Pointless work

What is pointless work?

Unnecessary work that has no meaning in the sense of a meaningful contribution due to its superfluousness?

Correct?

Well, let’s find out …

David Graeber, an anthropologist from the US, wrote „Bullsh*t Jobs: The Rise of Pointless Work—and what we can do about it.“ The book is intended as a blow against a false glue of our civilization: useless work.

Around 40 percent of Dutch people feel that their work is superfluous because it does not make a meaningful contribution to society and is only useful for maintaining their personal lives.

Well, that’s depressing, right? More than a third of the working population (surveyed in the study) feel their work is pointless.

What could be prime examples of pointless work? Jobs in corporate law, administration, human resources, public relations, fund managers, and stockbrokers are the most likely candidates, according to Graeber.

A refined version of Greaber’s definition of “bullshit jobs” reads as follows: “A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

The last part of the definition is of utmost importance. The people doing the work are best equipped to judge how meaningful or nonsensical it is, and the more ridiculous they find their activity, the more they feel compelled to pretend that it has meaning.

The following aspects are central:

• „Huge swathes of people spend their days performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.“
• „It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs for the sake of keeping us all working.“
• „The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.“
• „How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?“

The quotes read like a frontal attack on the common sense of modern working life. „I only do this shit because it feeds me.“ How often have you heard that and thought: That’s just the way it is?

So what is meaningful work?

Nursing staff in general, right? We need them because we depend on them. So why the hell are they paid so little—much less than all these people in useless jobs? One of the cardinal riddles of our current society.

An acquaintance manages an IT department in the administration of a medium-sized city in Germany. “There are five levels of hierarchy between me and the mayor,” he said recently. “Before a directive from the mayor reaches us, it has to pass through these five levels—and almost always arrives distorted in a way that makes little sense. The result is extra work because the misunderstandings have to be cleared up. We have found that we avoid extra work by contacting the mayor directly. These five intermediate levels are therefore completely pointless for us, in fact they are even a hindrance. I don’t think that’s just us.”

Do these five hierarchical levels know how superfluous they are?

Probably. Nowhere is the frustration associated with pointless work greater than in administrations.

People who supervise the work of people who in turn supervise the work of people who supervise the work of people who do the actual work—that’s less than five hierarchy levels, but the whole business of meaninglessness unfolds with full pernicious beauty.

Bureaucracies work like this—at least so far.

Why are we letting this happen?

Because we have become accustomed to it? Because we think that these are frictional losses for a greater good, called civilization?

However—but that is about to change.

Traditional middle management stands for the scaled control of people who do the actual work. Intermediate hierarchical levels are a legacy from Industry 1.0. Other processes and structures are needed in complex environments— i.e. Industrie 3.0. This also makes middle management obsolete. Middle managers are now the coal miners of the present. Hey guys, the mines are being closed, they should be told in good time. Move to other fields—or you’ll be out of a job. Sorry, this is reality with an outlook into the actual future.

This outlook may sound harsh, not very emphatic, perhaps even ignorant to some ears. The opposite is intended. Some circumstances are better formulated directly and with full force and not toned down to make them seem more tolerable. It is generally known that the rapid technological, procedural and social changes of the present are creating accelerated change overall. Established hierarchies are one of the first things to become obsolete.

A great many work processes are currently broken. As promoters of improvement we at Adaptomos fight waste—waste in the sense of superfluous work, working time, waste of human energy and motivation.