Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
But Graeber loses traction when he tries to explain why “it’s as if someone out there made up pointless jobs for the sake of making us all work,” or when he attempts to get a handle on how automation and technology have done the opposite of creating a lovely four-hour workday. His explanation hews to an argument that fits his politics: “Corporation... See more
Miranda Purves • You’re Not Just Imagining It. Your Job Is Absolute BS
The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore – in other words, like work in the worst sense of that word. This was a pitfall the critic Walter Kerr noticed back in 1962, in his book The Decline of Pleasure: ‘We are all of us compelled,’ Kerr wrote,
... See moreOliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.
There was a time, the historian Karl Polanyi reminds us, when the “problem” of unemployment for the laborer was not so much a problem of lack of work as lack of wages.22 Today this reality is obscured: lack of work—unemployment—constitutes an acute psychological crisis.
Micki McGee • Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life
We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off “well”—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness. Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps fo... See more