"Bullshit Jobs": Are You Getting Paid to Pretend?

You know the feeling. It’s 2:37 PM on a Wednesday. You’re sitting in front of your laptop, bathed in the gentle, soul-sucking glow of a screen full of emails. You’ve been “working” for six hours, but if someone put a gun to your head and asked you to explain what tangible, useful thing you’ve accomplished today, you’d stammer, sweat, and ultimately have to admit: you rearranged some cells in a spreadsheet that you’re pretty sure no one will ever open.

You click over to a different tab. You respond to a Slack message with a carefully selected GIF. You join a Zoom call to “touch base” about a future meeting to “circle back” on a project that feels suspiciously like it was designed by a committee of people who have never spoken to a real human being.

In that quiet moment of existential dread between clicks, a terrifying thought bubbles up from the depths of your psyche: What if this is all… bullshit?

What if the complex, jargon-filled tasks that take up 40 hours of your week are not just boring, but fundamentally pointless? Not just unfulfilling, but utterly, completely, and absurdly unnecessary?

Congratulations, my friend. You haven’t had a breakdown; you’ve had a philosophical breakthrough. You’ve stumbled upon one of the most relevant and hilarious concepts of our time: the theory of “Bullshit Jobs.” And the best part? You are not alone. Millions of us are quietly getting paid to participate in a global game of make-believe.

It's Not Just a Bad Job, It's a Spirit-Crushing Lie

Before we go on, let's get our terms straight, because this idea, brought to us by the late, great anthropologist David Graeber, is brilliant in its simplicity.

A “shit job” is not the same as a “bullshit job.”

A shit job is one that’s difficult, unpleasant, or low-paying, but is clearly useful to society. Think garbage collectors, janitors, fast-food workers, nurses. These jobs are often grueling, but you know that if they stopped doing them, society would grind to a halt in a pile of filth and disease. They are fundamentally necessary.

A bullshit job, on the other hand, is often comfortable, well-paid, and might even have a fancy title like “Vice President of Strategic Outreach” or “Digital Experience Synergist.” It’s a job that, if it vanished tomorrow, would make absolutely no difference to anyone. In fact, the world might even be a slightly better place.

The defining feature of a bullshit job, according to Graeber, is that the person doing it secretly believes it’s pointless. It’s a form of paid play-acting, where the main skill required is the ability to look busy and talk about “leveraging deliverables” with a straight face.

A Field Guide to Pointless Professions: The 5 Flavors of Bullshit

Graeber didn’t just drop this bomb and walk away; he created a handy taxonomy of bullshit. See if you recognize anyone you know (or, you know, yourself) in these five main categories.

1. The Flunkies: These are the people whose jobs exist solely to make someone else look or feel important. Think of a doorman who is there for no security reason but simply to signify the prestige of the building. In the modern office, this is the personal assistant to a mid-level executive whose primary role is to schedule meetings about pre-meetings, essentially acting as a human Google Calendar to signal their boss’s status.

   
   

2. The Goons: These are the jobs that have an aggressive or deceptive element and only exist because other people have them. Think corporate lawyers who exist only because the other side has corporate lawyers. Or the PR agent hired to make a polluting company look environmentally friendly. This category also includes telemarketers, lobbyists, and the person who designed the pop-up ad that’s currently blocking the paragraph you’re trying to read. They are the professional annoyers of the world.

   
   

3. The Duct Tapers: This is my personal favorite. These are the people whose jobs exist only because of a glitch or a flaw in the system that shouldn’t be there in the first place. This is the employee whose entire day is spent manually copying data from one ancient, buggy software program and pasting it into another ancient, buggy software program because the company won’t pay to make them compatible. They are human patches for broken systems, living embodiments of the phrase, “This is a workaround.”

   
   

4. The Box Tickers: These are the people who allow an organization to say it’s doing something that it is, in fact, not doing. This is the person in charge of the “Corporate Wellness Initiative” who just sends out a monthly newsletter with stock photos of people laughing while eating salad. Or the committee formed to investigate a problem, which produces a 200-page report that is immediately filed away, unread, its purpose fulfilled simply by having been written. Their job is not to do the thing, but to allow others to say the thing is being done.

5. The Taskmasters: These are the people whose entire job is to manage or create more work for others, much of which is also bullshit. This category includes the middle manager who invents pointless reports for their team to fill out, just to justify their own existence. They are the creators of unnecessary deadlines, the conveners of redundant meetings, and the primary reason the phrase "I'm sending you a placeholder invite" exists.

If They're So Useless, Why Are There So Many?

This is the billion-dollar question. If we live in a capitalist society that’s supposedly obsessed with efficiency, why are we paying millions of people to do... nothing of value?

Graeber’s theory is that we’ve accidentally created a system of “managerial feudalism.” In the corporate world, power isn’t always measured in profit; it’s measured in the number of people you have working under you. A manager with a team of ten seems more important than a manager with a team of two, even if that team of ten is exclusively dedicated to synergizing strategic thought-leadership documents. So, managers have an incentive to create unnecessary roles to expand their little empires.

Combine that with a weird, lingering Puritanical work ethic that says everyone must be working a full 40-hour week to be a worthy person. There often isn’t 40 hours of real, necessary work to be done. So, to keep up appearances, we invent pointless tasks, write performative emails, and sit in meetings to fill the time. It’s a collective agreement to pretend we are all very, very busy and important.

Why Getting Paid to Do Nothing Is Actually a Form of Torture

Okay, so you have a comfortable, well-paying job where you get to browse Reddit for half the day. What’s the problem? Sounds like you’ve won the lottery, right?

Wrong. This is the philosophical core of the problem. Human beings have a deep, innate need to feel that they are making a useful contribution to their tribe. We need to feel like we matter. Being forced to pretend your work is meaningful when you know it’s not is a profound form of psychological violence. It’s a direct assault on your soul.

Imagine being an artist, and someone offers you a huge salary to sit in a beautiful studio all day with all the best supplies, with one condition: you are forbidden from ever creating anything. For the first few days, it might feel like a vacation. After a month, it would be a living hell.

This is the reality of a bullshit job. It’s the source of that specific, modern burnout that comes not from overwork, but from the spiritual exhaustion of pretending. It’s the root of “quiet quitting,” which isn’t about being lazy; it’s a perfectly rational response to being asked to pour your life force into a task you know is meaningless.

How to Survive Your Own Bullshit Job

So, what do you do? Quitting your job to become an artisanal potter in the woods isn’t a realistic option for most of us. But recognizing the absurdity is the first step toward reclaiming your sanity. Here are a few strategies:

1. Become the Office Anthropologist. Start secretly studying your workplace like it’s a newly discovered tribe with bizarre rituals. Document the strange mating calls of “circling back” and the ritualistic sacrifice of time known as the “all-hands meeting.” Turning your misery into a secret research project can be surprisingly fun.

2. Embrace Your Inner Rebel. Use the vast swaths of dead time for your own purposes. Write your novel. Learn to code. Plan your side hustle. Master a language on Duolingo while nodding thoughtfully on a Zoom call. Your employer is buying your time, not your soul. Find ways to secretly invest that time back into yourself. This is your Office Space moment.

3. Find Meaning in the Margins. If your work itself is pointless, find a way to be useful in a different way. Be the person who is genuinely kind to your coworkers. Be the one who organizes the fun social event. Be the mentor to the new hire who is drowning in jargon. You can inject real, human value into a place, even if the work itself is bullshit.

Ultimately, the problem isn’t you. You’re not broken for feeling empty while updating a pointless tracker. That feeling is proof that you are a healthy human being who craves purpose. In a world that often seems determined to pay us for pretending, holding onto that desire for meaning is the most important job you’ll ever have.