Bullshit Jobs

Too many jobs are socially useless

Bullshit jobs add up to the perception of lack of meaning and purpose a materialistic worldview already conveys. Billions are wasting most of our resources, energy, and fossil fuels. Nonsense employment is making us poor (inwardly and outwardly) and baking our planet.

I guess that, at least in the contemporary Western world, less than half of the population has a job with real social value. Few jobs, professions, and careers produce goods or services of social usefulness that serve to promote a common material, cultural, or psychological state of well-being. In the best case, these jobs are simply void occupations that leave no trace. But most are also detrimental to society and the environment as a whole. They are directed towards the production of unnecessary or unhealthy consumer goods, serve financial or industrial elites, or favor a system that destroys the natural habitat. We still live under the illusion that the energy we put into our job is good for the community. Our culture, mental categories, and especially our educational and economic system, are such that the vast majority of us work for something unnecessary, or even harmful, for the collective benefit. And, in most cases, our job does in no way describe or determine who we are as a person. These jobs – namely, those jobs that make no meaningful contributions to the world – have been called ‘bullshit jobs’ by the American anthropologist David Gareber.

“Many people feel they work in pointless, meaningless jobs, research confirms” Source: Phys.org

If we are honest with ourselves, most of us would admit that the real reason we pursue a profession is that we need to make a living, or where there is a possibility to climb up the hierarchy, that it satisfies our ego thirsty for recognition and prestige. We are rarely willing to admit to ourselves how we live an imprisoned life, or that we are working for something that is socially worthless, and eventually even harmful to others.

This state of affairs is a giant matrix, a network of social conditioning that is strongly tied to an economic order, from which it is not easy to separate oneself and become self-sufficient. It is, on the one hand, a play in which we largely participate deluding ourselves and, on the other, it is sustained by the inherent structure and rules of our economic and educational system.
The problem is both individual and systemic.