Work brings purpose to life but it can be a great hack to keep you occupied from serious business. Work is not equivalent to production and it is not bliss. It is necessary to keep one alive and can bring happiness and purpose but it needs to be on itself purposeful and with actual tangible results.
There is an overworking and underproduction crisis. People work in bullshit works shuffling paper around and they are killing themselves while at the same time they produce nothing.
To unburden ourselves from normalcy bias we have to look at different times where things were simpler and their wasn't much space for non-producing workers.
From the paper
"Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's"
"The contrast between capitalist and precapitalist work patterns is most striking in respect to the working year. The medieval calendar was filled with holidays. Official -- that is, church -- holidays included not only long "vacations" at Christmas, Easter, and midsummer but also numerous saints days. These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking. In addition to official celebrations, there were often week's worth of ales -- to mark important life events (bride ales or wake ales) as well as less momentous occasions (scot ale, lamb ale, and hock ale). All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancient regime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year."
From the article
" On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant by David Graeber "
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century's
end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like
Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work
week. There's every reason to believe he was right. In technological
terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn't happen. Instead,
technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make
us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created
that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing
tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. 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.
Why did Keynes' promised utopia—still being eagerly awaited in the
'60s—never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn't figure
in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less
hours and more toys and pleasures, we've collectively chosen the latter.
This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment's reflection
shows it can't really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an
endless variety of new jobs and industries since the '20s, but very few
have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
In Bullshit Jobs, American anthropologist David Graeber posits that the productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, but instead to
"bullshit jobs": "
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 author contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
- flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants
- goons, who act aggressively on behalf of their employers, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists
- duct tapers, who ameliorate preventable problems, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags don't arrive
- box tickers, who use paperwork or gestures as a proxy for action, e.g., performance managers, in-house magazine journalists, leisure coordinators
- taskmasters, who manage—or create extra work for—those who don't need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals
From the book
"Bullshit Jobs"
