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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An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 74. Existenzminimum
I just got back from a happy few days in Paris. I met Friend Landis who was over from Chicago for a book tour, swanned around at the AsiaNow art fair, listened to live jazz (and got hit on) at Harry’s Bar, and visited the Louvre for the first time.
What I mean to talk about today however is the hostel. I stayed in a proper hostel dorm for the first time in perhaps 20 years. I loved it and I’m going to do it again in Holland and Luxembourg next month.
Seemingly, Paris hostels have privacy curtains on their bunks, which really changes everything. The bad thing about hostels as everyone either knows or can imagine is the feeling of overexposure; that strangers might be looming over you as you sleep. But the simple addition of a curtain makes a hostel every bit as good as a Japanese capsule hotel. You can still hear people moving around in the room at night, but I found it oddly comforting; you can tell from their soft movements, careful not to cause a fuss, that they’re just sleepy travellers the same as you.
For about £30 (instead of the £100+ you’d need for a hotel room in a city like Paris) you get the privacy of your bunk (in which there’s a reading lamp, a socket for charging your phone, and some little shelves for anything else you like to have nearby in the night), a locker in which you can stash your bag for the duration of your stay (actually a cube-shaped chest with a padded lid, good for sitting on to remove or put on your shoes), and access to the communal kitchens and toilet/showers.
Sorry to rattle on excitedly, but I am excited. I really enjoyed all this.
The toilet/shower rooms are much like the ones you’d find at a modern gym: by which I mean private shower cubicles, not the horror of shared showers like the ones in which footballers practice their heterosexuality. The kitchens, I was surprised to see, were spotlessly clean but well used: as well as being a casual social space for strangers to chat, I saw travellers preparing decent meals in there like fresh soup and spaghetti. (I just used it to fill my water bottle before vanishing off into Paris for pastries and cocktails).
There was also a cafe-bar in this particular hostel. I assumed it would be a basic affair for weary travellers so I dropped in on my first night with a plan to read my book over a quiet pint. But there was a jumping party going on! Glamorous drag queens were spinning records while the well-dressed Parisian youth gyrated and laughed and mingled. The place felt like the colonial bar in Lawrence of Arabia where he demands lemonade after crossing the desert; it was decorated with strings of muted lights and lazy palm fronds.
I was wearing my smelly Montreal Bagel t-shirt and some old jeans, so I was hardly presentable for it. I thirsted for that beer though, so I courageously ensconced myself at the bar and chatted with a bar worker who wasn’t bothered about my grotesque appearance and texted with my partner at home who assured me I was beautiful. I felt too self-conscious to read though, so I quaffed my refreshing blanche and made a dash for my bunk.
Sleeping with that curtain closed was a bit like being on an overnight ferry or a sleeper train without, obviously, the sensation of motion. For three nights in my coffin-like quarters, I slept like a brute.
The hostel struck me as quite the model for living. It was my socialist motto of “private sufficiency, public luxury” taken to the extreme and placed under one roof. I was happy to be far from material responsibilities and domestic maintenance. I think I could have worked on my books there if I’d wanted to.
If my partner ever throws me out, I’ll look into a long-stay hostel arrangement. The existenzminimum of a bunk, a locker, and access to those shared cooking and showering facilities was extremely liberating. And when you’re not sleeping or padding around in the communal spaces, you’re out there in your new town, living.
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Be frugal, be free. New Escapologist Issue 14 is available in print and digital formats now.
A Treat for Future You
I used to listen to a comedy podcast called The Parapod. It was about the paranormal and presented by two comedians: one a believer in any old rubbish and the other a rational sceptic. The believer, Barry Dodds, was generally ridiculed as a gullible thicko even aside from his belief in El Chupacabra.
It was always very funny and Barry was a good sport. But, baseless belief in vampires aside, I was often left thinking “but, Barry’s got a point there. It was just a bit strangely articulated.”
On one memorable occasion, he described making tea before bedtime and putting it in a Thermos for the morning. He described it as “a treat for future me.”
This was good ammunition for his opponent who ridiculed him for thinking in those terms. Most people would, for example, fold their laundry without thinking of it as “a treat for future me.”
But getting things done sort of.. is a treat for future you. Isn’t it?
Getting things done today improves your life (or the lives of others) tomorrow.
Celebrated wise man and New Escapologist columnist David Cain picks up the subject at his blog today. He does not use the phrase “a treat for future me” because he’s more articulate than poor Barry. Instead, he writes:
Imagine you’re having a hard day, and you get home to find that someone has left dinner for you. It’s exactly what you wanted. Lasagne! Or maybe green curry, or tacos. […] Of course, this thoughtful benefactor could be you, just earlier.
He goes on to give more significant examples than lasagne or a Thermos of tea. Perhaps you past self wrote a book or got a degree or invested some money. They did something difficult for you. If you’ll pardon my weak pun, it’s a present for the future.
Anyway, David also says:
This sort of inheritance represents real wealth — consisting of personal freedom, money, resources, skills, relationships, and overall well-being — and you can pass it on to yourself.
The whole post is interesting and worth reading. He explains the “catch” of having to do things now in order to benefit from them later. And how to actually do the difficult thing of doing. But what interests me as an Escapologist is his definition of freedom.
He’s right. It’s real freedom. The only reason my days aren’t a living Hell today is that I put in the legwork yesterday and the day before and ten years ago. Rarely does a day at Escape Towers see an act of manic brinkmanship: I take everything in my stride and, largely, do what I want went I want to do it. I am the inheritor of many, many treats for future me.
Compare and contrast this idea of freedom with what Joan Didion once observed about the American idea of freedom (in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968) via their then-idolisation of multimillionaire Howard Hughes:
That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves […] that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
I think it’s possible in 2023 to get those wires crossed. I think people today idolise the Kardashians (who whoever it is now) because, on some level, they’re hungry for Didion’s “absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy” but getting caught up on the material wealth they see on the screen or how their bodies look compared to theirs. I could be wrong. But it’s what I suspect.
So be like David Cain and Barry Dodds: send presents to the future — treats to future you — in order to maximise your freedom, not the material things or the power that money can buy. Those are dubious treats for future you.
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For further meditations on freedom versus The Trap, subscribe today to New Escapologist magazine.
Catfood Omelettes
This is from the introduction to a 1998 comic called Queen of the Black Black by Megan Kelso:
I plan to be drawing comics when I am an old, old, woman, barring early death or a freak accident. Maybe I’ll own a skating rink or maybe I’ll be living on catfood omelettes in a damp basement apartment, but I WILL be making comics.
Such gorgeous integrity. I really admire the the certainty, the commitment, the ability to look sacrifice in the whites of the eyes. An aspiring or struggling creative person could take strength from this today.
Kelso, needless to say, is still making comics.
When I searched around the quote this morning I found it in full, quoted back to her, in a 2011 interview. The interviewer asks if she still feels that way “now”. Kelso:
My young self made a vow that my older self feels obliged to keep. I sometimes wonder if that very public vow I made is part of what has kept me at it. However, I love making comics as much if not more than I did back then, so I think I would’ve kept at it even if I hadn’t proclaimed it from the hilltops the way I did. I fear I’m going to be more on the catfood side of things than the skating rink side, but yes, I still believe it.
You can take it from me as well. There may be twists and turns in the road, times you feel foolish or low, but commit (and accept the catfood omelette contingency) and you’ll succeed. You might not become mega-famous or super-rich (dubious prizes anyway) but you’ll still be doing your thing instead of something you despise. And that’s Escapology.
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“You Got to Do What You Got to Do, Right?”
I’ve been listening to a fair amount of This American Life. I guess I just dig vocal fry.
Sometimes, the show tells an escape story but I usually forget to mention it here because I listen in bed and forget all about it by sunrise. Miraculously I have remembered one.
“Who is Ryan Long?” tells the story of a game show contestant called, well, Ryan Long. He did extremely well on TV’s Jeopardy!, winning almost $300,000.
Ryan was introduced to the telly-viewing public as as a rideshare driver but he’d actually been something of a factotum. Throughout his thirties, he’d worked in airport security worker, as a package handler, an office clerk, a piano mover, a warehouse worker, a “water ice guy”, a cashier, a bouncer, and a street sweeper. He says, “You got to do what you got to do, right?”
Ryan is biracial and physically large, which apparently isn’t the typical profile of a Jeopardy! contestant. His confounding of prejudice is the thrust of this programme about him, but the presenter goes on to say:
I also got this accidental reflection on American capitalism, and how so many of us are served so poorly by the way life is currently set up as all work and no time. Jeopardy provided a very specific Ryan-shaped escape hatch. It gave him the space to stare into that crack between realities, and fish out all the elements of what his life could be.
We’re all too often told that work is liberating, that it’s what we have to do to “get ahead” but the rewards are often so low (and increasingly so) that all we get in exchange for our graft is our home and healthcare if we’re lucky. We do not generally find the time for personal improvement or to give anything worthwhile to our communities beyond the demands of capitalism.
This “accidental reflection” came about when interviewer asked Ryan if the prize money had made him happy.
It allowed me the opportunity to have time to […] examine myself, I guess. Just everything before, looking where I come from and what makes me tick. It’s a valuable thing. I think everybody needs to do it, but not everybody has time to do it. […] That’s the most valuable thing that I got out of this.
It’s an example of how a life-changing sum of money (though still not the millions of dollars some people imagine they’d need to retire) led to the buying of time to do the personal work, to take stock and come to terms with one’s emotions, to defrag, and see what’s going on with yourself.
No doubt Ryan will go back to work and maybe he still does a few rideshares even now, but the time he bought with the prize money allowed him to be himself for a while.
I wish more people had the chance to engage in this kind of reflection, for mental good health and for actively figuring out what to do next. We’re too often shoved around with no time–the naturally-occurring time of our lives–to spare. We’re told that Universal Basic Income (the provision of material basics for everyone, so that work becomes a consensual choice instead of wage slavery) would lead to personally unproductive or “immoral” slacking but Ryan, this clever everyman, joins a growing body of people who can show otherwise.
Tired of the everyday grind? Try The Good Life for Wage Slaves or I’m Out, both of which are available now in paperback.
Letter to the Editor: Grind Culture
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Robert,
With regards to your take on LinkedIn and Jaron Lanier. I’m a big fan of Lanier and I read his books but I think he’s wrong on LinkedIn. Sure it can help people find work, but it’s designed with lots of psychological tricks to make you feed it.
Features like “x people have looked at your profile” try to make you pay for LinkedIn Plus or whatever it’s called. Trying to get you to “complete your profile” by nagging. And have you ever tried to find how to quit it?
It also encourages shallow correspondence and lazy people connecting and spamming you with whatever service they think you should buy.
All a bit “grind culture,” shallow and non-human. It’s the opposite of the old Web and what blogs seemed to have, and why I hope they’ll have a resurgence.
Reader A.
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You’re right of course, A. Your “grind culture” is inherent to most social media (by which I mean moaning about overload or showing off about dubious white-collar successes) but LinkedIn is solely towards work. I suppose I saw it as a way of connecting employers to CVs, which is marginally useful, but if users are encouraged to fart out a perpetually-scrolling litany of humblebrags, it can “get in bin” as they say.
Death to all social media! So far as online life goes, it’s email, blogs and forums for me.
The current chatter about Twitter suggests that people really will go back to some of those methods, though I recently heard a young pop star describe email as “so toxic” and she does all her talking though Instagram and WhatsApp. I suppose she means that email can all too easily pile up and become unmanageable, but aren’t social media posts and messages practically infinite? At least with email you can unsubscribe from things you don’t like and just change your address if it comes to the worst. You’re less likely to be trolled by email than on social media and your email client probably isn’t Facebook (or Meta or whatever they’re calling themselves now) like those two platforms are, which is surely as toxic as it comes if we’re talking social responsibility. I don’t really know what she meant by “toxic” but I hope she’s an outlier and that the cool kids get on board with alternatives to the mega-platforms.
Remembering. And Asking “What Next?”
Imagine if Capitalism was just switched off one day. If the government just decided to admit that money isn’t real and the whole thing was being called off. Debts written off, no more payday, Absolute Jubilee. Landlords wouldn’t need to suck the lifeblood out of tenants any more because their own upholstered lives wouldn’t be dependent on wealth. Supermarkets wouldn’t charge anymore and could just become food distribution centres, under the benign new management of community organisers. We could all escape our bullshit jobs and do nice things (valuable cultural things, important altruistic things) for no pay instead.
Obviously this will never ever happen and, if it did, all sorts of forgotten and ignored problems would scuttle out of the cracks. It was an idle fantasy arrived at today while thinking about… Twitter again. Sorry.
I don’t think Twitter is really going to disappear, though lots of people seem to. And if it does go, what will people do when they find that they’re finally free?
Freedom from social media as we know it could really be the consequence, I think. Twitter is probably the last of the true mega-platforms, isn’t it? TikTok has more users but it seems less infrastructurally important because, unlike Twitter, it’s just a bit of fun. Nobody’s pestering me to join TikTok and nobody thinks I’m eccentric or a Luddite for not being on it. Shops don’t tend to have TikTok emblems in their windows like they do for Facebook and Twitter. Nobody says “oh, you have to be on TikTok!” It doesn’t seem to have the “necessary evil” strongarm nudge power of Facebook and Twitter. With ease, you can ignore it.
It seems that, were Twitter to shut down or vanish behind a paywall, you could get away with having absolutely no social media in your life at all. Nobody would expect it.
So what will happen when the age of “necessary evil” social media, of Big Social to coin an obnoxious phrase, is over? To start with, journalists might have to re-learn some old tricks; to actually ask penetrating questions instead of scraping Twitter for secondhand hot takes.
Many will continue in their “pivot to video” by embracing TikTok and whatever comes (or has come, probably) after it. But it will be diminishing returns as these platforms become sillier and less essential.
Others will return to a period of Internet time before the algorithms took over: platforms called dreamwidth and cohost are being mentioned and they look just like Livejournal. That would be nice. I still believe that the Internet is not the problem, only that the mega-platforms are damaging free will.
And maybe we can regress en masse even further to pre-Internet ideas. I for one am hoping to set up a small publishing press (real paper!) with a friend next year. New Escapologist might be back in paper too. Move over bits, atoms are back!
The death of Twitter obviously wouldn’t be as big as the death of money but there would be a similar sense of walking out into freedom again (a freedom that was there all along, really), of squinting in the sunlight and feeling its warmth on your skin (but was it always so warm?), of remembering, and asking “what next?”
Get yer atoms here, missus: treat yourself to a copy of The Good Life for Wage Slaves.
Hic!
Instant coffee just isn’t a draw anymore. The latest development in Gilded Cage technology is nothing less than the open bar. Boooooze!
Reader S draws our attention to a Wall Street Journal item about the lengths some firms are going to to get employees back in the harness:
some [businesses] are pulling out the stops–literally, on kegs, casks and wine bottles–in an attempt to make workplaces seem cool. Sure, executives could simply order people to return to their cubicles, and some have, but many want their workers to come back and like it.
It’s never enough to have a workforce under the thumb, is it? Wage slaves have to enjoy being stuck in a room with their better-paid overlords, puzzling over spreadsheets or just pretending to be busy while the sun shines and their kids grow up.
That means giving people what they want, or at least what bosses think they want. People like to wear comfy hoodies, right? OK! They miss their dogs when they go to work, don’t they? The canines can come!
A happy worker is a productive worker! It’s just interesting that the key to worker happiness is so rarely “higher wages” or “fewer hours” or “work from anywhere.” It’s always crap like this.
[Workers] love an afternoon cocktail, yes? Check out our new office bar!
So offices are filling with booze now. Well, why not? It’s not as if these places were conducive to concentration anyway.
And who better to emulate than our leaders in Downing Street? If they can run a whole country on the slosh, we can probably handle an inconsequential marketing concern.
You might think that, as a noted booze hound, I’d welcome the news of free drinks for office workers. But on the actual clock? It’s a recipe for disaster.
A social lubricant, booze encourages camaraderie and honesty. And being honest at work, let’s face it, will get you sacked.
This is why the offer of booze at work will neither work nor last. As soon as one leery wage slave, tongue loosened by tequila slammers, starts speaking truth to power, they’ll take it away. After all, the drunks in HR won’t do anything to help.
Alas, by that time, you’ll all be back where the bosses want you instead of being paid to wear slippers. Don’t be fooled. I’m here to help you spot a classic trap.
Booze can blur the line between professional and personal relationships in ways that make certain workers—often less-powerful ones—feel uncomfortable.
Exactly. Look, if workers have shown they can be productive at home and if, as figures suggest, they prefer to work remotely, why do we need such desperate attempts to coax them back to the office? Why are our bosses so needy about getting us back into city centres and onto industrial estates in the age of the total digital connectivity? Why does it have to be the worst of both worlds?
It’s because they (not we) pin their identities, often their whole lives, on the idea of being a manager of people. Which is pretty darn sad when you think about it.
Ultimately, these people like sitting in rush hour traffic because it makes them feel important. They like to chair meetings while idly clicking at a biro. They like to stride around the corridors like they’re in The West Wing.
They like feeling big while others in proximity feel small.
Feeling small and drunk probably isn’t a good combination, so I’d encourage anyone tempted by an office bar to stay at home. Drink at night instead, with company — not a company (aha!) — like nature intended.
The Laziness Lie
Further to our recent post about the work of Dr. Price, their essay, The Racist, Exploitative History of ‘Laziness’ is a cracker.
“The hatred of laziness,” they write, “is deeply embedded in the history of the United States” and consequently the rest of the world:
The value of hard work and the evils of sloth are baked into our national myths and our shared value system. Thanks to the legacies of imperialism and slavery, as well as the ongoing influence that the United States exerts on the rest of the world both in media and in military force, the Laziness Lie has managed to spread its tendrils into almost every country and culture on the planet.
Strong, most excellent stuff.
They go into the etymology of the word, which conflates weakness with evil, and then into the use of “laziness” to justify slavery in America and oppression during the Industrial Revolution.
It’s the kind of thing I touched on in my “How the West Was Won (by Work)” chapter in Escape Everything! and again in The Good Life for Wage Slaves but didn’t quite have the expertise or guts to go into very deeply.
Colonial America relied on the labor of enslaved people and indentured servants. It was very important to the colonies’ wealthy and enslaving class that they find a way to motivate enslaved people to work hard, despite the fact that enslaved people had absolutely nothing to gain from it. They also needed to find ways to ideologically justify the existence of slavery because many people of the period recognized (as we do today) that it was a morally abhorrent institution.
Importantly, this history forms the basis of the Operating System on which we run today:
Decades of exposure to the Laziness Lie has had a massive effect on our public consciousness. It’s made many of us critical of other people and quick to blame the victims of economic inequality for their own deprivation. It’s made us hate our own limitations, to see our tiredness or desire for a break as signs of failure. And it has created an intense internal pressure to keep working harder and harder, with no limits and no boundaries. This ideology was created to dehumanize those whom society had failed to care for, and with each passing year, the number of people who are excluded in these ways seems to only grow.
What a wonderful essay. I am yet to read Dr. Price’s book, but I recommend it all the same.
See also: Overturning the Legacy of Slavery [with UBI] and Drapetomania.
Dole
I’m reading a compendium of nature writing by Kathleen Jamie. In a chapter of reminisces about her life in the 1970s, she writes of dropping out to work on archaeological digs with the oddballs and stoners:
The exams had been no triumph; if I’d thought about trying for university, which was not an easy process anyway, without a knowledgeable family or supportive teachers the idea was dashed anyway.
But you could sign on the dole. You could hide among the swelling numbers of genuinely unemployed, and claim a little money every week. That’s what people did: artists, diggers, mountaineers, would-be poets and musicians, anarchists and feminists. Anyone for whom the threat of a job, of conformity, felt like death.
The dole doesn’t exist in the way it did in the 1970s. We have Jobseeker’s Allowance now and Universal Credit. Doom, doom, doom. I don’t say we should bring back the dole exactly (though it would certainly be a positive step back to a happier time) but that Universal Basic Income be brought in to give the opportunity of quiet freedom to everyone who wants it. (And if you don’t want it and would prefer to work hard for loads of money, a progressive tax system would slurp your share of UBI away so you wouldn’t have to worry about it.)
Kathleen Jamie used her time on the dole (and by the way, we more commonly call it “the brew” in Scotland) to attend those archaeological digs, to experience the world a little, to meet new people, to sense the depths beneath the feet.
As well as being a well-earned break after years of unasked-for schooling, the dole could evidently be a useful airlock between life chapters in which to marshal one’s thoughts instead of foolhardily hurtling into the next thing. It grants the sort of space that is useful to anyone but essential to future writers and musicians and thinkers, people who might make a contribution greater than the gains of typical white-collar servitude.
UBI now please. Or if that’s not affordable, bring back the old-fashioned dole. If it was affordable in the 1970s, it should be affordable in the age of the iPhone.
For more old and new ideas, The Good Life for Wage Slaves is available now.
