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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

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I'm not here to relitigate the entirety of Graeber's theory,

Neither am I of course, but on the face it does seem a little silly to suggest that a worker must know the overall significance of their role to make their job worthwhile. I'm certainly not excluding the possibility of bullshit jobs in general, and I do agree that just because someone works hard that doesn't mean their job is at all important or meaningful.

So we end up with a quadrant:

  1. People who think their jobs are meaningful/important, and they are

  2. People who think their jobs are meaningful/important, but they aren't

  3. People who think their jobs aren't meaningful/important, but they are

  4. People who think their jobs aren't meaningful/important, and they aren't

"Bullshit jobs" originally referred to those in Q4, but really ought to encompass those in Q2 as well: if a job is meaningless or pointless, the fact that the person holding it doesn't realise it's meaningless or pointless doesn't change that. It's entirely possible for a person to think that their job is meaningless or unimportant, and for their appraisal to be inaccurate (Q3).

I’d argue that Q2 is actually much more important part of the “bullshit jobs” problem, as many of those people are people with high status and so are the jobs even though they are fundamentally useless or even negative in value.

The status peddling nature of those jobs really muddy the water as to what’s important and should be honored by society at large.