On Bullsh*t Jobs | David Graeber | RSA Replay

In 2013 David Graeber, professor of anthropology at LSE, wrote an excoriating essay on modern work for Strike! magazine. “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” was read over a million times and the essay translated in seventeen different languages within weeks. Graeber visits the RSA to expand on this phenomenon, and will explore how the proliferation of meaningless jobs - more associated with the 20th-century Soviet Union than latter-day capitalism - has impacted modern society. In doing so, he looks at how we value work, and how, rather than being productive, work has become an end in itself; the way such work maintains the current broken system of finance capital; and, finally, how we can get out of it.

SUBSCRIBE to our channel!

[sonjak]

I am at a job doing things nobody needs while I am listening to this talk.

[hrishikesh-s]

I miss David Graeber and I didn’t even discover him till after he was passed away. Rip David!

[kevinslater]

"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

-Buckminster Fuller

He said this in the 1970s

[markm]

Great talk. I had a bullshit job for about two years and it made me change career paths completely. Not only did the job not fulfill me, I questioned the sanity of a system that continually made me pretend to work and wouldn't allow me to shift into another position I had shown I was capable of because I didn't get the right university marks - which were only part of the application process as a filter to begin with. Finding David's book helped me put into words what I'd been trying to define for a very long time - how jobs were being created to keep people busy and justify giving them an income, rather than because they were necessary.

[BuhodePiedra]

I manage rainwater catchment tanks in the CA central coast where water is very scarce. I can barely afford a studio apartment. Meanwhile, all of the bankers, golfers, investors and folks that simply move money around have very large estates and don't seem to lift a finger. It's not only that the BS jobs are ubiquitous but that there is an direct relationship between the BS'ness of your job in relation to your wage earned. e.g. Higher level of BS = Higher Wage. Low level of BS = Low wage.
we need to remove invisible layers of 'policy violence' to flip this equation upside down, so that bankers are scraping by for selling us all out and, for example, people like hotel maids can live comfortably, because they actually provide a real service.

[BenjaminEAlexander]

I first heard of this idea while I was killing time in an office, with maybe six hours/day of time to read newsletters, compile datasets for personal interests, and generally look busy without doing any work. Of course I made the most money I ever have doing that kind of work. I work as a bicycle mechanic now, and I was amazed when I started how much more of my day is actually taken up with work, but how much happier I am. I do sometimes miss being up to the minute on essays and publications and Twitter, but I am very obviously more mentally healthy, and I'm not making the world a worse place with the two hours/day I would actually do any work.

[rogersyversen]

I dropped out the third year of police university college because of all the bullshit during my practice year at a police station. It spiraled me into a depression from a sense of meaninglessness by watching all the beurocracy and the hopeless fates of the people we were supposed to serve. Now I am studying sociology and I see more and more of this collective lie in this field aswell - papers being written with no sense of discovering anything at all, just the need to publish. The dilemma for me is that I feel need my masters degree in order to even have a voice. None of my twitter posts or facebook updates ever gets listened to. There is no platform for legitimate critical thought - it gets swallowed by algorithmically tuned social media that cater only to the individual ecco chambers. If I talk to my fellow students about actual discovery of truth, they just look at me in bewilderment for a bit, then go back to their phones and silently filter me out of their feeds.

[edisonyi]

Not to mention the fact that hedge fund managers literally produce negative value, especially to their clients. On average, hedge funds perform worse than passive index funds. Some hedge fund managers literally pretend to actively manage their fund and secretly just track a passive index fund. Yet, hedge fund managers get payed astronomical amounts of money. Teachers however get poverty level income.

[gbrinch]

I started playing the piano ay age 20 because I wanted to be a composer after seeing the film Amadeus....I have never looked back! Am enjoying my 30+ year of teaching, performing and composing! Not a lot of money but no end of job-satisfaction!

[drop_messages]

This is an interesting talk. I never thought of it as "we choose more stuff over leisure then as some jobs were automated, admin jobs were created to fill the void left by automating manufacturing. So, not only can I not have a decent manufacturing job, but when I do apply for my next job, I have to navigate through an entire HR department so that some person with no clue how to do my job, can make a judgement if I am good enough for a job

[ilikesprayart]

This is probably the closest I've seen anybody get to practical philosophy in modern age, and it made my day, I know I'll sound like a boomer, but ty Graeber and ty yt algorithm and whoever posted this, it's insightful as FU-K.

[seahorsemafia]

Rest in Peace Mr. Graeber. We're forever grateful for your amazing mind and your success in getting your ideas out there.

[shinrarango]

what a kind, caring, funny and genuine man Mr Graeber was. a real loss

[RealRuralJapan]

AT LEAST 60% of a nurses time on shift is doing BS admin tasks. Most teachers would actually spend 30% teaching and the rest on admin and classroom management ie- making sure the kids are distracted enough so it doesn’t turn into anarchy.

How can anybody think young kids can concentrate for 8 hours 5 days a week? Nurses can’t spend a decent amount of time caring for patients when they are bogged down in paperwork. As a teacher myself if you can get kids to learn well 20% of time you are a superstar. Adults can’t even concentrate for an hour nowadays on anything without fiddling with their phones!

[supahacka]

The job of a bus driver might be relevant - still a lot of bus-driver headcounts are #bullshitjobs because they move around people that only need to move around because of the underlying system. The same holds true for nurses for example ... their job is relevant but most nurses treat systemic issues and illnesses. Something similar goes for a lot of relevant jobs like engineers working for say a mobile phone company: their job might be relevant but there are 30 other mobile phone companies selling a very similar product ... so you got a 90% redundancy in engineering jobs as well. #bullshitjobs are everywhere ... billions of them worldwirde.

[e.d.]

Thank you David Graeber. And Godspeed.

[victorm]

I remember working as a junior construction inspector. My eight hour day consisted of a) walking around for 15 minutes taking pictures b) Writing a 10-minute daily report. Ironically I felt miserable.

[JoshuaMcTackett]

I studied HR and decided it was BS before starting any jobs. Dodged the whole industry. Now I work in an industry that really does help people, but also causes big societal problems that I am think are worse than the alternative. I do it to pay the mortgage while I work towards what I really want to do

[rhionbutcher]

The sad thing is that the meaningful jobs tend to be the least paid - nurses, cleaners, bus driver etc. These people are literally turning the cogs of society

[ArtAristocracy]

"Michael Hudson actually made the argument that thirty years ago, rich people discovered that poor people actually feel they should pay their debts, which had never occurred to them, because they don't."

- David Graeber