Where once hoopers and wainwrights and seamstresses saw themselves as heirs to a proud tradition, each with its secret knowledge, the new bureaucratically organized corporations and their “scientific management” sought as far as possible to literally turn workers into extensions of the machinery, their every move predetermined by someone else.

As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion have become the glue that holds society together. This is a disastrous state of affairs. I wish it to end.

“Caring labor” is generally seen as work directed at other people, and it always involves a certain labor of interpretation, empathy, and understanding.

If being forced to pretend to work is so infuriating because it makes clear the degree to which you are entirely under another person’s power, then bullshit jobs are, as noted above, entire jobs organized on that same principle.

It’s as if businesses were endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the resulting savings to acquire even more unnecessary workers in the offices upstairs.

Human life is a process by which we, as humans, create one another; even the most extreme individualists only become individuals through the care and support of their fellows; and “the economy” is ultimately just the way we provide ourselves with the necessary material provisions with which to do so.

Since the 1980s, all conversations on changes in the structure of employment have had to begin with an acknowledgment that the overall global trend, especially in rich countries, has been for a steady decline in farming and manufacturing, and a steady increase in something called “services.”

Still, a rising tide of bullshit soils all boats.

Work, Aristotle insisted, in no sense makes you a better person; in fact, it makes you a worse one, since it takes up so much time, thus making it difficult to fulfill one’s social and political obligations.