Clearly you have never been in this situation. I once held a job where I had exactly one hour of work to do each day and nothing else to do. If I put my mind to

Clearly you have never been in this situation. I once held a job where I had exactly one hour of work to do each day and nothing else to do. If I put my mind to it, I could finish a weeks’s worth of work in half a day. The rest was wasted time and waiting around. Plus, someone else controlled my time. I had to sit in my chair at my desk for eight hours, take a one hour lunch break in the middle of the city, never leaving the office otherwise. You have no control over the most important parts for the largest part of your waking day. You are asked to do meaningless busywork that wouldn’t need to be done at all if automated even in a half-assed way. There is zero reason for you to sit in the office all day, wasting hours upon hours except for your boss mandating it. 100% of the non-automated remaining parts of your job could be done remotely, by telephone and email. This crushes you eventually, depending on personality type sooner or later, especially when your mind is accustomed to tackling and solving problems. It grinds away at your sense of self, drains you of energy, it quite literally drives you slowly insane. You try not to think about it but you do. You try to read, surf the internet, stay in touch with others and do all the things you can do somewhat stealthy. Because when you eventually ask for more stuff to do, you get assigned to sorting contents of binders. Because, according to my boss at the time, “there’s always something to do”. Busywork. Got it. It makes you depressed, severely so. You realize that nothing you do matters at all and there’s no point to your job anyway. Every trivial task eventually becomes an immense burden that sometimes takes you days to complete, despite being a 30-minute task. In a way this means you have come full circle. You feel your mind rotting away. You feel that you have reached the end of your rope and this is what your life will be from now on. But if you raise your voice and speak up, all it earns you is the scorn of the boss and other (really bad) colleagues that want things to stay as they are. Some companies may well have an expectation of owning your time regardless of outcome and some people may well be cynical and empty enough to live with this situation, I for one would rather be dead. It took me four years and a nervous breakdown to finally throw the towel, with no regard for what happened to me afterwards. Yeah, quite a walk in the park those jobs are. Relaxing. Quite ideal.