Bullshit jobs

Many people feel that their jobs could be accomplished in much less than 8 hours every day, but social and economic stigma forces us to spend needless time at work, which most would rather spend doing other things.

On top of that, some jobs that exist in current society can be considered outright malicious and exploitative, and as such society would benefit from these not being done.

The author presents various examples for both arguments supplemented by self reports from persons in different professions which corroborate that this is a shared feeling, and explore the different impacts such work arrangements have on people.

The explicit goal of the book is to highlight that our current economic system is very far from the rational ideal it sells itself as, and to point out the negative impacts this has on an individual and social level, to foster debate about the problem as a first step to addressing it.

While he does suggest Universal Basic Income could help solve some of these issues, he clearly states his goal is not to promote this or any other policy as a unique solution.

No sé cómo había llegado hasta aquí sin conocer esta teoría.

Como libro, en ocasiones es un tanto repetitivo, y se le puede criticar que toda su teoría y estudio no tiene mucho de científico porque es en base a un artículo y gente que le escribe... Y sabes qué, me da igual. La sensación de que este señor ha puesto por escrito algo que todos sabíamos de forma tácita.

La distinción este trabajo precario y trabajo de mierda también es importante

This is an interesting read. It was interesting to me as someone aspiring to not have a job and close to making that happen. The look at "why have jobs?" and "why treat them as so sacred?" really hit home.

I have long said that this reverence for having a job is rooted in Puritanism. Recently I am wondering if it is more deeply internalized capitalist frames. Graeber's viewpoint is that it is some of both, which I found interesting.

This book was a good companion piece to Chokepoint Capitalism

It took me some time to enter into the Bullshit jobs book. At first, it appears as some leftist light essay. The book started when David Graeber wrote a first opinion piece about the fact that a significant percentage of the population is doing work that is useless to society and they know it. This first essay made a lot of noise, and some media made some polls : in UK, more than 35% of people say that they are doing a useless bullshit job. Based on these numbers and lot of testimonies, David Graeber wrote this book to elaborate on this concept. The first chapters appears as quite light : some definitions, some testimonies, some categories of bullshit job. Overall, I wasn't convinced : radically leftist but also pretty light theoretically, not real analysis of what is happening, no stats, everything described in a pretty broad context. But I powered through it and found myself suddenly into pretty intense and deep writing about what is work, what is the value we put into work, how capitalism forced an evolution about these concepts, and all this starting from the question of how do we globally accepts that some works are totally useless. I am not used to read that kind of broad essays, but I really enjoyed this anthropological thinking about work and may read some more David Graebber.