Bullshit jobs: why we're not all working 4h days

I might go round befouling phones to bring on the Apocalypse.

Anyone remember Groenings’ ‘9 Types of Bosses’? I’ve worked for each of those, and the penultimate one I had, the Perfect Boss, ruined me for work forever, especially as he was replaced by a boss that managed to combine characteristics of all the other eight, and seemed to think that the company only existed so that she could buy a big house and pad her pension.

Some were bad bosses because they were useless, and some because they only worked effectively for their own benefit. The one good one got kicked out because he didn’t watch his back.

I’ve forgotten my point now, but I think it had something to do with the uselessness of modern management. I wonder if they would work better if they weren’t so direly over-valued?

I don’t think we have to recreate all of these systems. They’re already there, and they can be adapted. There would be huge changes necessary to do this right, but I don’t think recreating existing systems would be significant challenges.

So here’s one idea, let me know what you think: No more wages. You’re now paid in housing, food, services and stuff. In exchange for this, you work ten hours a week as an epidemiologist. You have a job now that we all decided was important, so you’ll keep doing it. You can work more if you really want to, but you won’t be given more.

Farming is sort of seasonal, so a bunch of other people will work a few straight weeks each year at 30 hours a week to plant and harvest. They like that because they get the rest of the year off. Who? Well, some of them are former health insurance middle managers. We don’t need health insurance any more, because health care is now provided by the same system. It’s part of your pay. So all of those folks, who had non-essential jobs are free to work on essential jobs, reducing the amount of work time for others in those fields. Some of them were advertising managers, some worked at fast food restaurants, some were telemarketers.

Some of those new farmers came from the auto manufacturing industry, which is largely robot driven. Automobiles are now produced to last for a long time rather than to go out of fashion in four years. Because we’d all rather be doing something else with our time than paying for new cars that break. Our cars are now more reliable and last longer and take less time to build.

Every time someone figures out how to do the essential things more easily or quickly or reliably, no one loses a job and has to find new busy work. Instead, we all save a little work time. We all share that productivity increase.

That’s my little utopian fantasy. There are a lot of challenges - agreeing on what’s considered “necessary” being chief among them. I think we both agree that farming would be important.

You say “The only way to strike up a fundamental shift would be to take personal responsibility for the production of stuff we each want to consume.” But I think the other way: The only way to strike up a fundamental shift would be to SHARE responsibility for the production of stuff we ALL want to consume.

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Of course it would be completely disruptive if you released them on the world all at once, and extremely dangerous. But in reality we’d have years or even decades of a development process when we knew they were coming, and were getting cheaper until more of use could use them etc. Even if they start out really pricey, eventually someone civic-minded will get there hands on them and end the rent-seeking forever.

What a replicator really means is that anything you can design or obtain a design for, you can have for free in as much abundance as you choose. The work of engineering, and possibly of obtaining raw materials, swtill exists. Science still exists. Art of all forms. Relationships. Law and crime will exist (even property crime, though less of it, and most likely violent crime m eventually be prosecuted more like property crime is today if people have frequent reliable backups. Medical research is still needed. We still need to invent space travel.

And even if someday we can discover the true laws of reality and find we can do absolutely anything we want, we still get to enjoy going out and actually doing it.

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Yeah, a few of us have been fighting for an end-around, with some limited success (because everybody’s too busy looking at the bad things that are being done with corporations to realize that one can be exploited from the inside to let us take our entire lives back!

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I think I have figured out what bugged me about the assertion in the original article - it’s that it is so blanket. It’s not the actual jobs or occupations that are useless. It’s that the people are used in unproductive or outright counterproductive ways.

Lawyers engage in zero-sum battles over rent seeking instead of preventing conflicts through well-structured contracts and negotiations, middle managers send each other piles of reports instead of hands-on coordinating the operation, clerks figure out ways to deny people their health insurance instead of diligently keeping records…

So it’s in fact rather about bullshit positions than bullshit jobs.

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It would be safe to say that a huge number of administrative tasks in our current society either provide no real value or else are simply propping up another part of an already inefficient system.

The reality is that capitalism itself requires a sort of manufactured scarcity, and wouldn’t function well without it, nor would it function well with very low unemployment.

You can even go as far as McDonalds. What value is there in flipping burgers? Why not have burger-making robots and have the only HUMANS who make them be the ones who love them and make the most amazing artistic burgers ever? Sure, one could say ‘automating all those things would create chaos’ and I’d argue ‘we HAVE chaos’. One could say ‘these jobs teach valuable skills’ and I’d respond with ‘not in a useful way’.

Then when you get to the vast majority of administrative tasks (NOT ALL! just most) you end up realizing that they only have value in this very specific context, as part of a complicated interconnected system that’s kind of an unguided evolutionary mess.

If we had more nurses, doctors, providers, producers, and just made sure to keep up a nice stockpile of nonperishables and places for people to be then sure, we couldn’t justify paying them as much as we do in our economic system, but we also would have plenty of food and health care and people with places to live. It’s so broken there’s no way to fix it incrementally without breaking it, but that doesn’t mean we should give it excuses.

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Shorter version of article: If you actually do anything with reading or writing for a living that isn’t 100% creative, your job is bullshit!

Snarky, anti-intellectual piece of crap article, sorry.

I’ve done work as part of a legal staff, and in grant administration, and believe me, the jobs were not “zero value bullshit.”

Another note: Those who bitch the loudest about how much they hate lawyers are the ones who cry the loudest when they actually need one.

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You are asking the question wrong, you should ask it like this: “What is better for our community, well paid people with stable jobs and good benefits or EVERYDAY LOW PRICES!!!”

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I’m not working a 4-hour day partly because I’m working on a project too large to tackle alone. That requires time spend in communications.

I’m also not working a 4-hour day because that’s absolutely the wrong direction. What I should be working is much longer creative blocks, and then taking corresponding time off. Significantly more efficient when working on complex systems where half the work is keeping all the context loaded in wetware. (Unfortunately, even though I’m on flextime, some of the systems I need become unavailable for service during some of my more productive hours. And on this project, I can’t argue that disrupting my efforts is really worse than disrupting someone else’s in another 8-hour shift. Grumph.)

Well, with this and Taibbi’s piece making reference to “degrees in bullshit,” at least kids nowadays can get a job in what they majored in.

Yeah, I like this.

I’m a big fan not of ‘4 hour days’ but ‘80 hour months’.

And let’s be fair, even that’s kind of a trick. If we have useful work to do, with people we love working with, then it’s not really work anymore. And a few intrinsically motivated people can blow a huge number of people being motivated in other ways out of the water, there’s just no competition. :smile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

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I am reminded of the dumb woman at work who said “how great would it be if they could make a robot to do my job.” “Once the price came down to 5x your salary the company would buy one and fire you. You’d be unemployed and looking for work with all the other people who had been replaced. Yeah, that would be great.”

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I almost forgot, this should be required reading:

In Praise of Idleness
By Bertrand Russell

I think this is the entire essay here: [1932] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

From this guy:

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I’m a government administrator, and I can say that 90% of my job is being a stopgap against human error. By “error,” I mean greed, laziness, wastefulness and stupidity. It’s definitely not fulfilling work to any extent, but as long as humans are in charge of and a part of the system, I don’t see how my job is either useless or likely to disappear any time soon. I frequently think throughout my day how much of my job would disappear if A.I. were in charge of many of the systems currently mismanaged by humans, though.

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Of course telephone sanitizers wouldn’t actually be on the B Ark, since they’re performing a necessary service.

Although I assume it’s payphones that were being sanitized? Do those even exist anymore?

I don’t mean to get all Death of a Salesman on you, but It is a shame so many good paying jobs are simply about the shuffling around of money, rather than creating anything, or empathy for fellow humans.

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No, no. . I’m pretty sure that’s just a regular moment of clarity.
:bulb:

We’ve got billions of people, and most of them aren’t doing anything that anybody else particularly wants done, are they? It almost seems like the moment we do manage to make anything good a whole bunch of others just want to blow it up. Heck, and that’s on top of discussions on how we treat each other.

Sometimes I marvel at us, we somehow are making incremental progress despite all this.

(note: I Have NO idea how I made that little light bulb happen. . . but . . .neat! I’m going to call it serendipity)

(the moment, not the light bulb)

I completely agree. I’ll get paid more, with better benefits, and have a job that’s easier on my body, all just shuffling money.