I Do Nothing at Work and No One Seems To Notice or Care
It's slowly destroying me.
I’m writing this essay from my workplace desk. There’s a colleague typing away on some email right next to me. Conveniently, no one can see my screen.
I feel like an asshole writing this, but what is true of me is true of millions of other white-collar workers. It’s true for most of my colleagues. I’m doing nothing. We are doing nothing.
Obviously, I have some work. Like perhaps two hours a day or so. When there are meetings, a little more. But most of the time I indeed do absolutely nothing. Nada. Zero. I’m almost invisible at my desk and nobody gives a shit. I’m still getting paid. Paid more than most blue-collar workers who do hard, back-breaking, essential labor.
My mother is a cleaning lady—has been for decades now, since the day we fled from Yugoslavia to Austria—and she’s destroying her body. I’ve told her that she can be prouder of her job than I of mine. But the fact that I got academic degrees appears to be the sole thing that matters in the perception of most people. By finishing college, so the story goes, I have earned my white-collar membership card and therefore am entitled to enjoy my meaninglessness. I’m still being perceived as a productive member of this shitshow we call society.
Of course, not all white-collar jobs are utterly meaningless and boring—just most. Some jobs do actually provide value. My girlfriend, for example, is a doctor. But even doctors spend a huge part of their days with bureaucratic nonsense and way too little time actually treating patients. It’s absurd.
So, do I feel bad about doing nothing?
Absolutely, I do. I feel bad about others having to struggle so hard while I earn money mostly sitting around and occasionally shooting the shit with my colleagues. I have many friends who work in the trades or the service industry and when I tell them how I spend my days at work—mostly reading stuff on Substack, or news, or browsing Reddit—they don’t believe me. All my white-collar friends, on the other hand, absolutely do believe me.
Morally—in regards to my employer—I don’t give a shit. And you shouldn’t either if you find yourself in the same position. This entire business I’m employed at is bullshit. Each and every one of us here—particularly the three business owners—are doing exclusively bullshit work. Curiously, other businesses buy our bullshit and then repackage it to sell that repackaged bullshit to other bullshit businesses. So the cycle of what we call the economy continues. It’s all a gigantic waste of resources and lives.
Interestingly, all this bullshit produces an incredible amount of money and wealth. It’s surreal and fascinating. Most is hoarded by the business owners, of course, while we employees receive some scraps. In truth, none of us should be rewarded anything for this shit. We’re not doing anything meaningful or beneficial for people. We don’t deserve this. Our jobs should not exist. (I work in marketing.)
Enjoy this essay in video format:
Bullshit jobs
But how can that be? Businesses are supposed to be efficient, right? That’s why we’re privatizing everything, right? Right?? The tech bros told us that all those Kafkaesque dystopias of meaninglessness and inefficiency only appear in government institutions.
At this point, I can only refer you to David Graeber’s famous book “Bullshit Jobs.” In it, he lays out the entire argument for why bullshit jobs exist, why they prosper, why they pay more, why private businesses are just as inefficient as the bureaucratic monsters that are government institutions, and so on, and so forth. It’s a phenomenal book everyone should read to understand the world better.
The meaninglessness has a price
What I want to focus on here, however, is the price those of us who do this meaningless shit day in, day out have to pay.
This is not to say that it’s worse than destroying your body to provide for your family—it’s just a different type of suffering. All this, of course, is written by a privileged white dude in the West. Always keep that in mind, because I can already sense the “other people on this world have it far worse” comments. They are correct but they belong to a different subject altogether.
Anyway, I have ADHD. Diagnosed and confirmed. I crave learning new things, being creative, experiencing competence, and being productive. I’m bored very, very easily. So how did I end up in a job like this? And why do I stay?
Several reasons:
I made many bad choices in life. The first significant one was going to university. I should be doing something with my hands. Actual work.
I’m not socially intelligent and dislike boring people. But, boring people are the majority and most people can sense when you don’t like them. Smalltalk is dreadful to me, and so is navigating the hyper-complex web of inter- and intra-reciprocal relationships. This makes career progression difficult—not that I necessarily want it. Add to that a healthy dose of mental problems.
If I do not find my work meaningful I will not do it. Or, if I must, I will do the bare minimum. I could work for days on my Substack here, but I can’t do useless, boring stuff that has the sole goal of making money for the business owners. Alienation. This applies to almost every job.
I stay because I have to pay rent and buy food. And because of the status, I admit it. My girlfriend is a doctor. She’s very supportive, but I have to do my part.
I’ve changed jobs far too often already. I did work in restaurants and I was a high school teacher for a while. That didn’t work out either. Now I’m almost out of options, and my CV is a complete mess.
Comfort.
Many more reasons such as bore-out. I already asked for more tasks and responsibilities but they ended up being even more boring than the ones I had. So I don’t ask anymore.
There are millions upon millions of people just like me—no matter if they’ve got ADHD or not—and we’re all pretending we do actual work. I guess it’s even true, in some ways, because all this does take a huge mental and psychological toll.
Humans were not made for office jobs. We were meant to provide value to our families and community members. Today, us white-collar workers are alienated to a degree unprecedented in history. No one understands what the other does and why. I can’t even explain properly what my fucking job is. It’s processes upon processes that are needed for other processes to function, all built on delusions, not bound in any material reality. Money out of thin air. It’s nothing, it’s shit. Every day I lose part of my self, my personality, my potential, my dreams, forever lost.
The consequences: extreme mental fatigue, depression, drug abuse, stupidity (I feel my brain shrinking with every day spent here—I’m not joking, man. I can actually feel it!), disillusionment, anxiety, alienation, anger, etc.
It is my conviction that useless work is one of the main issues in developed societies, which is why I write so often about it. All the gains in productivity and automation led to a situation where we had to invent increasingly ridiculous jobs to avoid having to change anything about the current socioeconomic system. People know this, people feel this, but rarely do they openly talk about it. So many problems root back to this. So many society-wide issues, particularly involving younger generations who see through the bullshit much more clearly than Boomers ever did.
What potential wasted. All that could have been. Who could those people have become? What would they have achieved, freed from all those constraints and shackles? We will never know, and that is our collective loss.
“No one wants to work anymore!” is a shit statement, uttered by people so indoctrinated and ignorant it’s laughable. The truth is: “No one wants to work for an abstract, unseeable, cruel construct.” We want our work to have meaning and significance. We want to see the results. We want to feel them; in a way, be them. Our heart and soul to the benefit of the community we readily give. But not to a monster.
So, it’s either fading away in the physical (blue-collar jobs) or the mental sense (white-collar jobs), both in the service of the great nothing. This is no choice, really. Good thing there are drugs.
The obvious elephant in the room here is, of course, AI. It’s interesting to me how many people (especially on my leftist spectrum) keep doubting that AI can replace them, when it so obviously can and will in a matter of a few years. It’s a “bubble” in the same way the internet was a bubble, and to categorically deny what harm (and—less likely—good) it can do is ridiculous. History doesn’t stop because people want it to.
The question of what we will do when even the already ridiculous bullshit jobs are gone and how we will organize society then is a topic for another day though. Such required deeper thoughts elude me here, in the office.
Hey wait, it’s almost 5 pm. Gotta go now. A good day’s work it was. And we will do it again tomorrow. See you!
Antonio
One way through which I still live my true self are my books. You can read them here. The easiest way to support me is by buying the books or by becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack:
Same here. I maybe actually work 15 hours a week. The rest of the time I work on my novel. If somebody needs something I jump on it, which makes me seem reliable. That only happens once every couple weeks. And I tell my boss I can take on more, but that never goes anywhere. I don’t feel guilty because our whole capitalist economy is bullshit and I used to work 50-60 hours a week in previous jobs. I make good money so I feel like I hit the jackpot to some degree and am keeping my head down until my novel gets published or retirement whichever comes first.
ADHD aside, this is exactly my situation. I have always been underemployed and bored in the sort of laptop jobs where I constantly have to explain what I actually do because the job title meana nothing. What saved me from insanity was Covid. Now I only have to go into the office one day a week and so save all my work for then, doing what I like at home the rest of the time. Yesterday there was an obligatory two hour all staff Teams meeting to slowly and laboriously explain a concept to us which could have been understood in a five minute email. So I turned off my camera and spent the time tending to my houseplants instead. Because I'd rather do that, I'll never 'advance' in my career, never have enough money to be comfortable - but I'm fine with that deal.
I wonder all the time if other people at work are doing as I do, feel as I feel, or if they're all actually as bought into the 'values' and 'objectives' and the bullshit as they seem. I wish there was some sort of lapel badge or secret hand signal to identify my people out there.