The Rise of B.S. Jobs
“It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working.”
So writes David Graeber in his exploration of how technology has been used to make us work more instead of helping us achieve the utopian dream of John Maynard Keynes’s 15-hour work week. Graeber argues:
Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
So what are these so-called “bullshit jobs?” Graeber says these are mostly jobs in the administrative sector, as well as the service jobs that “only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.”
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