Image uses a portrait of Kurt Vonnegut from The Greanville Post, licensed under CC by attribution.

At the centre of the story of society is a moral: If you love your job, you won’t work a day in your life. So what happens if you believe you work a bullshit job? When the meaning has evaporated and left behind only questions and uncertainty? Join me in exploring the intersection of our identity and work.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

— “The Armadillo”, Elizabeth Bishop

---

What does meaning mean?

When dealing with meaning, there isn’t an objective scale of value we can apply to any given job. We can’t ascribe an absolute worth to hairdressers or service workers (though I would argue the pandemic has taught us we highly undervalue these kinds of workers) and instead it’s much easier for us to use a subjective value of meaning when it comes to your work. To help with our exploration, we’ll use David Graeber’s definition of a meaningless job:

A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged that is not the case.

— Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber

Most of what I’m about to say is based on, or inspired by, David Graeber’s book “Bullshit Jobs”. I will be using the terms “bullshit” and “meaningless” synonymously. The book delves into the who, what, why, where of meaningless jobs and how they came to be. Graeber’s focus is on the holistic view of entirely Bullshit Jobs. These are jobs that are so obviously unnecessary, that even the person doing them cannot justify their existence. Though, they feel obligated to pretend otherwise.

Entirely bullshit jobs are a great way for the book to prove its claim that this kind of work exists, and is harmful. I’m not here to reiterate the proof of meaningless work, or detail its history. What we’re going to focus on today is about why meaningless work causes us so much hurt and worry about our identity as a whole. At the intersection of work and our identity, why does doing, and knowing it is, meaningless work cause such a profound unhappiness, it attacks our very spirit?

Some assumptions from Bullshit Jobs

Since this isn’t about the entirety of the book, and just about the effect of meaningless work on people, there are a couple assumptions from the book that will be useful for what I talk about next.

1. Bullshit jobs exist. Yep, there are jobs out there that serve no purpose to the greater world.. Capitalism promises that it would not suffer a job that had no purpose, and yet it suffers many of them. I’m not here to argue their existence - the book is much better at that than I am.

2. They exist not just in the US. Being European, we often hold ourselves above American work ideals, but polls from the UK and Holland showed that 37% and 40% (respectively) of people believed their job did not make a meaningful contribution to the world.

3. These jobs exist in both the public and private sector. The idea that bullshit jobs only exist in government isn’t true. Plenty of people and companies create meaningless jobs out of ego, bureaucracy, box-ticking, or because they’re unknowingly perpetuating their own meaningless work. There are many reasons, but it’s useful to us that we understand that bullshit jobs exist, and they exist in all job sectors.

The book is a much more complete view of bullshit jobs and what can be done about them. If anything that follows sparks curiosity, I’d highly recommend reading the book.

“My job didn’t start out this way”

Graeber’s exploration of Bullshit Jobs is largely made up of accounts from people who believe their job started and had always been meaningless. Reading it, I was very interested in the stories from people who had a gradual “A-ha” moment when they realised that the job had become meaningless. I think that any job that has lost its meaning to you is a bullshit job now under the definition above.

It’s a useful distinction to me for what we’re talking about - between jobs always having been bullshit, and becoming bullshit - to paint the most optimistic light on the situation and provide a hopefulness that it doesn’t have to be this way. I don’t want what I write to be an angry observation of the world around us, and instead a prompt to start remaking the world in our image.

The harmful effects of bullshit work

Overall, meaningless work commits a Spiritual Violence against a person. It’s an attack on something not just physical, not just mental, but on something that is the essence of being. It wears away our sense of self.

Emotional labour

To begin with, there’s the emotional labour in pretending that our work is not meaningless. Jobs in society exist as our saviour from wrack and ruin, keeping us clothed, fed and warm. When that job is threatened by the potential of being meaningless, we feel obligated to defend our work as contributing something.

Emotional labour was initially defined by Arlie Russell Hochschild as the process of employees being required to manage their feelings by the company. We see it today in service workers who are required to “provide service with a smile”. We’ve even meme-ified it through the idea of a “Karen” - typically a white woman with a short haircut who exists to make absurd demands and be placated by a service worker.

A requirement of our job is that we self-regulate our emotions so that only the positive ones are present at work. It exists in the tech sector as well, with cultural catchphrases like “disagree but commit” where you’re allowed a middle ground, as a treat. Emotional labour isn’t inherently bad, but it is a toll to endure, especially if it’s forced upon you.

It takes a lot of energy to smile when you’re sad. To be happy when you’re miserable. We put effort into broadcasting an image of importance to our peers and bosses. We are forced to maintain a pretence of meaning, lest we want to lose our jobs.

Paranoia

With that forced pretence comes the question: who else knows my job is pointless? You can’t outright ask. Because if they don’t know, you don’t want them to know.

But if they do know, why have they never said anything? We’re left in a position where the full scope of our role is ambiguous and we don’t know who’s on our side, or who’s to be trusted. All we can do is start probing the boundaries of what we can and can’t get away with. All while plastering a contented smile across our face and continuing to crank out reports no one reads, or clean already-clean countertops.

The paranoia breeds distrust and competition with those around you. Without a vocabulary or role model, it’s hard to even describe how you’re feeling.

Scriptlessness

As we grow up, we learn about the world through the experiences of others. Things like books, movies and role models influence our idea of how the world works, and how we should work within it. There’s an idea in psychology of “scriptlessness” which is when we don’t have any previous examples to infer how we should behave in a given situation.

If you’ve ever sat in a cafe and wondered “do I pay with the server or at the counter?”, then you know what scriptlessness is. In that situation, you can overcome it by trying one option or another. The consequences of failure’s low. What’re they gonna do, shame you for wanting to pay?

With meaningless work, there are bigger consequences at play. You can’t simply ask. You can’t voice concerns. There’s no books or blog posts about how you’re supposed to correct the situation. What do you do?

I’m hoping this post points you towards some resources to help you feel less alone in your thoughts. This is more common than you think, and my motivation for writing this is to give you a springboard to other written pieces. Hopefully this post becomes more and more obsolete as time goes on.

The (lack of) pleasure of being the cause

Motivation is a big question when it comes to work topics. It’s often at the core of search queries looking for help: “how do I regain motivation?”, “why am I not motivated?”, “what is motivation?”. It’s not surprising that it crops up here as well.

Karl Groos was a German psychologist in the late 19th/early 20th century. He was fascinated with infants and their fascination and joy at the simplest of things. His research into infants laid out the idea that children experience “the pleasure of being the cause”. A tiny hand can wave a toy boat back and forth through the air, cooing and gurgling in delight simply because they take pleasure in having an impact on the environment around them. They take pleasure in having a concrete effect on our world.

As we grow up, this idea forms the basis of motivation in adults and can form the explanation of why we do things. We do things for their own sake. We do things because we enjoy our impact on the environment around us. It’s skimming a stone on a still lake, but it’s also exercising power for the sake of exercising it. From hobbies to sadism, this theory underpins our motivation. We often find that the root of why we do things is borne from the simple pleasure of being a cause.

A meaningless job lacks a sense of control and autonomy for the worker. Often, the only control we have is over how we go about pretending that our job is meaningful. You might be forgiven to think that as you get more senior, the more control you have but unfortunately it looks like the same lack of control exists at all levels in a chain of meaningless jobs (according to Graeber).

With that lack of control but innate sense of wanting to be the cause, we see a harmful motivation emerge. Superiors exercise their power and make demands, belittle subordinates and otherwise cause harm to those in their charge. They’re doing it because they can. They’re doing it to feel the pleasure of being the cause in an otherwise void of motivation.

Causing harm becomes the only act of rebellion against a system that perpetuates meaningless work.

Imposter syndrome

An effect caused by the combination of distrust and sleeplessness is the idea that our peers might be doing actual, meaningful work. Without any measurable meaningful output, it can be hard to understand that others don’t hold the same view of meaningless as you. This leads to deeper questions of inadequacy, and sometimes ungratefulness as we compare ourselves to others.

Particularly in senior roles, we see a paradox in how respected we are in our field, or our job, while we struggle internally with the idea that the work we do doesn’t contribute more meaningfully to the world and society at large. And it’s this situation that leads to a kind of Sunk Cost Fallacy where we feel too invested, and often too well paid, to really speak out about the truth of how we feel.

Symptoms of mental stress

In the last decade, we as a society have become more aware of the effects of stress. All of the above contributes to significantly higher levels of stress and unhappiness in the workplace. The NHS in the UK lists some of the effects as: irritability, anger or being tearful; worry, anxiety or hopelessness; stomach problems, stress headaches and muscle pain; skin reactions like stress rashes and hives; feeling dizzy, sick or faint.

The effect of a meaningless job can impact you physically, making you ill or susceptible to illness.

What can be done?

When I set out to finally put all these thoughts down in text, I did not want it to be all doom and gloom. It was hard but based on the books below, I think I’ve got some suggestions on how to minimise the effect of meaningless work.

• “Bullshit Jobs” by David Graeber

• “Work Won’t Love You Back” by Sarah Jaffe

• “Lost In Work” by Amelia Horgan

• “Quit” by Annie Duke

• “Laziness Does Not Exist” by Devon Price

• “You Deserve A Tech Union” by Ethan Marcotte

Find meaning outside of work

One of the first remedies for resisting the effects of meaningless work is to find meaning in hobbies, activism or any activity that brings you joy. Be the weekend warrior! Lean into the idea that what we do is work to live, and not the other way around.

There is one massive warning, as put by Amelia Horgan in “Lost in Work”: Resist the jobification of your hobbies.

Don’t fall into the trap of side hustles and Grindset Mindsets. The precarious situation of work, and the world in general, pushes us to commodify and monetise everything we can to maybe, one day, escape the rat race and be our own boss, with our own hours and moral scruples. This, however, is a recipe for burnout. From a young age, we’ve been drilled with motivation from parents and school to do things “that look good on the CV” but the only way to truly regain your sense of self is to pursue your passions for the passion.

A society where we must work the majority of our waking hours will never deliver us happiness, even if we are the lucky few who have jobs in which we do gain some joy. As Silvia Federici wrote, “nothing so effectively stifles our lives as the transformation into work of the activities and relations that satisfy our desires.

— “Work Won’t Love You Back”, Sarah Jaffe

With that in mind, you should almost certainly take up or reconnect with a hobby of some kind. Reading, knitting, crochet, crafts, music, going to the cinema once a week, movies in general, sports, TV shows, building model gundam, following Formula 1, going to music festivals, etc. etc. are all good options and nourish the soul in ways your job can no longer. In particular, do a search for local groups in your area that engage in the things you enjoy, and do a search online to cover those times when you’re not feeling like going out to interact with people in person.

I was once given the advice that if you show up to a place once a week at the same time every week, eventually you’re going to get to know someone and with more time, you’ll even make friends. This can be as straightforward as joining a weekly board game night in a local pub, or heading to the same cafe every Sunday to sit and enjoy a cup of coffee. And if you’re lucky, you’ll even find the ritual becomes its own kind of pleasure in and of itself.

Reclaim public space/community

Although Sarah Jaffe talks about reclaiming public space amidst political movements such as Occupy and Black Lives Matter, this suggestion is a little more timid and local - though if you have the opportunity to support and uplift political action, please take it. Instead, what you can do is foster a sense of community through meetups and groups, whether about a hobby, politics or any topic of interest. If it’s often sunny/dry where you are, maybe gathering outdoors with a group of friendly people once a week, laying claim to a portion of a park, a grassy embankment or a few public benches can go a long way to reclaiming space for a community of people to grow.

If it’s a little wetter, such as here in Ireland, think about all the groups you would have loved to be involved in when finding meaning outside your work, and reach out to local spaces to host a meetup every once in a while. In particular, you’ll probably find the most luck with independent spaces such as community centres and independently-run shops. Bonus points if you can find a location for your group that doesn’t have any pressure or opportunity to purchase goods. What we want to achieve is a separation from work, including any financial worry, and the best way to guarantee that is by giving people a Third Place they can inhabit that doesn’t cost money, and provides a social outlet for something they enjoy.

You could also endeavour to get involved in your local community. If you have a community centre or even just a noticeboard somewhere nearby, have a look out for ways that you can get more involved with local community groups. For example, here in Ireland there are Tidy Town groups that do clean up and general beautification work in local towns and cities. These offer a fabulous opportunity to make friends and give back to the community you live in. Alongside local cleanup, there are also likely to be local business bureaus, event planning, committees and just general organisation groups. You might have to hunt for them, and maybe seek out people to ask questions but finding a way to feel a part of a community will go a long way to helping you feel whole.

Organise with your co-workers

The hardest step in repairing a broken environment or system is being able to imagine it in the first place. Look around at peers in other companies, blogs, articles and whatever material you can arm yourself with and try to imagine an ideal world of conditions that make you and your job meaningful again.

You don’t have to immediately go full unionisation, because I know that’s become a scary term in a Capitalist world, but you should figure out what steps need to be taken to get to your ideal, and start having conversations with your coworkers about what their ideal looks like. Figure out where the overlaps are. If you end up with enough common ground among enough people, it’s likely time to find a way to ask for change.

If you don’t think just asking will work, then it’s time to think more concretely about the gap between reality and your ideal. Is this something you want to change? Do you have the energy and patience to change it? Is it worth changing here? If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, then you might find more comfort in the next section.

If the answers are “yes”, then I would highly suggest reading material such as “You Deserve A Tech Union” and beginning to think about how you achieve change through influence, and maybe formal action as a collective.

Quit

This thought’s probably already crossed your mind, but you should consider quitting. If you’re struggling with the thought, Annie Duke’s “Quit” goes through the most common mental blocks to quitting a job that you know isn’t good for you. Here are three that helped give me an “a-ha” moment in the past.

Firstly, the one you’re likely most familiar with is the sunk cost fallacy in which you’ve put so much time, energy and effort into doing this job, making friends and all the things a person should. The sunk cost fallacy is the tendency to continue with your job, even when you’re aware that leaving would be beneficial. A big chunk of the blockage here is loss aversion - we don’t want what we’ve already sunk into this commitment to go to waste. Look out for words like “waste” or “I can’t … now” in your line of thinking help spot when this is a factory, but the evidence suggests we’re likely to fall into the same trap even if we’re aware and cognisant of sunk cost.

An obvious hurdle to overcome is the feeling of uncertainty. You don’t know if there will be a job out there, or how much it will pay, or how long it will take to get. And those are all totally valid worries. In society, we celebrate and evangelise the people who respond to adversity by soldiering on, even though the quitters can be just as influential. Think of it like cutting your losses at a poker table - the longer you stay, the more you’re gambling with your physical and mental health, your happiness and your future. Unfortunately, life is filled with situations that require action without having a full rundown of all possible information. However, quitting is the tool that allows us to react to new information that is revealed after we make a decision. Having the option to quit helps you to explore more, learn more, and ultimately find the right things to stick with.

The final thing I want to mention is omission-commission bias. It is our inability to accurately value actions, and inaccurately value _in_actions. What I mean, is that we will naturally view quitting as a definitive action - an act that will require effort and commitment - but we won’t view not quitting as an equal option in the decision, even though it may take the same or more effort. We tend towards the status quo, and that can be harmful in spurring ourselves into action. Choosing to stay is a valid choice, but it is still an active choice.

Our problem is that we tend to think about these things in a backward-looking way. We feel like if we walk away from something, that means we’ve wasted everything that we put into it.

But those are resources that are already spent. You can’t get them back.

We need to start thinking about waste as a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one. That means realizing that spending another minute or another dollar or another bit of effort on something that is no longer worthwhile is the real waste.

— “Quit”, Annie Duke

Learning to appreciate being Idle

I don’t know if you should quit your job, it might make totally no sense given the climate at the moment. So another option is to learn to become comfortable with the meaningless-ness of your job. Engineer and embrace idleness as a way to balance the karmic scales.

The only piece of practical advice in this section is: attempt to undo the mental model that productivity is linked to goodness. Work to unwind the “protestant work ethic” that lies at the heart of the capitalist message and understand that salvation will not come from hard work. Devon Price’s “Laziness Does Not Exist” offers a lot of great advice and perspective on adopting a mental model that is both kinder to ourselves, and to the society around us. In particular, there is often a call to deliberately think and ponder the context in which the perception of laziness has emerged. Think hard about what other factors are put upon you/that person - environmental, financial, physical, bureaucratic, unrealistic standards, emotional, etc. etc. What seems like laziness on the surface is often a symptom of larger problems at play in the systems that govern our lives.

So start by being kind to yourself, and resisting the guilt that will inevitably come.

Beyond the practical lies the theoretical and philosophical. Personally, I’ve found a lot of comfort and reassurance in reading pieces from Betrand Russell, a mathematician from the early-to-mid 20th century. He wrote an essay in the 1930s titled “In Praise Of Idleness” which finally convinced me I wasn’t going insane. This wasn’t a new problem, we’d been seeing this drive for meaningless work even back then.

Another thinker that’s unfortunately not with us is Kurt Vonnegut. So much of what he’s said and written is still so relevant and poignant today, but in particular I love the story he told about why he only buys one envelope at a time.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: There’s a little sweet moment, I’ve got to say, in a very intense book— your latest— in which you’re heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say— I’m getting— I’m going to buy an envelope.

KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: What happens then?

KURT VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know…

And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

– Kurt Vonnegut interview in The Bellingham Herald

And isn’t that lovely? To take joy in the act of what may happen if you succumb to the slowness of life and appreciate that it may take you on a journey with dogs and fire engines to enjoy? As Vonnegut once said in a commencement speech address: “We’re put on this earth to fart around”.

In Closing

All in all, I understand that this whole post was a gradient of anger to optimism, or at least I hope the optimism came through. I do not think that the way the world works will change overnight, or even any time soon, but I do hope we can begin to recognise the effects of meaningless work and take the steps - individually and collectively - to mould the world into a better shape slowly but surely. Or, at the very least, mount our own small scale quiet protests.

[…] I should rather praise
A worldly time under this worldly sky—
The terrier-taming, garden-watering days
Those heroes pictured as they struggled through
The quick noose of their finite being. By
Necessity, if not choice, I live here too.

— “Glengormley”, Derek Mahon