Clarence: I worked as a museum guard for a major global security company in a museum where one exhibition room was left unused more or less permanently. My job was to guard that empty room, ensuring no museum guests touched the…well, nothing in the room, and ensure nobody set any fires. To keep my mind sharp and attention undivided, I was forbidden any form of mental stimulation, like books, phones, etc. Since nobody was ever there, in practice I sat still and twiddled my thumbs for seven and a half hours, waiting for the fire alarm to sound. If it did, I was to calmly stand up and walk out. That was it.
In a situation like that—I can attest to this because I have been in roughly analogous situations—it’s very hard not to stand there calculating “Just how much longer would it likely take me to notice a fire if I were sitting here reading a novel or playing solitaire? Two seconds? Three seconds? That is assuming I wouldn’t actually notice it quicker because my mind would not, as it is now, be so pulped and liquified by boredom that it had effectively ceased to operate. But even assuming that it was three seconds, just how many seconds of my life have been effectively taken from me to eliminate that hypothetical three-second gap? Let’s work it out (I have a lot of time on my hands anyway): 27,000 seconds a work shift; 135,000 seconds a week; 3,375,000 seconds a month.’ Hardly surprising that those assigned such utterly empty labor rarely last a year unless someone upstairs takes pity and gives them something else to do. Clarence lasted six months (roughly twenty million seconds) and then took a job at half the pay that afforded at least a modicum of mental stimulation.
~
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 av- erage. 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.
(What a shame!! He could be programming and playing guitar! The system made him so much less than he should be!)
~
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 some- thing that had a more obvious social value—organ transplant registration, say, or tickets to Glastonbury—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.
~
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 rea- son 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 “adver- tise 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…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 ’‘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? Id be lucky if they didn’t hate me on that basis alone.
~
Hannibal: I do digital consultancy for global pharmaceutical companies’ marketing departments. I often work with global PR agencies on this, and write reports with titles like How to Improve Engagement Among Key Digital Health Care Stakeholders. It is pure, unadulterated bullshit, and serves no purpose beyond ticking boxes for marketing departments. But it is very easy to charge a very large amount of money to write bullshit reports. I was recently able to charge around twelve thousand pounds to write a two-page report for a pharmaceutical client to present during a global strategy meeting. The report wasn’t used in the end because they didn’t manage to get to that agenda point during their allotted meeting time, but the team I wrote it for was very happy with it nonetheless.
~
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.
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 point- less, 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 behaviour 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.
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’ 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 employees’ 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.’ 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.’ 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 forth- coming; 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.
~
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 feel- ings 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 job-holders 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! 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 un- necessarily 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 bea 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 employees. 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 Cree Indian community in northern Quebec.
~
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—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 bollocks” (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”!’. 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 bollocks!” 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.
(From the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber—non-block quoted text is all Graeber’s, except for bracketed stuff which is me. Almost all of the testimonies come from Chapter 4, What Is It Like to Have a Bullshit Job?)