Bull$#!+ Jobs
Jobs should make the world a better place. This is the crux of what David Graeber argued in a paper published in Strike magazine in 2013. He suggested in his article that the hallways of corporations around the world have been filled by people doing “busy work” that achieves nothing. It is an argument taken to the extreme, to be expected from someone who self-identifies as an anarchist, but the popularity of the article was such that it led to a book and continued attention for the idea over several years. Clearly Graeber struck a nerve.
Graeber identifies a laundry list of professions that he would sweep from society which is a turn off to anyone who has found it useful to work with folks in these professions (let alone those working in them). Corporate law, financial services, human resources and public relations have their place in society in our opinion. What the anthropology professor hits on that caught our attention is the sentence;
“Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at”
He proceeds to say it is not a prescriptive approach (i.e. he is not necessarily typecasting certain jobs as useless) but rather tries to speak directly to anyone who does not know why they do what they do and don’t enjoy it. If you have been following along, this sounds like the ideas behind Ikigai have echoed all the way to Graeber’s office in London.
Graeber’s words also seem prescient 7 years later in the time of COVID. He suggests that a good measure for how important a career might be would be to imagine what would happen if it disappeared. His reference to nurses, school teachers and garbage collectors sounds remarkably like any number of articles doing the rounds through the first few months of the COVID pandemic.
Whilst anarchist thoughts about what valid careers are and whether we are being mollified by the capitalist elite may be the preserve of an Economics professor we do have some key practical takeaways.
- Whether a job is meaningful is down to you → what you like and what you are good at is what you need to focus on
- Essential jobs won’t go away → the world will always need nurses, teachers and all the other people who push us forward as a society
Check out https://www.ikigainetwork.io to hear from people who have found roles where they feel like they are finding meaning, making the world a better place, having fun and making a living.
See David Graeber’s full article
For those who prefer a podcast — NPR interviewed Graeber here
