STRIKE! Magazine – On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant

We are not paying you to feel fulfilled as a person. We are paying you to do a job, no matter if you think its shitty or not. Companies pay very few people to do useless things for long. In a market economy companies who get too big of a bureaucracy tend to start sliding down hill. Shortly after that layoffs happen and those jobs that are mostly fluff are eliminated. They might eventually build back up over years only to be eliminated again later in a cycle... the guy doesn’t understand that the “professional class” includes all you technical people. As technology advances you generally have more technical people. I think a bigger issue at hand is when a bulk of the jobs require higher and higher skill levels to accomplish sucessfully. At that point what happens to the people on the low-normal side of the intelligence curve? They don’t disappear out of society. Not everyone will grow up to be an engineer or doctor. Not everyone is capable of that. What happens when we automate the factories so much that the people who would of lived fine lives as factory workers have no place to go to and are not capable of performing the job repairing the robots? What do we as a society do with those people? This is much more pressing than a bunch of people feeling unfulfilled at work... to those people I say suck it up buttercup. You are not being payed to believe in the power of your dreams.

He actually makes some good points. That's why I left the beltway bandit I was employed with. Even though I am an "unpaid staffer" I do feel my work with the Red Cross is worthwhile and needed.