> Bullshit jobs really aren’t that bad. I had an email job for four years. I sucked at it and my superiors didn’t like me so eventually I was fired. But objecti

> Bullshit jobs really aren’t that bad. I had an email job for four years. I sucked at it and my superiors didn’t like me so eventually I was fired. But objectively, you couldn’t call it a bad gig. This was especially true because I was in a union, which almost nobody with an email job has, but still - strip away the collectively-bargained contract and its benefits and I still lived a relaxed, low-stakes day-to-day existence. Most people in email jobs have a browser full of tabs that have nothing to do with work. They watch YouTube endlessly. They listen to podcasts and they drink their coffee. They shop on Amazon. They don’t do a single thing that’s physically taxing, risk no injury in their work other than carpal tunnel, and are often minimally supervised. And all of that could be had in a cubicle; now a lot of people with these jobs work from home, expanding their opportunities to set their own schedules and to goof off relentlessly. Of course there are exceptions, but if you’ve got a nice low-level white-collar job doing some sort of administrivia for, like, a car insurance company or a commercial bank or on the bureaucratic side of an ad agency or in myriad other places, you’re enjoying an existence that most human beings can only look at and covet. This really says something important for me. I was really pleased when an unashamed left-wing anarchist Graeber critique was a mainstream hit, but I didn't understand why it was a hit. Eventually I twigged it; a left-wing critique on productivity and the priorities of society had been perverted by middle-class liberal arts and administrative strivers into a commentary about why their current jobs sucked and why they couldn't have their dream jobs. A condemnation of structural rot into a complaint about the obstacles to fulfilling the middle-class dream of being paid to express yourself, and to have fun. A commentary on useless jobs had been changed into a commentary on pointless jobs.