance
Human groups worked for millennia before the advent of language. It would not have been possible to conceive of “meaningless” work without words necessary to describe the concept.
In agrarian societies the need to understand why survival required work was one of the first questions that preoccupied persons whose circumstances and affluence allowed for reflection and writing. We know this because the question of why humans are compelled to work is the subject of the earliest extant work of Western literature whose authorship is definitively known. In the 6th century BC, Hesiod described the need to work in terms of existential justice: Zeus decreed that work constituted punishment for a crime perpetrated by Prometheus, a mortal who stole fire from the Gods. While humans might think it unfair that all are punished for the crime of just one individual, it is not up to us to decide. The Gods compel us to work to survive, regardless of what we may think about it. Foundational texts from non-Western civilizations feature similar themes.
When homo sapiens evolved language and the capacity to create mythologies to explain work’s meaning, the “meaning” of work didn’t change, but its foundational purpose was given a name: survival.
The Advent of the “Bullshit” Job
While the meaning of the term “Bullshit” can easily be missed and seen as just another expletive used for effect, emphasis, or posturing, it is actually an important concept with a precise meaning that is increasingly indispensable for understanding a type of untruth that is so preponderant in our culture. “Bullshit” refers to a form of untruth that is clearly distinguishable from lying and delusion. Whereas lying involves deception, and whereas delusion entails a fixed false conviction, the primary mental activity that accompanies bullshit is lack of care: the bullshitter is unconcerned with the way things really are. This lack of concern differentiates the bullshitter from the liar: the liar is desperately concerned with the way things really are, if only to ensure that his lies conceal some aspect of reality, whereas the Bullshitter is unconcerned with the way things really are but seeks to hide this lack of concern.
“Both the (bullshitter) and the liar represent themselves as endeavoring to communicate the truth…But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him…the motive guiding and controlling (his speech) is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.”
– Harry Frankfurt
This distinction between lying and bullshit is critical to understanding the essence of the “bullshit job”. The job is not so named because the worker is lying about the fact that she works. The worker performing the bullshit job performs tasks like the worker employed at a real job. The difference between the worker at a real job and the worker at a bullshit job resides in the fact that the worker at the bullshit job is paid, in part, to pretend that the work she performs matters. The worker in the bullshit job isn’t lying when she says she is at work, she is rather paid to pretend that the work she performs serves a purpose connected to the survival or flourishing of the community-at-large.
Work is goal directed activity that seeks to solve a problem, whereas the bullshit job would not qualify as real work because it doesn’t solve a real problem that matters in the world-at-large. It rather entails a form of paid employment that is felt to be so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious such that even the employee cannot justify its existence.
The Common Good is Embedded in the Concept of Work
Bullshit jobs would not exist if they did not fulfill some purpose. Employers must regard the jobs as necessary, or they would not create them and pay employees to perform them. Employees also find bullshit jobs (or the compensation derived from them) necessary, or they would not work at them.
The “pointless jobs” described by David Graeber include jobs that “harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer” (e.g., lobbyists employed by fossil fuel companies to stifle efforts to address climate change), or jobs that involve imposing a temporary fix on problems that could be fixed permanently (e.g., computer programmers employed to repair and address user problems arising from code whose dysfunction was intentionally produced to derive revenue arising from the need to repair it).
It is only possible to conceive of a “bullshit job” if one assumes that real jobs promote group survival or flourishing. If real work were not assumed to be about something other than accumulating capital (for the employer or shareholder) or collecting compensation (for the employee), it would not be possible to conceive of a “bullshit job”.
“Proof of Concept”: New Research Confirms Salience of the Bullshit Job
A 2023 study showed that 19% of respondents consider their jobs “rarely” or “never” useful to society. The study did not address whether the jobs were objectively useless but rather demonstrated that the respondents felt that their jobs were.
The concept of the “Bullshit Job” cannot alone explain why so many people perceive their jobs as socially useless. People’s perceptions of their job’s usefulness is affected by factors unrelated to actual usefulness. Unfavorable working conditions – such as those that now plague the health care industry – can easily transform a critically important job (such as that of a Physician or Nurse) into a job that feels pointless. One of the most compelling facts to emerge from studies of Physician Burnout involves the degree to which this widespread phenomenon is correlated with the percentage of tasks that the Physician performs that are felt to be meaningless. Physicians who spend less than 20% of their work effort on the activity they find most personally meaningful are nearly three times more likely to be burned out than those who spend at least 20% of their work effort on such an activity.
Pretending to Contribute
In general, the employee continues to work at the bullshit job due to the compensation he receives in exchange for doing so. The work activity involves “bullshit” in the specific sense that it is or is felt to be either unimportant or destructive to society. The employee performs the activity because the compensation received in exchange for it perpetuates his survival (or social and economic position).
From a psychological standpoint, a primary problem for the employee who works a bullshit job involves the expenditure of emotional labor to fulfill the demand to pretend: as part of the conditions of employment at a bullshit job, the employee feels “obliged to pretend” that the work being performed contributes to what the world needs. The employee stays at the job because she feels she needs the job to survive as an individual or as breadwinner for a family. Although the job is necessary to the survival (or economic and social position) of the individual worker and the family she supports, the job can feel meaningless because the work feels irrelevant or antithetical to the employees’ aspiration to contribute to the creation of a world in which she would like to live.
The concept of the “bullshit job” reminds us that the problem of insufficient meaning can only arise in a situation where a significant amount of work activity is felt to be irrelevant or antithetical to the survival or flourishing of society.
Sources:
Hesiod. Works and Days. Translated by Glenn Most (2018). Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University Press.
Frankfurt, Harry G. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton University Press.
Graeber, David (2018). Bullshit Jobs. Simon & Schuster.
Walo, Simon. “Bullshit After All? Why People Consider their Jobs Socially Useless”. Work, Employment and Society. Volume 37, issue 5. First published on line 07/21/23.
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