Bullshit Jobs

David Graeber, an anthropologist, begins by recounting how a short essay he wrote in 2013 for a radical magazine called Strike! unexpectedly went viral. The essay, titled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," tested a hunch: that huge numbers of people secretly believe their jobs are pointless. Drawing on the economist John Maynard Keynes's 1930 prediction that technology would produce a 15-hour workweek by century's end, Graeber argues that the prediction was technologically feasible but never materialized. Instead, new industries like financial services and telemarketing expanded, along with sectors such as corporate law, human resources, and public relations. The explanation, Graeber contends, is not economic but moral and political: a ruling class benefits from a busy population, and a deep cultural belief treats work as a moral value in itself. A 2015 YouGov poll of British workers found that 37 percent believed their jobs made no meaningful contribution to the world, and a subsequent Dutch poll produced an even higher figure of 40 percent.

Graeber arrives at a working definition through a series of examples and refinements. He opens with Kurt, an employee of a subcontractor of a subcontractor of a subcontractor to the German military, whose job consists of driving hundreds of kilometers to move a soldier's computer a few meters down a hall. Through cases like this, Graeber defines a bullshit job as a form of paid employment so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence, even though the conditions of employment oblige the employee to pretend otherwise. He defends the subjective element of this definition, arguing that workers are generally the best judges of whether their labor contributes anything, and distinguishes bullshit jobs (often well paid but pointless) from "shit jobs" (poorly paid but genuinely necessary).

In the second chapter, Graeber develops a five-part typology drawn from over 250 firsthand testimonies. Flunkies exist only to make someone else look important: unnecessary receptionists or personal assistants whose bosses have nothing to delegate. Goons occupy jobs with a manipulative element that exist only because competitors employ them, including lobbyists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Duct tapers patch over problems that should not exist, such as employees assigned to correct the output of incompetent superiors. Box tickers allow organizations to claim they are doing something they are not, as when Betsy, hired to coordinate leisure activities in a care home, spent her time filling out forms that were immediately filed away instead of actually engaging with residents. Taskmasters are either unnecessary supervisors or bullshit generators who create pointless tasks for others. Graeber introduces the concept of second-order bullshit jobs, the legitimate support work performed for bullshit enterprises, which pushes the total proportion of bullshit-related labor above 50 percent.

The third chapter asks why people paid to do nothing are so consistently miserable, challenging the economic model of homo oeconomicus, the rational, self-interest-maximizing individual that underpins much economic theory. Graeber presents Eric, a working-class history graduate hired as an "Interface Administrator" to maintain a computer system nobody wanted. Despite repeated attempts to quit, each met with a raise, Eric could not get himself fired and eventually resigned after an emotional collapse at a train station. Graeber analyzes Eric's story as shaped by social class: someone from a professional background might have treated the sinecure as a networking opportunity, but Eric could not reconcile the pointlessness with his working-class values of making and fixing things. Graeber introduces the German psychologist Karl Groos's 1901 discovery of "the pleasure at being the cause," the observation that infants express intense joy upon realizing they can produce effects in the world. This capacity, Graeber argues, is foundational to the human sense of self, and its denial produces rage, withdrawal, and psychological collapse. He traces how the modern concept of buying other people's time, forged through clock towers, pocket watches, and Puritan moral reform, created a system in which idleness becomes theft and pretend work becomes the purest exercise of a boss's arbitrary power.

The fourth chapter deepens the analysis of what Graeber calls "spiritual violence," the psychological, social, and physical damage inflicted by bullshit jobs. The dominant experience is one of agonizing ambiguity: workers are never sure whether supervisors know there is nothing to do or how openly they can acknowledge the situation. Graeber documents health consequences through Nouri, a software developer who tracked his deterioration across four successive bullshit jobs, including depression and damaged eyesight, noting that Nouri's health improved only when he channeled his energy into workplace organizing. Drawing on the sociologist Lynn Chancer, Graeber argues that unlike consensual relationships with clear boundaries, real workplace hierarchies offer no escape mechanism, and a broader culture of "rights-scolding," in which people across the political spectrum shame others for voicing discontent, compounds the misery by making workers feel they have no standing to demand meaningful employment.

The fifth chapter investigates structural causes. Graeber critiques the "service economy" label as deceptive, showing that actual service jobs remained steady at roughly 20 percent of employment for over a century while the real growth occurred in information work. He refutes claims that government regulation is the primary driver of bullshit, citing data showing administrative growth at private universities (135 percent) far outpaced that at public ones (66 percent). From testimonies inside major banks, where one risk analyst estimates 80 percent of 60,000 employees were unnecessary, Graeber develops his central structural argument: what has emerged is "managerial feudalism," a system in which corporations in the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, real estate) derive profits through debt creation rather than production, redistributing proceeds through elaborate managerial hierarchies whose size serves as a measure of executive prestige. He illustrates the transition with the Elephant Tea factory near Marseille, where workers improved productivity by over 50 percent but rather than sharing the gains, the company hired idle managers until one proposed shutting down the plant entirely.

The sixth chapter asks why society tolerates this arrangement. Graeber traces attitudes toward work back to Genesis and the Greek poet Hesiod, where labor is simultaneously divine punishment and a modest form of creative power. He documents a consistent inverse relationship between the social value of work and pay, citing studies showing medical researchers add $9 of value per $1 of pay while financial sector workers destroy value. Over centuries, the Northern European tradition of "life-cycle service," the Puritan "Reformation of Manners" that sought to impose discipline on displaced workers, the American labor movement's embrace of the labor theory of value, and the counteroffensive of industrial "consumerism" together produced a perverse moral logic: the more one's work benefits others, the less one deserves to be paid, and the awfulness of a job is precisely what makes it morally valuable.

The final chapter examines political effects and proposes a remedy. Graeber describes crisscrossing resentments: those in bullshit jobs resent workers with real labor; those with real labor resent the "liberal elite" who monopolize meaningful positions. He introduces "moral envy," resentment directed not at wealth but at someone's higher moral standard, to explain why conservatives target unionized teachers rather than executives. On automation, Graeber argues that the predicted mass unemployment has essentially occurred, but the gap has been filled with dummy jobs rather than increased leisure. He identifies Universal Basic Income (UBI) as the one proposal that could address the problem without expanding government power. He presents Leslie, a Benefits Advisor whose job exists only because of an apparatus designed to prevent eligible people from receiving assistance, and Candi, a former Wages for Housework activist who came to support UBI through the realization that if everyone is a carer, the simplest approach is to fund everybody unconditionally. UBI would eliminate intrusive bureaucracies, give workers the ability to walk away from pointless employment, and likely cause most bullshit jobs to disappear. If 37 to 40 percent of workers already believe their jobs are pointless, Graeber concludes, allowing people to decide for themselves how to contribute could hardly produce a worse distribution of labor than the one that already exists.