I saw an interesting, thought provoking video recently, a modern equivalent of a traditional essay. Why do people do bullshit jobs?
Well, that's a good question, one that I rarely think about unless I'm faced with someone who obviously dislikes their job (and they seem to want me to know it). Most people just take it as a given, "I have a bullshit job, I am going to work" or something like that. They do it because it "is". I don't think most of them care enough to even ask the question. Usually, the thought, if any is given, is "Let me do my bullshit job, get my paycheck, and get out of here."
My wife of 26 years had one bullshit job for well over 20 years. But hey, I met her at her first bullshit job, so I don't think you can call bullshit jobs useless. And you might like being with the people at your bullshit job, like she did. She smiled a lot at that bullshit job, but maybe that was just my point of view. She didn't dislike it and the owner of the place was good to her. The owner's wife was a different story, but every bullshit job has a thorn or burr it puts into your ass. That just seems to be reality.
I had bullshit jobs, jobs that I worked just to explore things I could do in life or just make money. I worked at a gas station at night, while I worked at my main job during the day, to make the extra money to get a new car. I liked the people I worked with, although I never saw the owner. I heard he was rich, although I was amazed you could become "rich" by owning two or three gas stations. One coworker introduced me to the show Red Dwarf, which I will always be grateful for. Another coworker showed me how to dash across the street to call the police when a suicidal drunk tries to light your gas pumps on fire with a Bic and a one dollar bill.
I think most people work bullshit jobs primarily to get money, like the social equivalent of a stalemate -- you need money, they need bullshit done. It's just that sometimes it's a little bit more than just a place to get money and get bullshit done. The thing is, how important is it to have all the people at each of these bullshit jobs I've known? Most of them, there are more people than necessary if the owner just worked there. But, the owner hires some of us so he doesn't have to be there, and enough to account for the bullshitters who are excessively lazy, which is inevitable. And that's where a lot of bullshit jobs come from, to make it possible for the owner to never be there doing one of the bullshit jobs. Because he doesn't actually want to be there.
So, here we are at a definition. People do bullshit jobs to get money for what they really want. The owner sets up these bullshit jobs, so he can get money to go do something else. Sometimes at these bullshit jobs, as in other areas of life, we meet people who we like in the process.
OK, so where does that leave us as these bullshit jobs inevitably go away? Are we a little bit emptier or a little bit better because of it?
The point of that modern essay I saw was that these are bullshit jobs. Why do we still do bullshit jobs when society doesn't need you to and we don't want to do them?
Well, it seems like one more thing waiting to be obsoleted, that should be obsoleted because its usefulness has been outlived. I have good memories from my bullshit jobs and I met my wife at one, but those are the upsides.
The downsides are that we spent a lot of time and years rushing to and from bullshit jobs when we were young, a lot of time standing around talking, doing bullshit. I personally spent a lot of days working 16, 20 hours, with barely enough time to eat and sleep. My wife worked 6 days a week for decades, even during the early years of our children, at that bullshit job. Even though she didn't really have to, technically we didn't need the money, but she wanted to have her own money, even if 80% of it went to a nanny. So, every Saturday, Mom was at work, doing her bullshit, and Dad and the kids went out to see some stuff, do some light shopping, go check out what was new at Fry's or the mall, maybe visit Mom at the bullshit job before lunch.
Oh, and after a couple of decades of dedicated work, my wife slipped on some soup, hit her head on the floor/table, and ended up in the emergency room. She was OK, but never fully recovered and still has pains in her head and shoulder that she lives with to this day. But after a couple of months of paying for doctor visits and worker's comp, the owner at that bullshit job unceremoniously fired her ass. Well, what did you expect, it was a bullshit job. That she worked at for over twenty years. That gas station coworker who introduced me to Red Dwarf worked full time at that gas station job and never in her life had medical insurance, even after working there for over ten years. Imagine working at your job for over 10 years, in your mid-30's, never having had medical insurance, and never knowing if next year you won't even have that.
So, there are a lot of things today that have changed since I started working as an adult, like all these bullshit jobs, to which we can gladly say "Goodbye and good riddance!"
Like wearing a suit and tie every day to every office job. Like working "9-to-5" where work actually starts at 8am, you'd better be there by 7:30am so you're not a minute late, and you work later than 5pm to get the day's work done so you don't have it waiting for you tomorrow. Like working the hourly factory job where you clock in and clock out at PRECISE times, but people always start walking toward the clock-in or clock-out area 15-20 minutes early, then stand around talking until PRECISELY one minute before the time that they actually slide that card into the time clock and walk into or out of the building. Like the sales job where you brag to the other guys about how you overcharged the old lady to pay for your new sports car. Like the retail job where every worker has a nightmare customer and every customer has a nightmare salesperson.
Yeah. Good riddance.
I don't think any of us will have a problem turning over the bullshit jobs to AI or machines, will we? I think we can find our friends elsewhere...