There is no such thing as a bullshit job

Seven years ago, I read David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs and found the whole concept deeply annoying. Today, it seems even more harmful to me.

Graeber defines a bullshit job as:

A form of paid employment so completely pointless, unnecessary, or harmful that even the employee cannot justify its existence — and yet, because of the conditions of employment, they have to pretend otherwise.

Graeber puts designers, bloggers, lawyers, and all kinds of other people into this category of supposedly useless workers.

But here’s the problem: the value of a job is not primarily determined by the worker. It is determined by the employer. If the employer believes that the work being done — or even not being done — justifies the cost of the salary, then the job has some kind of value. That value may come from personal ambition, altruism, badly designed processes, or something else entirely. But it is still there.

Just because something seems useless to you does not mean it actually is.

So why is this idea even more harmful today? Because of artificial intelligence.

AI can quickly and efficiently generate images — so designers are no longer needed. It can write code — so programmers are no longer needed. It can give medical advice — so doctors are no longer needed. And so on. If we accept Graeber’s formula and factor in AI, we end up with the conclusion that almost all human work is already bullshit.

And, honestly, that sounds pretty doubtful.

That is why we should not define the value of work only through its final result, or through some hypothetical usefulness. In fact, we often instinctively resist this framework, because we sense that our own work, and other people’s work, contains something beyond the simple execution of functions.

There is work I dislike, and it is probably better to avoid it when possible (and Graeber rightfully points it out). There is harmful work, at least in my view. There is mechanical work, which robots will eventually do — and thank God for that.

But there is no such thing as a bullshit job.