An anthropologist asked why so many people secretly believe their job is pointless.
In August 2013, the anthropologist David Graeber published an essay titled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" in the magazine Strike!.1 The essay went viral, eventually receiving over a million hits. Graeber defined a bullshit job as one that even the person performing it secretly believes should not exist.
Graeber argued that technological progress should have drastically reduced the number of working hours needed to sustain society, yet the opposite had happened. Instead of working less, people were working more, in roles that produced nothing of recognizable value.
In 2018, Graeber expanded the essay into a book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, identifying five categories of pointless work. Flunkies exist to make someone else look important. Goons perform aggressive tasks on behalf of employers whose competitors also employ goons. Duct tapers fix problems that should not exist. Box tickers generate paperwork that serves no function beyond demonstrating compliance. Taskmasters manage people who do not need managing.2
A YouGov poll conducted in 2015 found that 37 percent of British workers said their job did not make a meaningful contribution to the world.3
The phrase's power came from its refusal to soften. Academic language would have called it "perceived role meaninglessness" or "task significance deficit." Graeber used profanity because the phenomenon itself was profane. People were trading the finite hours of their lives for work they believed was worthless, and the economy was organized in a way that made this arrangement seem normal.
Graeber died on September 2, 2020, at the age of 59. His phrase had already entered the vocabulary of workplace critique in more than a dozen languages. The book was translated into over twenty of them.