Is Your Job Total B.S.?
#GetToWorkYouLemming
You read that right. Is it? I mean, if your job and what it produces went away tomorrow, would the world be worse off?
That’s the thrust behind a book from a guy named David Graeber, and this article from Bloomberg about the book and his opinions on modern jobs caught my eye.
To be clear, I haven’t read the book and this is not a book review. But I find it an interesting take on modern jobs.
Most jobs in the past were about creating things and manufacturing. Now, at least in the Western world, Graeber laments that they’ve been largely replaced by “the ballooning of … the administrative sector up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources and public relations.”
In many ways I see his point. I mean think about it, when you dive into it, you can see how so many modern white collar workers could go home each day wondering what real value they added to the world.
Kind of like the running joke with Chandler on the sitcom “Friends”. Whenever Chandler’s job would come up, his sarcastic reply was always “gotta get those numbers in!!”. He put numbers into a spreadsheet for faceless mega-corp, like many do for real. I admit, it sounds miserable.
Of course there are the obvious B.S. jobs that simmer at the bottom end of society. There’s surely people who work for TMZ and who’s sole job is to follow celebrity “news”, or give summations of what idiot said what about what other idiot. The world would undoubtedly be a much better place without this B.S.
But Graeber adds things such as corporate law and academic administration into the mix of what he calls the B.S. administrative sector.
Capitalism survives and thrives because of entrepreneurship and companies, and companies need to be governed and abide by a body of law. Which of course means people have to practice that law and make rulings on it. Take that away and I think you risk the whole capitalist system.
But without getting into politics, from how Bloomberg described Mr. Graeber I’m guessing he might be okay with no more capitalism. That’s as far as I’ll take that line of thought. (*Warning-warning, Accidental FIRE is a no politics zone, inappropriate political comments will be scrutinized heavily and possibly deleted.)
But what about academic administration? Surely even an anarchist such as himself is not for the end of schools. Schools don’t function unless people work at them, often doing boring, seemingly useless jobs. Are some of those jobs total, unnecessary, B.S.?
Probably, for sure. But all of them? I highly doubt it. I mean, you kind of need a school Principal, and someone to track the darn budget.
Boring Things Sometimes Need To Be Done
#DidYouGetTheNumbersIn?
What Graeber seems to be missing is that once you create an entity, be it a school or a company, these entities don’t just magically operate without human intervention. And once humans intervene, they figure out what functions need to be done to run the entity.
Two or three logical steps after that, low and behold, there’s someone sitting in a cubicle entering numbers in a spreadsheet. Work happens.
The article states that – “polling agencies in Britain and the Netherlands tested his hypothesis. A third of respondents in both countries answered negatively to the question: “Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world?”
Ok, so does that mean the two-thirds of respondents think their job does add meaning to the world? If so, I think that’s higher than I would have thought and not too bad in my view.
This CBS article says that 51% of Americans are “disengaged” from their jobs. Being disengaged is not the same as hating it, and it’s also not the same as thinking it does or doesn’t add value to the world.
I’m sure there are scenarios where one agrees that their job contributes to society, such as being a doctor, but at the same time they’re disengaged. Like politics, all job happiness is local.
In the end, the Bloomberg writer adeptly points out that Graeber’s writing of a book about B.S. jobs is in itself a B.S. job, and he probably has quite a bit of self reflection to do.
Over To You
We in the financial independence and early retirement movement focus on jobs quite a lot. Much of that focus solely revolves around how to ditch them. But at the same time most admit that the end goal is to have the wonderful “job” of self employment, instead of the punch-a-clock cubicle drudgery.
And many, including yours truly, appreciated their job for the majority of their career, excelled at it, and realized that it did indeed add value to society. But things change, breakups happen.
So what about you financial warriors – what do you think about Mr. Graeber’s assertion? Does your job provide a meaningful contribution to society? Or is it just B.S?
Once in a while, I try to make the exercise of connecting my job to the impact it makes in the world: how my tasks impact companies, how these companies impact the world. It motivates me and keeps me engaged.
It’s funny that most people that think that their work is not improving the world, also seem to think that their companies would not survive without them.
It’s a good exercise to do every so often for sure!
Seems like a terrible idea to me. I think most jobs in society provide meaning. I do agree with the assertion that there are too many adminsitrators, particularly in the health care field where I work.
That said, I think most jobs provide value in at least two wasys. Hopefully the provide value to the life of the person doing the job, getting paid, and (hopefully) feeling productive. As a by product, hopefully it provides value to society, too.
I think the idea in this book may come from American Exceptionalism where we feel the need to be “special” and really “accomplish things” in life. There is nothing wrong with just having a job.
TPP
First off – EVERY Doc should realize that their job is doing good, unless they’re doing something bad like running an oxycodone racket. I really like your line of though about this attitude being linked to American Exceptionalism. Very interesting, I’ll have to ponder that one more. Thanks for the excellent comment!
Does mine provide a meaningful impact? Short answer is yes…
Do I enjoy my job? The real answer is no…
I’ve come to realize (at least for myself) that the best job is one that both gives you a sense of purpose, and a sense of excitement when you wake up to go to your job. I have been reflecting on this topic a lot recently because my fiancee and I are getting closer to the end of our original 5 year plan, and I have been beginning to think “What’s next?”
I have a great feeling that the next 5 year plan will focus on the both of us transitioning into jobs that give us the satisfactions I listed above, once $$$ has begun to not be the primary focus for us. Maybe this next 5 year plan will be the true beginning of our FIRE movement!
You are at that stage where it’s clear you’re ready to launch Sean 2.0. Enjoy the excitement, you’re second act is gonna be killer!
i’ve mostly worked in manufacturing so i know what you mean. somebody has to get the shit down the line and into a package and onto a truck to a customer. i don’t really like this mega-corp but it’s pretty satisfying to contribute to a real high quality product. i’ve seen the rise of administrative barnacles of compliance and consultant types being valued over process knowledge and innovation. i just accept it and go home and let off some steam.
gotta tell you freddy, most of my career has been in white-collar jobs. while i sometimes did produce a “product”, it was often a program or a presentation or a digital map product. sure, it often did help someone directly and often supported military folks – so i enjoyed that. but at the same time i always dreamt of producing a physical product – i.e. an object. to me there’s still a certain romanticism of actually making something. maybe i’ll take up woodworking one day….
I have to think that optimizing a website to get more people to click on a button is one of those things that the world would probably be fine without. But it pays well, and the company isn’t bad… So sure. Why not?
As long as you like it and the pay is good, then screw Mr. Graeber!!
It’s all in how you look at it though, we need to step back from it and see it from not the columnists point of view but the book author. Is it geared towards a generalized take on work or is geared towards the unleashed sprawling affect that capitalism can have on society. I do believe that modern society has created a capitalist system that has people merely as cogs in the wheel. Yes, sure there are indeed mundane jobs that are necessary to the bigger picture but how often do we look at that picture and do we critique it.
I’d have to read the book myself to get the author’s full take. For sure many jobs and therefore people can feel like cogs in the wheel, there’s just SO many repetitive and duplicate jobs. But it’s the ability to step back and try to see what function each job is doing in the grand scheme. Admittedly, that’s difficult.
I think we assign meaning to whatever we do in life, so you can find meaning in “BS” jobs if you want to and if you don’t, totally OK too. I think we all experience a certain threshold to said BS job. But I do think MOST people want to feel they are making a contribution on society, and sometimes it’s hard to see the forrest through the trees. Ya know?
Awesome comment – I agree that every can probably find meaning in their job as long as the job isn’t directly hurting people. It is truly a forest/trees thing for many jobs.
HA! So funny – writing of a book about B.S. jobs is in itself a B.S. job. We all have to pay the bills somehow. I think all jobs are producing something useful. Even the paparazzis are producing content for consumers. It’s all supply and demand. If nobody wants to read about early retirement, then I wouldn’t get any traffic at my site.
Very true Joe, capitalism operates by supply and demand. And CLEARLY there is demand for your blog!!
I do feel a provide a valuable service as a radiologist to the community. That being said I definitely know I can be replaceable and there is always talk of artificial intelligence getting to a point where radiologists may become extinct (I doubt it will get to that in my practice lifetime)
There are definitely aspects of my work that seem like BS (jumping through hoops to maintain my board certification and more and more government regulations). The overall impact this has in increasing quality of patient care is negligible (and I would venture to say detrimental in some instances). It is mainly these things that make dreams of retiring early grow more and more enticing.
All Doc provide meaningful value, that’s a given to me. I wonder how the people who run the board certification tests feel about their contributions?
Preach. My workplace is in the business of helping patients make better healthcare decisions, an admirable task that gives me the feeling of making a contribution, but explaining my role there requires a lot hand waving. However, when I packaged scissors in a factory, there was a clear process and product, and kids would have their scissors when school started in the fall. Win! Same with my jobs being a janitor and working on a hot dog cart. Not huge impact on society, but those messes were cleaned up and people weren’t hungry anymore. More satisfying in a lot of ways than my current position.
A scissor factory – wow! I guess no one was allowed to run.
Thanks, I’ll see myself out…. But great comment. As I said to Freddy, I’ve gravitated toward the concept of producing a physical object as being just way cooler than the white-collar digital work I’ve done most of my career.
I have been lucky to find a job that feels meaningful. I do lament however at the rapidly expanding group of expensive health care administrators in this climate of declining quality.
Doc do meaningful work for sure. I’d love to chat with you at FinCon about the declining quality issue. There are so many facets to that!
Define meaningful. Take my job, I can draw a direct line from my job to my companies bottom line. I have real impact on them and they produce things that can save lives. But I don’t design or produce what they sell. By boosting their income so they can do more r and d to invent new life savings technologies am I helping society in a meaningful way?
Or further removed take your celeb gossip guy. If he brings something that ultimately is relatable for someone in audience who turns around their life is it impactful? It’s a hard question to answer.
That’s awesome that you have that line to the impact in your job. And THANKS for challenging me on the celeb gossip thing. I take your point, very interesting comment. I guess the difference there would be that the celeb gossiper doesn’t come to work every day with the intent purpose of thinking their job will help someone’s life, but as you point out it’s not out of the realm of possibility that it could happen.
Administrative assistant reporting in to say yep, my job is 100% BS. Multiple people could do various parts of my job and be good to go, except that no one wants to do the boring stuff. So it’s my job instead. That’s not great for job satisfaction at all, but hey, someone’s willing to pay me for it. So I use it to pay the bills while I make plans to move to something that would actually provide even a shred of a contribution to society.
Your main job does sound ‘sucky’ as you’ve describe it, but your second job is very meaningful!
The funny thing about my job is that I’m an automotive sales trainer. I contribute to the wealth creation of sales people and finance managers in an auto dealership. I train them to close their customers and to overcome objections. Some reading this will think aim not contributing to society at all, but I disagree. I live what I do though I still plan on retiring in only a few years.
I think you’re contributing to society by helping a company (either the dealership itself or the car company) make money. That’s capitalism. And anyone who has VTSAX or other mutual funds surely owns part of that car company, so they benefit too.
I absolutely do not think that my job is B.S. and I do think that what I do for a living is meaningful. I just wish I had the time to do more of it without compromising other meaningful aspects of my life: family, friends, health, etc.
I guess through minimalism/essentialism, I try to minimize everything not meaningful in my life and cut out all of the B.S. and distractions.
Great way to look at it Doc – weed out the BS so you can do the meaningful parts more. The book “Essentialism” really goes into this in detail.
This is pretty interesting, especially in that by writing that he may have been a bit hypocritical haha.
My job definitely has value and is needed, though I do find that much if it is administration BS that I only have to do because of certain regulations and internal rules that are sometimes hard to justify.
If anything I’d agree more that I’m disengaged and would rather be doing something different with my time. TBD on that front since it’s hard to let go of a good paying job!
The disengagement aspect is a whole different beast. I’m with ya, I went part time at a job that contributes directly many people but that I was also disengaged from, for a multitude of reasons.
I was in chemical manufacturing and our products saved lives and made modern civilization possible. I was always proud of what we did and generally loved my job and worked way past financial independence because work was a favorite hobby. I think jobs tied to creation of a tangible product are inherently more rewarding though I enjoy consulting in retirement. However I’m still supporting manufacturing so I still feel like what I do matters to improve the world.
Awesome Steve! I agree, I think I would enjoy making a physical product more at this point in my life!
I’m an academic and there are useful admins and not so useful admins. We desperately need more good admins to help us with the important paperwork to keep things running (e.g., payroll, reimbursements, travel). Not so useful admins include people whose jobs it is to throw roadblocks in our way (e.g., compliance checkers, lawyers). But I guess they’re necessary in some cases to prevent very bad things from happening.
We have those roadblock people at my job too. We joke that they have a big “no” button on their desk (like the Staples easy button). We loathe them.
This was a good one. I think my job was bullsh^t but it was close. I created a file every workday and sent it to the state of Louisiana. The file was a list of people who had private insurance but were on the Medicaid. Louisiana then used this list to deny Medicaid payments on behalf of such “double-dippers.” So I guess I helped save the taxpayers of Louisiana some money. I don’t know. Thanks for making me think, AF.
Wow, there were THAT many people double-dipping that they had to employ people full time to rack it? Ugh. I don’t think that’s BS cuz you’re saving taxpayer dollars but I wouldn’t want to do the job because it would make me sad.
My jobs tend to fall into the boring things that need done due to regulations camp – so the world wouldn’t fall apart if they weren’t done, but there would be fines etc.
And more importantly, I doesn’t need to be me doing it – pretty sure I am replaceable.
“Replaceability” is a whole ‘nother matter. The vast majority of us are 🙂
Every job will have BS components to it. My job has plenty of them. I am an auditor. Sure the end result is valuable to society as we verify a company’s numbers, but 95% of the stuff that occurs before the end product can be considered BS. Every job has it and I can understand why so many people feel bored or that their job is meaningless.
In my opinion, Self-employment will also bring BS aspects into the fold. It just feels different because you are working for yourself and will be more excited to accomplish the task, thus, you are willing to tolerate the BS because it directly impacts you!
Thanks for the read!
Bert
Good point about self-employment, when the excitement factor or the thought that “at least it’s for me and only me” comes into play most folks are probably willing to turn a blind eye to some B.S.
Twice I worked on a “really, really important” project, only to see one get canceled and the other one go bankrupt. So in the end, both were a total waste. But we didn’t know. Also, one small company I worked for had some folks who had been there a while. One of my coworkers said they were “retired in place” == RIP. He even created some memorial file cabinets on their behalf when they FINALLY left the company and were replaced by no one. My guess is that most of the people commenting here are industrious people and not likely to be in this category.
That RIP term is kinda popular at my job to describe a portion of our workforce. We have a sizable demographic at my job who are late-career and who’s skills haven’t kept up with our industry or the technology. But we can’t fire them because it’s the government. We have been offering early buy-outs each year to incentive them to leave.
I would hope AF readers are industrious as a whole, if not I need to reexamine what I’m doing 😉
I believe it’s not “BS jobs” but “mandatory BS job requirements” that all too often the people enforcing them can’t even explain why it’s a requirement. People become disengaged and dissatisfied when they see a better or faster way to do things but are not allowed to move forward with those ideas. Changing the way we do work is long overdue! Enjoyed reading, thanks for sharing!
Very good point Misty – it’s the “that’s how we’ve always done things” problem. My agency has that BIG TIME. We’re allergic to process improvement.
Definitely my job has meaning and brings value to society – which is exactly why I feel more “stuck” in it sometimes than if it were “just a job,” if that makes sense.
Totally makes sense. To be honest I feel a little bit the same way since my job does provide a lot of meaning as well, just not as much being a manager as when I was actually doing the more meaningful work
This post definitely gives us something to think about. I’ve had jobs that had a huge impact, and others where I really questioned the value. We all want to have purpose in our jobs, and without that connection it can be difficult to go into work everyday.
It can for sure, thanks for stopping by!
The only place that jobs exist that are actually completely pointless is in the public sector. If someone is paying you to do something in the private sector, then you’re serving some sort of purpose somewhere. What possible motive would a private business have for paying people to do something “pointless”?
Now, it’s completely possible that the “point” of your job might not be something fulfilling for you. For instance, I know in some places businesses hire security not because their business really needs security, but because hiring said security decreases the price of their insurance. “Decreasing the cost of a business’ insurance” isn’t the most fulfilling “point” for those security guards, I’m sure. But I just think it’s important to dispel this notion that businesses are running around paying people to do pointless tasks for no reason… it’s just an absurd idea.
I don’t think companies intend to pay folks to do pointless things, but I’ve seen it before many times – almost always with very large companies. Bureaucracy happens, and when a company gets so large it’s hard for them to avoid it. A friend of mine works for a massive company called Harris and says they could unload tons of folks and functions and not miss a beat.
We are lucky to have an economy that can sustain so called BS jobs is all I will say.
To comment on the other seemingly insignificant job, it is on ourselves to help people see the significance of their job through our appreciation. A person working the overnight shift at a 24-hour CVS may think their job is meaningless. When I arrive in a new city at 2 am and realize I’ve forgotten my contact case and solution, I can assure you I am so appreciative that person is willing to work that shift. It impacts my whole ability to sleep well and work well the next few days. All it takes is saying, “Thanks for being here. You’re a lifesaver.”
This is a great take on things. Let’s consider ourselves lucky that we can make money trying to get people to click a button on a webpage or working at CVS at 3 in the morning. I’ve traveled to quite a few countries and saw many people who would love to have one of those jobs.
Also a great point about thanking them. As someone who worked in retail through my teenage years including stocking shelves at a grocery store overnight, I know how those jobs can suck. I try to be as friendly as possible with those folks to make their situation suck less. Thanks for the great comment!
I have thought about this extensively. The reason we are pursuing FIRE is to not become we are in a rush to escape our jobs, we truly enjoy them. I am a pediatric ER nurse and my husband is a firefighter/paramedic so each of us have been a part of saving a number of lives. We derive value from what we do in part because we believe our jobs are valuable to our community. Neither one of us could imagine ever working a 9-5 job but that certainly does not mean they are not valuable to society. Of course they are. Most jobs are intertwined into society and necessary for other jobs to occur. All parts of the machine. We will likely work in our professions for a while even after reaching FI because we want to but at a drastically reduced number of hours.
Your jobs are obviously more than meaningful and that’s a great reason to stay with them. But as I’ve found, reducing hours makes me better at work hen I’m there and overall healthier.