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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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There's a book out there called Bullshit Jobs.
The thesis is that most jobs are bullshit, that they add nothing to society except to entertain middle management who, in turn, entertain upper management. My last job was a bullshit job but the position was never eliminated because the funding was already secured and to eliminate it would be a political blow to the director.
Oddly enough, menial, low paying jobs are often the ones that are NOT bullshit jobs, but as you climb the education and career ladder, you are more and more likely to find yourself in a bullshit job, a sinecure for those who followed all the rules of the ruling class.
Someone else noted that if a minimum wage worker takes five minutes extra on their lunch break they are likely to get reprimanded, if not fired.
If the Vice-President leaves for lunch at 10 am and doesn't come back at all nobody raises an eyebrow.
Capitalism is more than an economic system, it's a system to manage existential anxiety, ie, a religion:
https://magnus919.com/2026/03/the-suppression-engine-what-zapffe-reveals-about-why-post-capitalism-is-hard/
People who are rich have access to a lot of distraction, so they don´t have to work.
I really like the Apple TV show "Your Friends and Neighbors."
One of the tropes of the show is that the protagonist can rob from people in his fancy neighborhood and very often no one notices that they've been burgled because they have so much stuff that missing a $500,000.00 watch doesn't even register with them.
Yes, it's purpose was likely achieved when it was purchased. Shopping is the hobby.
Another story, maybe illustrating how having too much money can backfire: Mark Zuckerberg decided to start collecting watches. He immediately just bought the most valued watches in existence. How much fun could that possibly have been?
I live in NYC. I've gone to charity thrift shops and picked up brand new items that people donated.
It used to be more fun before thrift stores started taking advantage of online sales; it definitely used to be worth a trip to the rich part of the state to hit the thrift stores.
Eh.
During World War II, secrecy required some jobs to be performed where workers didn't understand the context of what they were doing. For instance, a worker would wave a wand over a set of clothes. If the wand beeped, the clothes went into one pile. If the wand didn't beep, the clothes went into a different pile. The worker was checking to see if the clothes were irradiated, but they weren't able to know the context on why they were waiving wands over clothes.
I suspect that a lot of jobs are at that level of abstraction. There may be value in those jobs, but the affects of the job not getting done aren't immediate and it takes a higher level understanding of the work flow to understand why that job is necessary.
I love that your counter-example is also just casually a violation of workplace safety and employee consent.
oh yeah, being able to say "i directly supervised a team of 9" is different HRspeak from "i directly supervised a team of 10". I can't remember exactly what X and X+1 were back when i practiced, but one meant quarterly tax filings and one meant monthly. I'm sure there are other areas (i started in bookkeeping and payroll and when i got supervisees the very first thing i delegated was (all our easy clients') payroll. i fucking hate doing payroll) but when all you got is a hammer