In Dan’s case, everyone played along with the charade. The environment was in no way abusive. The six managers and their supervising managers-of-managers were polite, friendly, mutually supportive. They all told one another what a terrific job they were doing and what a disaster it would be for everyone else if they weren’t there as part of the team—but only, Dan felt, as a way of consoling one another in the secret knowledge they were hardly doing anything, that their work was of no social value, and that if they weren’t there, it would make no difference. It was even worse outside the office, where he began to be treated as the member of his family who had really made something of his life. “It’s honestly hard to describe how mad and useless I felt. I was being taken seriously as a ‘young professional’—but did any of them know what it was I really did?”
Eventually Dan quit to become a science teacher in a Cree Indian community in northern Quebec.
• • •
It doesn’t help that higher-ups in such situations will regularly insist that perceptions of futility are self-evidently absurd. It doesn’t always happen. Some managers, as we’ve seen, will basically wink and smile; a precious few might honestly discuss at least part of what’s going on. But since middle managers generally see their role as one of maintaining morale and work discipline, they will often feel they have little choice but to rationalize the situation. (In effect, doing so is the only part of their jobs that isn’t bullshit.) Plus, the higher you climb in the hierarchy, the more oblivious the managers are likely to be—but at the same time, the more formal authority they tend to have.
Vasily works as a research analyst for a European foreign affairs office: his office, he reports, has just as many supervisors as researchers, and every sentence of any document produced by a researcher invariably ends up being passed up two levels of hierarchy to be read, edited, and passed down again, repeatedly, until it makes no sense. Granted, this would be more of a problem if there were a chance that anyone outside the office would ever read them, or, for that matter, be aware they existed. Vasily does occasionally try to point all this out to his superiors:
Vasily: If I question the utility or sense of our work, my bosses look at me as if I’m from another planet. Of course they do: for them, it is crucial that the work we’re doing is not seen as total nonsense. If that would be the case, the positions would be canceled, and the result would be having no job.
In this case, it’s not the capitalist economic system but the modern international state system that between the various consular services, United Nations, and Bretton Woods instututions, creates untold thousands of (usually high-paid, respectable, comfortable) jobs across the planet. One can argue, as in all things, about which of these positions are truly useful and for what. Presumably some do important work—preventing wars, for instance. Others arrange and rearrange furniture. What’s more, there are pockets inside the apparatus that appear, to their low-ranking denizens, at least, as entirely superfluous. This perception, says Vasily, creates feelings of guilt and shame:
Vasily: When I am in public and people ask me about my job, I don’t want to. There is nothing to say, nothing to be proud of. Working for the foreign ministry has a high reputation, so when I am saying, “ I am working for the foreign ministry,” people usually react with a mix of respect and not really knowing what I am doing. I think the respect makes it even worse.
There are a million ways to make a human feel unworthy. The United States, so often a pioneer in such areas, has, among other things, perfected a quintessentially American mode of political discourse that consists in lecturing others about what jerks they are to think they have a right to something. Call it “rights-scolding.” Rights-scolding has many forms and manifestations. There is a right-wing version, which centers on excoriating others for thinking the world owes them a living, or owes them medical treatment when they are gravely ill, or maternity leave, or workplace safety, or equal protection under the law. But there is also a left-wing version, which consists of telling people to “check their privilege” when they feel they are entitled to pretty much anything that some poorer or more oppressed person does not have.
According to these standards, even if one is beaten over the head by a truncheon and dragged off to jail for no reason, one can only complain about the injustice if one first specifies all the categories of people to which this is more likely to occur. Rights-scolding may have seen its most baroque development in North America, but it has spread all over the world with the rise of neoliberal market ideologies. Under such conditions, it’s understandable that demanding an entirely new, unfamiliar, right—such as the right to meaningful employment12—might seem a hopeless project. It’s hard enough nowadays being taken seriously when asking for things you’re already supposed to have.
The burden of rights-scolding falls above all on the younger generations. In most wealthy countries, the current crop of people in their twenties represents the first generation in more than a century that can, on the whole, expect opportunities and living standards substantially worse than those enjoyed by their parents. Yet at the same time, they are lectured relentlessly from both left and right on their sense of entitlement for feeling they might deserve anything else. This makes it especially difficult for younger people to complain about meaningless employment.
Let us end, then, with Rachel, to express the horror of a generation.
Rachel was a math whiz with an undergrad degree in physics, but from a poor family. She aspired to pursue a graduate degree, but with British university tuition fees having tripled, and financial assistance cut to the bone, she was forced to take a job as Catastrophe Risk Analyst for a big insurance company to raise the requisite funds. A year out of her life, she told herself, but hardly the end of the world:
Rachel: “It’s not the worst thing in the world: learn some new skills, earn some money, and do a bit of networking while you’re at it.” Such was my thinking. “Realistically, how bad is it going to be?” And obviously, in the back of your head, the resounding, “Loads of people spend their whole lives doing boring, backbreaking work for barely any money. What on earth makes you too special for one year in a boring office job?”
That last one is an overarching fear for self-aware millennials. I can barely scroll through Facebook without hitting some preachy think piece about my generation’s entitlement and reluctance to just do a bloody day’s work, for Christ’s sake! It is sort of hard to gauge whether my standards for an “acceptable” job are reasonable or just the result of ridiculous, Generation Snowflakey “entitled bollocks” (as my grandma likes to say).
This is, incidentally, a particularly British variation of rights-scolding (though it increasingly infects the rest of Europe): older people who grew up with cradle-to-grave welfare state protections mocking young people for thinking they might be entitled to the same thing. There was also another factor, much though Rachel was slightly embarrassed to admit it: the position paid extremely well; more than either of her parents was making. For someone who’d spent her entire adult existence as a penniless student supporting herself through temping, call center, and catering jobs, it would be refreshing to finally get a taste of bourgeois life.
Rachel: I’d done the “office thing” and the “crap job thing,” so how bad could a crap office job be, really? I had no concept of the bottom-of-the-ocean black depths of boredom I would sink to under a bulk of bureaucracy, terrible management, and myriad bullshit tasks.
Rachel’s job was necessitated by various capital holding requirement regulations which, like all corporations in a similar situation, her employer had no intention of respecting. Thus, a typical day consisted of taking in emails each morning with data on how much money different branches of the firm would expect to lose in some hypothetical catastrophe scenario, “cleaning” the data, copying the data into a spreadsheet (whereupon the spreadsheet program invariably crashed and had to be rebooted), and coming up with a figure for overall losses. Then, if there wa
s a potential legal problem, Rachel was expected to massage the numbers until the problem went away. That’s when things were going well. On a bad day, or bad month, when there was nothing else to do, her supervisors would make up elaborate and obviously pointless exercises to keep her busy, such as constructing “mind maps”13. Or just leave her with nothing—but always with the proviso that while doing nothing, she had to actively pretend not to be:
Rachel: The weirdest and (apart from the title) maybe most bullshitty thing about my job was that while it was generally acknowledged that there wasn’t really enough work to do, you weren’t allowed to conspicuously not work. In a hark back to the days of the early internet, even Twitter and Facebook were banned.
My academic degree was pretty interesting and involved a lot of work, so, again, I had no concept of the horrible dread I would feel getting up in the morning to spend all day sitting in an office trying to inconspicuously waste time.
The final straw came after months of complaining, when I met my friend Mindy for a drink after a week of peak bullshit. I had just been asked to color coordinate a mind map to show “the nice-to-haves, must-haves, and would-like-to-have-in-futures.” (No, I have no idea what that means, either.) Mindy was working on a similarly bullshit project, writing branded content for the pages of a company newspaper nobody reads.
She ranted at me, and I ranted at her. I made a long, impassioned speech that ended with me shouting, “I cannot wait for the sea levels to rise and the apocalypse to come because I would rather be out hunting fish and cannibals with a spear I’d fashioned out of a fucking pole than doing this fucking bollocks!” We both laughed for a long time, and then I started crying. I quit the next day. That is one massive benefit of having done all manner of weird menial jobs through university: you can almost always find work quickly.
So, yes, I am the queen crystal of Generation Snowflake, melting in the heat of a pleasantly air-conditioned office, but, good Lord, the working world is crap.
From thinking a “crap office job” was hardly the end of the world, Rachel was finally forced to the conclusion that the end of the world would, in fact, be preferable.14
on the misery of knowing that one is doing harm
There is one other, slightly different form of social suffering that ought to be acknowledged: the misery of having to pretend you’re providing some kind of benefit to humanity, when you know the exact opposite is in fact the case. For obvious reasons, this is most common among social service providers who work for government or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Most are engaged in box-ticking rituals, at least to a certain degree, but many are aware that what they’re doing is worse than useless: they are harming the people they are supposedly there to help. Shihi is now an artist, but she was once a community therapist in New York City:
ShÍhi: I used to work as a therapist in a community mental health center in the Bronx in the 1990s and 2000s. I have a social work degree.
My clients ended up either being mandated to “treatment” after being incarcerated for minor stuff (Clinton’s crime bill), lost their jobs and apartments after being jailed, or just needed to prove to welfare-to-work or Social Security offices that they need SSI [Supplemental Security Income] or other food/rent subsidies because they were mentally ill.
Some were indeed severely mentally ill, but many others were just extremely poor people who were constantly being harassed by the police. Their living conditions would make anyone “mentally ill.”
My job was to do therapy to essentially tell them it was their own fault and their responsibility to make their lives better. And if they attended the program daily, so the company could bill their Medicaid, staff would copy their medical records to send to the Social Security office so they could be reviewed for disability payments. The more paperwork in their charts, the better their chances.
I had groups to run like “anger management,” “coping skills” . . . They were so insulting and irrelevant! How do you cope with lack of decent food or control your rage toward the police when they abuse you?
My job was useless and harmful. So many NGOs profit from the misery created by inequality. I made a very poor living doing what I did, but it still pains me deeply that I was a poverty pimp.
It is interesting and important to note that many of the petty officials who do absurd and terrible things in the name of paperwork are keenly aware of what they are doing and of the human damage that is likely to result—even if they usually feel they must remain stone-faced when dealing with the public. Some rationalize it. A few take sadistic pleasure. But any victim of the system who has ever asked herself, “How can such people live with themselves?” might take some comfort in the fact that, in many cases, they can’t. Meena’s job for a local government council in an English town sometimes referred to as “Little Skidrow-by-the-Sea” was represented to her, when she took it, as working with the homeless. She found this was true in a sense:
Meena: My job was not to place, to advise, or help homeless people in any way. Instead, I had to try to collect their paperwork (proof of ID, National Insurance number, proof of income, etc.) so that the temporary homeless unit could claim back housing benefit. They had three days to provide it. If they couldn’t or wouldn’t provide the necessary paperwork, I had to ask their caseworkers to kick them out of their temporary accommodations. Obviously, homeless people with drug addictions tend to have difficulties providing two proofs of income, among many other things. But so do fifteen-year-olds whose parents have abandoned them, and veterans with PTSD, and women fleeing domestic violence.
So ultimately, Meena explains, her role was to threaten to make formerly homeless people homeless again, “all so that one department could claim a cash transfer from another.” What was it like? “Soul destroying.” After six months, she couldn’t take it and gave up on government service entirely.
Meena quit. Beatrice, who worked for a different local authority, also couldn’t take it after witnessing colleagues laughing over letters sent to pensioners that contained intentional errors designed to confuse the recipients so as to allow the council to falsely bill them for late payment. Only a handful of her coworkers, she said, took an active pleasure in defrauding the public they were hired to serve, but it cast a terrible pall upon an otherwise easygoing and friendly office environment. She tried to complain to higher-ups (“Surely this isn’t right!”), but they looked at her as if she were crazy. So Beatrice took her first opportunity to find another job.
George, who worked for Atos, a French firm hired by the British government to knock as many citizens as possible from the disability rolls (in the years following, more than two thousand were discovered to have died not long after having been found “fit to work”),15 soldiers on. He reports that everyone who works for the company does understand what’s going on and “hates Atos with a quiet desperation.” In other cases, government workers are convinced that they are the only ones in their office who’ve figured out how useless or destructive the work they’re doing is—though when asked if they have ever presented their views to colleagues directly, most invariably say they haven’t, leaving open the possibility that their coworkers are equally convinced they are the only ones who know what’s really going on.16
In all this, we are moving into somewhat different territory. Much of what happens in such offices is simply pointless, but there is an added dimension of guilt and terror when it comes to knowing you are involved in actively hurting others. Guilt, for obvious reasons. Terror, because in such environments, dark rumors will always tend to circulate about what is likely to happen to whistle-blowers. But on a day-to-day basis, all this simply deepens the texture and quality of the misery attendant on such jobs.
coda: on the effects of bullshit jobs on human creativity, and on why attempts to assert oneself creatively or politically against pointless employment might be considered a form of spiritual warfare
Let me conclude by returning to the theme of spiritual violence.
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It’s hard to imagine anything more soul destroying than, as Meena put it, being forced to commit acts of arbitrary bureaucratic cruelty against one’s will. To become the face of the machine that one despises. To become a monster. It has not escaped my notice, for example, that the most frightening monsters in popular fiction do not simply threaten to rend or torture or kill you but to turn you into a monster yourself: think here of vampires, zombies, werewolves. They terrify because they menace not just your body but also your soul. This is presumably why adolescents in particular are drawn to them: adolescence is precisely when most of us are first confronted with the challenge of how not to become the monsters we despise.
Useless or insidious jobs that involve pretenses to public service are perhaps the worst, but almost all of the jobs mentioned in this chapter can be considered soul destroying in different ways. Bullshit jobs regularly induce feelings of hopelessness, depression, and self-loathing. They are forms of spiritual violence directed at the essence of what it means to be a human being.
If what I have argued in the last chapter—that the integrity of the human psyche, even human physical integrity (insofar as these two can ever be entirely distinguished), is caught up in relations with others, and the sense of one’s capacity to affect the world—then such jobs could hardly be anything other than spiritual violence.
This is not to say, however, that the soul has no means for resistance. It might be well to conclude this chapter by taking note of the resulting spiritual warfare, and document some of the ways workers keep themselves sane by involving themselves in other projects. Call it, if you like, guerrilla purpose. Robin, the temp who fixed his screen to look like he was programming when, in fact, he was surfing the Web, used that time to perform free editorial work for a number of Wikipedia pages he monitored (including, apparently, mine), and to help maintain an alternative-currency initiative. Others start businesses, write film scripts and novels, or secretly run sexy maid services.
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