Your Job Is Useless

Society is producing an endless variety of unnecessary and meaningless bullshit jobs. Work, consume, repeat. It might be time to end this system.

What’s your time worth to you? What importance do you place on your physical and mental health? And how many hours a week do you work? How much is that in a year? How much in a lifetime? Is it worth it? Do you feel like that’s a life well spent?

You probably don’t and you shouldn’t.

Instead of wasting your time in (mostly, and oftentimes utterly) meaningless jobs, you could use that incredible, almost frightening amount of hours, days, years for more fulfilling activities. Like spending time on the things you love, or with family and friends. More time in nature, more time with your pet — that labrador that’s waiting for you at home, wondering what the hell you’re doing all day while you… work. You could spend more time living. What a radical thought, huh?

The capitalist never-ending pursuit of more, always more, economic growth, GDP, wealth (not for you, working-class peasant, but for them), and the destruction of everything that cannot be commodified (such as animals, nature, or happiness and purpose) endangers our health, society, and the environment. Most life on this planet is already dead and that’s just the beginning. What survives is what’s useful to us.

And yet you keep working. Every day, you go there and sell yourself. You do it because there is no choice and no alternative. Well, how much longer? When does life begin?

Work under late-stage capitalism

When I speak of work or jobs in the context of this essay, I define those concepts in institutionalized terms. Work is what you engage in because you must (to not starve or become homeless), and not the activities you would do anyway, such as painting, gardening, taking care of animals, or writing books, which are all highly labor-intensive occupations. Work in the general sense of ‘physical and/or mental exertion to achieve some goal’ can be beautiful and meaningful, and most, if not all, people would engage in such, even if, and when, the very concept of money were to collapse. We are a busy species and always will be. It’s more a question of compulsion and the exact sort of activity one would engage in. People would likely still farm and produce and maintain, even clean and repair, everything that is deemed meaningful and important, but few if anyone would voluntarily open an Excel spreadsheet ever again or schedule an entirely pointless meeting.

There is a clear and radical difference between those two definitions of work — one which most people fail to grasp. For example: I can spend countless hours on writing my new book or working on other personal projects. It’s incredibly hard mental work, but I love it and I would write that thing even if there wouldn’t be any monetary payoff (and there is hardly any, trust me). But toss me into an office where I have to be productive for like three or four hours a day and can spend the rest of my time on Reddit or pretending to not be on Reddit, and I drown. I fucking drown! That’s not a jackpot, it’s not great, it’s exactly the constellation that’s led to my burnout and depression a couple of years ago. And I’m not the only one — there’s an unrecognized pandemic of despair that’s taken hold of our society and especially younger generations, who are not as gaslighted into thinking that this is the norm, the ideal world, as those before them.

Yet any sort of physical labor, which is far more essential than anything ever done in an office, is deemed ‘inferior’ by the system. And so is caring labor, which is still mostly done by women. Facts clearly reflected in capitalism’s built-in system of social credit, i.e. wages and money.

The complaints of someone living in a rich Western nation, I know. What do purpose or happiness matter in the face of survival? you might ask. So many people have it so much worse; they’d give it all to sit in front of a computer all day. Well, the very same systems that created and sustain our meaningless world have also made the miserable worlds of the Global South. Colonialism, slavery, imperialism, debt, neoliberalism, and so on and so forth. Take apart the one and you liberate the other. But I digress; that’s a different discussion altogether. One which I’ll come to soon enough.

Anyway, this difference between personal or collective work (for example, building a communal shed with your neighbors) and institutionalized work (anything you wouldn’t do without the threat of starvation) is crucial and worth keeping in mind.

So, back to institutionalized work and jobs: We work far more than is necessary and that is a fact. Consider all the technological advances we made in the last couple of hundred years; all the productivity gains, all the progress, and all the new products. The purpose of all this was to make our lives more comfortable and provide us with the freedom to spend more of our time as we see fit. It was supposed to liberate us from toil, wasn’t it? Instead, we are working more than ever, subsuming our entire lives under this curious concept of ‘earning our livelihoods;’ this abstract concept of a ‘career’ no one, absolutely no one but you, will ever care about or remember. It’s a cultural phenomenon, it’s late-stage capitalism, and it’s important to note one thing above all: all those gains in productivity, all the profits, all the growth had but one goal: further enriching those at the top. It never had anything to do with improving lives or making the general populace happier; else we wouldn’t live this dystopia of mass ecosystem collapse and unprecedented wealth gaps.

For many reasons, among them the fact that the working class cannot be left alone with their thoughts else they might revolt, we live in a highly work-oriented culture. In the West, the economic system does an excellent job of meeting our basic needs. As a result, we’re spending an astonishing amount of time doing jobs that we could easily do without. These are jobs that don’t add much or any value to ourselves or others, often not even to companies, but were created so that everyone could have, well, something to do, or otherwise, to improve the status of managers who love to have as many underlings as possible to increase their status. For a much more detailed analysis of all this, please refer to David Graeber’s phenomenal Bullshit Jobs.

Mindless office work, which makes most people unhappy, is the best example of all this. Trust me, I’ve been there. But as mentioned: there is often a lack of financial incentive to do anything else. The dull, useless, and often actively harmful office jobs are usually very lucrative. As is the most parasitic sector of all: finance.

Industry of bullshit

It’s a curious circumstance that capitalism, a system that supposedly promotes an efficient allocation of resources and discourages waste and idleness, is the single most wasteful socioeconomic system in human remembrance. Never before have we wasted such an astonishing amount of natural resources and human labor, never before have we extracted and exploited as much, and never before have we obliterated and poisoned such huge swaths of land to produce mostly… garbage.

The misrepresentation comes from two faulty equations: GDP growth = happiness/progress & consumption = happiness/progress. An experiment: try throwing away most of those things you think you ‘need’ and see what happens. The results might surprise you. I can only speak for myself, but I’ve never been happier and more content since I’ve deleted almost all of my social media profiles, canceled all my subscriptions, and sold my TV and most other electronic devices. Now, I spend more time talking to my girlfriend, reading, writing, and preparing for my upcoming two-month-thru-hike across the Austrian Alps. This all doesn’t mean that I escaped capitalism or anything of that sort, of course. That would be outrageous. There is no such thing as escaping an ideology that permeates everything and covers every single square meter of this planet.

Let us briefly consider the almost endless bureaucracy and accompanying stupidity that has taken hold of our society. Instead of becoming more efficient and using fewer resources over time, most administrative apparatuses keep on growing. Not just in the public sector, as one might think, but even more so in the private one. A myriad of positions with astounding job descriptions no one quite understands, not even those who occupy them. Most of those jobs are entirely unnecessary and exist solely to provide someone, anyone with a position of comfort. New ones are created constantly, increasing our society’s complexity and associated maintenance costs, and encouraging nepotism and corruption.

Another case are jobs that involve the production of short-lived products, such as fast fashion or those garbage plastic toys for children, which are likely bad for them. Do we need new types of clothing all the time? Do we need ‘trends’? One could argue that the problem of clothing was solved in ‘pre-historic’ times already. Clothes should keep you warm and comfortable, everything else just seems unnecessary. But capitalism tells us otherwise, of course. It tells us that we need those things. Your child needs that bullshit plastic toy that they’ll touch two times before it breaks. Without those products, we are less.

We are not.

There are, of course, many jobs that our society could not function without. Consider doctors, nurses, teachers (such as myself, might I humbly add), scientists, and the like. But also artists, musicians, writers, or entertainers. What would the world be without them? Also, many people find fulfillment in what they do, even if the job itself might not be strictly useful or necessary. And there is nothing bad about that, whatsoever. You enjoy making Excel spreadsheets and marketing presentations? — be my guest. If there is one thing we should value above all else, it’s freedom. And no, please, not the propagandized Orwellian version of the word, so commonly abused in our anti-democratic systems. No, I mean real freedom. The kind of freedom David Graeber and David Wengrow define in The Dawn of Everything, their new history of humankind.

The freedom to walk away, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to reimagine society. Please, work if you want, consume if you want, but do not force me to engage in all the bullshit and destruction, and for God’s sake, for once, consider the price.

And yeah, that’s unrealistic. Either everyone participates or no one participates. There is no free land anyone could flee to and build anew, and even if there were, everything is dead. There is no alternative and there is no escape. Big Brother is watching, always, and despite its idealistic claims, the system cannot abhor competition and must eliminate it all, until we are left with the monopoly on shit.

Might as well start a revolution, eh?

Let us end this essay with a list of ten concrete useless and/or actively harmful jobs that just came to my mind (this is not an exhaustive list, by far):

• Hedge fund managers

• Advertising executives

• Lobbyists

• Everything in recruiting and HR (that was me!)

• Stockbrokers

• Private prison guards

• Telemarketers and online-course gurus

• Payday lenders

• Investment bankers

• CEOs

• Military recruiters

• Real estate agents

• Debt collectors

• Everyone who works for the IWF, World Bank, or WTO in any capacity whatsoever

• Those guys whose job it is to discredit unions

• All politicians (that’s the anarchist in me speaking)

Okay, those were a few more than ten, but I might as well have gone forever. Write some more examples in the comments if you want!

Until next time.

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I’m author, writer, and activist Antonio Melonio, the creator of Beneath the Pavement. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack or over on Patreon. It’s the best way to support Beneath the Pavement and help me put out more and higher-quality content.

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Further reading

• Graeber, D. (2019). Bullshit Jobs.

• Graeber, D. & Wengrow D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything.

• Suzman, J. (2022). Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time.

• Anarchist Federation. Work and the free society. https://libcom.org/article/work-and-free-society-anarchist-federation

• The Atlantic. How Civilization Broke Our Brains. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/01/james-suzman-work/617266/

• The Guardian. Blue sky thinking: is it time to stop work taking over our lives? https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/oct/04/blue-sky-thinking-is-it-time-to-stop-work-taking-over-our-lives