Bullshit Jobs Cheat Sheet
I like this website. It’s an angry single-page summary of the Bullshit Jobs economic scenario in which our global society is ensnared. Or, as its author puts it, “a crude attempt of helping people to understand humanity’s #1 issue.”
And the Number One issue it surely is. Yet so few people describe it as such or talk about it so directly. Our economy should work to push money around to the places it’s needed, but instead we’re hollowing out the Earth and enslaving billions of people (often literally) to generate vast batteries of pointless wealth for tiny coterie of bastards.
We are 30+ years past said peak labor efficiency but continue to maintain the obsolete work-for-income paradigm. With fatal implications and consequences.
Instead of finally decoupling income from labor and distributing the wealth generated by our actual economy, we maintained this narrative of “never-enough-jobs”. [This has led to] to billions of purely systemic and/or redundant, non-contributing bullshit jobs.
The site quotes Thomas Jefferson, our forever boyfriend David Graeber, Margrit Kennedy, and Alan Watts. (I’ve never read Alan Watts. I think I prefer E. F. Schumacher when it comes to hippie economics but Watts’ name comes up a lot and he’s a goodie for all I know. The cheat sheet describes him as an early advocate of socially-responsible automation and UBI).
Most powerfully of all, the site reminds us that all of this pointless toil, as well as ruining lives and promoting staggering injustice, is destroying the planet. “To save the world,” it quotes Graeber as saying, “we’re going to have to stop working.” Graeber was right.
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About Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham is the editor of New Escapologist. He also writes books and articles. Read more at wringham.co.uk