Yet others escape into Walter Mitty–style reverie, a traditional coping mechanism for those condemned to spend their lives in sterile office environments. It’s probably no coincidence that nowadays many of these involve fantasies not of being a World War I flying ace, marrying a prince, or becoming a teenage heartthrob, but of having a better—just utterly, ridiculously better—job. Boris, for instance, works for “a major international institution” writing bullshit reports. Here is his (obviously somewhat self-mocking) report:
Boris: It is clearly a bullshit job because I have tried everything, self-help books, sneaky onanistic breaks, calling my mother and crying, realizing all my life choices have been pure shite—but I keep carrying on because I have a rent to pay.
What’s more, this situation, which causes me a mild to severe depression, also obliges me to postpone my true life’s calling: being J. Lo’s or Beyoncé’s Personal Assistant (either separately or concomitantly). I am a hardworking, results-driven person so I believe I could handle it well. I would be willing to work for one of the Kardashians, too, particularly Kim.
Still, most testimonies focus on creativity as a form of defiance—the dogged fortitude with which many attempt to pursue art, or music, or writing, or poetry, serves as an antidote to the pointlessness of their “real” paid work. Obviously, sample bias may be a factor here. The testimonies sent to me were largely drawn from my followers on Twitter, a population likely to be both more artsy and more politically engaged than the public at large. So I will not speculate on how common this is. But certain interesting patterns emerge.
For instance, workers hired for a certain skill, but who are then not really allowed to exercise it, rarely end up exercising that skill in a covert way when they discover they have free time on their hands. They almost invariably end up doing something else. We’ve already observed in chapter 3 how Ramadan, the engineer who dreamed of working at the cutting edge of science and technology, simply gave up when he discovered he was really expected to sit around doing paperwork all day. Rather than pursuing scientific projects on the sly, he threw himself into film, novels, and the history of Egyptian social movements. This is typical. Faye, who has been contemplating writing a pamphlet on “how to keep your soul intact in corporate environments,” falls back on music:
Faye: The frustrated musician in me has come up with ways of silently learning music while stuck at my corporate desk. I studied Indian classical music for a while and have internalized two of their rhythmic systems. Indian approaches are abstract, numerical, and nonwritten, and so open up ways for me to silently and invisibly practice in my head.
This means I can improvise music while stuck in the office, and even incorporate inputs from the world around me. You can groove off the ticking clock as dull meetings drag on or turn a phone number into a rhythmic poem. You can translate the syllables of corporate jargon into quasi hip-hop, or interpret the proportions of the filing cabinet as a polyrhythm. Doing this has been a shield to more aggregate boredom in the workplace than I can possibly explain. I even gave a talk to friends a few months ago about using rhythm games to alleviate workplace boredom, demonstrating how you can turn aspects of a dull meeting into a funk composition.
Lewis, who describes himself as a “fake investment banker” for a financial consulting firm in Boston, is working on a play. When he realized his role in the company was basically pointless, he began to lose motivation and with it the ability to concentrate on the one or two hours per day he actually did need to work. His supervisor, a stickler for time and “optics” who seemed remarkably indifferent to productivity, didn’t seem to mind what Lewis did so long as he didn’t leave the office before she did, but what he describes as his Midwestern American guilt complex drove him to come up with a means to carry on:
Lewis: Happily, I have an automatic standing desk and lots of mildly guilt-ridden BS-free time. So, over the last three months, I’ve used that time to write my first play. Strangely, the creative output began out of necessity rather than desire. I found that I’m way more productive and efficient once I’ve chewed on a scene or dialogue. In order to do the seventy minutes or so of actual work I need to get done in a given day, I’ll need another three to four hours of creative writing.
Faye and Lewis are unusual. The most common complaint among those trapped in offices doing nothing all day is just how difficult it is to repurpose the time for anything worthwhile. One might imagine that leaving millions of well-educated young men and women without any real work responsibilities but with access to the internet—which is, potentially, at least, a repository of almost all human knowledge and cultural achievement—might spark some sort of Renaissance. Nothing remotely along these lines has taken place. Instead, the situation has sparked an efflorescence of social media (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter): basically, of forms of electronic media that lend themselves to being produced and consumed while pretending to do something else. I am convinced this is the primary reason for the rise of social media, especially when one considers it in the light not just of the rise of bullshit jobs but also of the increasing bullshitization of real jobs. As we’ve seen, the specific conditions vary considerably from one bullshit job to another. Some workers are supervised relentlessly; others are expected to do some token task but are otherwise left more or less alone. Most are somewhere in between. Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one’s shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others—all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock ’n’ roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created under the midcentury welfare state. What we are witnessing is the rise of those forms of popular culture that office workers can produce and consume during the scattered, furtive shards of time they have at their disposal in workplaces where even when there’s nothing for them to do, they still can’t admit it openly.
Some testimonies similarly bemoaned the fact that traditional forms of artistic expression simply cannot be pursued under bullshit conditions. Padraigh, an Irish art school graduate shepherded into a pointless job at a foreign tech multinational owing to the complexities of the Irish welfare and tax system—which, he says, makes it almost impossible to be self-employed unless you’re already rich—has been forced to abandon his life’s calling:
Padraigh: But what kills me most is the fact that outside of work, I have been unable to paint, to follow my creative impulses to draw or scrape out ideas on canvas. I was quite focused on it whilst I was unemployed. But that didn’t pay. So now I have the money and not the time, energy, or headspace to be creative.17
He still manages to keep up a political life as an anarchist determined to destroy the economic system that does not allow him to pursue his life’s true calling. Meanwhile, a New York legal aide, James, is reduced to acts of subtle protest: “Spending all day in a sterile office environment, I’m too mentally numb to do anything but consume meaningless media,” he says. “And on occasion, yeah, I do feel quite depressed about it all: the isolation, the futility, the tiredness. My one small act of rebellion is wearing a black-and-red-star pin into work every day—they have no fucking idea!”
Finally, a British psychologist who, owing to Prime Minister Tony Blair’s higher education reforms of the 1990s, was laid off as a teacher and rehired as a “Project Assessor” to determine the effects of laying off teachers:
Harry: What surprises me is that it’s astonishingly difficult to repurpose time for which one is being paid. I’d have felt guilty if I’d dodged the BS work and, say, used the time to have a go at writing a novel. I felt obliged to do my best to carry out the activities I was contracted to carry out—even if I knew those activities were entirely futile.
David: You know, that’s one theme that keeps cropping up in the testimonies I’ve been reading: jobs that shoul
d be wonderful, since they pay you lots of money to do little or nothing and often don’t even insist you pretend to work, somehow drive people crazy anyway because they can’t figure out a way to channel the time and energy into anything else.
Harry: Well here’s one thing that bears out your assertion. These days, I work as Training Manager in a bus depot. Not all that glamorous, of course, but much more purposeful work. And I actually do more freelance work for pleasure now (short stories, articles) than I did in that completely unchallenging BS job.
David: Maybe we’re onto something here!
Harry: Yes, it’s really interesting.
So utilizing a bullshit job to pursue other projects isn’t easy. It requires ingenuity and determination to take time that’s been first flattened and homogenized—as all work time tends to be in what James calls “sterile office environment[s]”—then broken randomly into often unpredictably large fragments, and use that time for projects requiring thought and creativity. Those who manage to do so have already sunk a great deal of their—presumably finite—creative energies just into putting themselves in a position where they can use their time for anything more ambitious than cat memes. Not that there’s anything wrong with cat memes. I’ve seen some very good ones. But one would like to think our youth are meant for greater things.
About the only accounts I received from workers who felt they had largely overcome the mental destruction caused by bullshit jobs were from those that had found a way to keep those jobs down to one or two days a week. Needless to say, this is logistically extremely difficult, and usually impossible, for either financial or career reasons. Hannibal might serve as a success story in this regard. The reader may recall him as the man who writes bullshit reports for marketing agencies for as much as £12,000 a go and tries to limit this work if possible to one day a week. During the rest of the week, he pursues projects that he considers utterly worthwhile but knows that he couldn’t possibly self-finance:
Hannibal: One of the projects I’m working on is to create an image-processing algorithm to read low-cost diagnostic strips for TB patients in the developing world. Tuberculosis is one of the world’s biggest killers, causing one and a half million deaths a year with up to eight million infected at any one time. Diagnosis is still a significant problem, so if you can improve the treatment of just one percent of those eight million infected patients, then you can count lives improved in the tens of thousands per year. We’re already making a difference. This work is rewarding for all those involved. It’s technically challenging, involves problem solving and working collaboratively to achieve a greater goal that we all believe in. It is the antithesis of a bullshit job. However, it is proving virtually impossible to raise more than a very small amount of money to do this.
Even after spending much time and energy trying to convince various health executives there might be potentially lucrative spin-offs of one sort or another, he only raised enough to pay the expenses of the project itself, certainly not enough to provide any sort of compensation for those working on it, including himself. So Hannibal ends up writing meaningless word spaghetti for marketing forums in order to fund a project that will actually save lives.
Hannibal: If I get the opportunity, I ask people who work in PR or for global pharmaceutical companies what they think of this state of affairs, and their reactions are interesting. If I ask people more junior than me, they tend to think I am setting them some kind of test or trying to catch them out. Perhaps I’m just trying to get them to admit that what they do is worthless so I can persuade their boss to make them redundant? If I ask people more senior than me what they think about this, they will usually start by saying something along the lines of “Welcome to the real world,” like I’m some teenage dropout yet to “get it,” and accept that I can’t stay at home playing video games and smoking weed all day. I must admit that I spent quite a lot of time doing that as a teenager, but I’m no longer a teenager. In fact, I’m usually charging them a huge amount of money to write bullshit reports, so I often then detect that there’s a moment of reflection as they internally question who it is that really doesn’t “get it.”
Hannibal is at the top of his game: an accomplished researcher who can walk with confidence in the corridors of corporate power. He’s aware, too, that in the professional world, playing the part is everything: form is always valued over content, and from all indications, he can perform the role with consummate skill.18 Thus, he can see his bullshit activities as basically a kind of scam; something he’s putting over on the corporate world. He can even see himself as a kind of modern-day Robin Hood in a world where, as he put it, merely “doing something worthwhile is subversive.”
Hannibal’s is a best-case scenario. Others turn to political activism. This can be extremely beneficial to a worker’s emotional and physical health,19 and is usually easier to integrate with the fragmented nature of office time—this is true of digital activism, at least—than more conventional creative pursuits. Still, the psychological and emotional labor required to balance meaningful interests and bullshit work is often daunting. I’ve already mentioned Nouri’s work-related health problems, which began to improve markedly when he began working to unionize his workplace. It required definite mental discipline, yes, but not nearly so great as the mental discipline required to operate effectively in a high-pressure corporate environment where one knew one’s work had no effect at all:
Nouri: I used to have to go literally “insane” to get into work. Scrub away “me” and become the thing that can do this work. Afterward, I’d often need a day to recover; to remember who I am. (If I didn’t, I’d become an acerbic, nitpicky person to people in my private life, enraged over tiny things.)
So I’d have to find all sorts of mental technologies to make my work bearable. The most effective motivations were deadlines and rage. (For example, pretending I was slighted, so I’d “show them” with my excellent productivity.) But as a result, it was hard to organize the different parts of me, the ancient things which cohere into “me”; they quickly went off-kilter.
In contrast, I could stay up late for hours working on workplace organizer stuff, like teaching coworkers how to negotiate, programming, project management . . . I was most fully myself then. My imagination and logic worked in concert. Until I saw dreams and had to sleep.
Nouri, too, experienced working on something meaningful as entirely different. True, unlike Hannibal, he wasn’t working with a collaborative team. But even working toward a larger meaningful purpose, he felt, allowed him to reintegrate a shattered self. And eventually he did begin to find the seeds of a community, at least in the minimal form of a fellow isolated workplace organizer:
Nouri: I began to introduce myself to people by saying that programming is my day job, and workplace organizer is my real job. My workplace subsidizes my activism.
Recently I found someone very much like me online; we’ve become deep, deep friends, and as of last week, I find it so much easier to get into “the zone” for work. I think it’s because someone understands me. For all my other “close” friends, I’m an active listener, a sounding board—because they simply don’t understand the things I care about. Their eyes glaze over when I even mention my activism.
But even now, I still must empty my mind for work. I listen to Sigur Rós—“Varðeldur,” which my new friend sent me. Then I go into a sort of meditative trance. When the song’s done, my mind’s empty, and I can run fairly nimbly through work.
It’s always a good idea to end a bleak chapter on a note of redemption, and these stories demonstrate that it is possible to find purpose and meaning despite even the worst of bullshit jobs. It also makes clear that this takes a great deal of doing. The “art of skiving,” as it’s sometimes called in England, may be highly developed and even honored in certain working-class traditions, but proper shirking does seem to require something real to shirk. In a truly bullshit job, it’s often entirely unclear what one is really supposed to be
doing, what one can say about what one is and isn’t doing, who one can ask and what one can ask them, how much and within what parameters one is expected to pretend to be working, and what sorts of things it is or is not permissible to do instead. This is a miserable situation. The effects on health and self-esteem are often devastating. Creativity and imagination crumble.
Sadomasochistic power dynamics frequently emerge. (In fact, I would argue they will almost invariably emerge within top-down situations devoid of purpose unless explicit efforts are made to ensure that they do not—and sometimes even despite such efforts.) It is not for nothing that I’ve referred to the results as spiritual violence. This violence has affected our culture. Our sensibilities. Above all, it has affected our youth. Young people in Europe and North America in particular, but increasingly throughout the world, are being psychologically prepared for useless jobs, trained in how to pretend to work, and then by various means shepherded into jobs that almost nobody really believes serve any meaningful purpose.20
How this has come to happen, and how the current situation has become normalized or even encouraged, is a topic we will explore in chapter 5. It needs to be addressed, because this is a genuine scar across our collective soul.
Chapter 5
Why Are Bullshit Jobs Proliferating?
In the Scilly Islands . . . the natives of that group are popularly said to have eked out a precarious livelihood by taking in each other’s washing.