Work Sucks. Here’s The Real Reason You Hate Your Job
Work should help us thrive, but our jobs leave us hopeless, exhausted, and deflated. Where did we go wrong?
Apr 5,2022
We’ve still got time, but things aren’t looking too good.
Keynes’ prediction isn’t as silly as it sounds, though. When he made it, working hours were in a steady decline. It was easy to follow the trend lines to their logical conclusion. Union efforts were winning battles to shrink the workweek and new technologies were making workers more productive in less time.
A much shorter workweek was a reasonable conclusion.
But by the late 1940s, the workweek stopped shrinking. It leveled off into the 40 hours a week we still know — and loathe — today.
For a while, the growing productivity meant growing wages, too. Productivity and worker pay grew together. But by the late 1970s, it all began to come undone. Since 1979 — because of tax cuts for the wealthy, aggressive financial deregulation, less frequent raises to the minimum wage, and other intentional policies — productivity has continued to increase while worker pay has generally stagnated.
There isn’t a labor shortage.
Now — even though our system relies on there being more workers than jobs — we’re facing a nationwide labor shortage. The coronavirus pandemic shook the labor market hard, particularly in low-wage service industry jobs. Many were laid off or furloughed, and now they aren’t coming back.
Some are complaining that “nobody wants to work anymore,” but the problem is not that there’s a lack of people looking for jobs, too strong a social safety net, or too rich of benefits. People are just fed up with bad jobs.
The same is true of the white-collar office workers now resigning. As companies call their staff back to the office, employees are refusing to return to toxic work environments. They’re looking for less stress, more meaning, and better pay, too.
It’s been called the Big Quit, the Great Reset, the Great Reshuffle, and a dozen other not-so-great names. Organizational psychologist Anthony Klots was the first to call it the Great Resignation when he was quoted in a Bloomberg article on how to quit your job. That one stuck.
People are burned out. And after the pandemic, many are rethinking the place of work in their lives, reflecting on what gives them meaning and happiness.
And work isn’t it.
Increased productivity didn’t translate to time off, instead, we got bullshit jobs.
Our economy has perverted the notion of work, distorting its purpose. Specifically, useful jobs are made unrewarding. The pay is low, the benefits are next to nil, and the hours are grueling. On the other hand, the pencil-pushing jobs that don’t create any tangible benefit for society are often incredibly lucrative.
This is the thesis of anthropologist David Graeber’s 2018 book, Bullshit Jobs. In it, Graeber observes something we all knew deep down was true. Some jobs are pointless. They exist solely to make the rich more money and to keep us busy. Work is adult daycare.
“Only a little more than half of all workers — and less than half of millennials and Gen Z — feel that their job makes a meaningful contribution to the world.”
Contrary to what Keynes predicted — that as technology improved, automation would ease our work week to fewer and fewer hours so we can more completely enjoy life away from the labor needed to maintain it — companies have filled the hours gifted to us by increased efficiency and productivity with bullshit jobs.
These new jobs do nothing to improve the human condition. They serve no real purpose other than accelerating the accumulation of wealth and power of a greedy few while keeping us busy, cooped up at a job all day. Think of the movie Office Space. Essentially, these frivolous jobs exist for their own sake.
The numbers back Graeber up. According to a 2021 poll by YouGov, only a little more than half of all workers — and less than half of millennials and Gen Z — feel that their job makes a meaningful contribution to the world. Nearly a quarter of US adults firmly believe that their job is meaningless.
The essential workers we spotlighted and celebrated during the height of the pandemic (but didn’t pay more or learn to appreciate) aren’t the ones working bullshit jobs. Their work, as it turns out, is foundational to our collective survival.
Bullshit jobs are the ones that keep us busy most of our waking hours doing work that’s hard if not impossible to connect to any collective, societal good. They alienate us and exhaust us. They leave us without the energy to fight for any meaningful change.
Paradoxically, these pointless jobs are often white-collar jobs with big salaries. The highly-valued and highly-paid jobs are the most likely to be unfulfilling, useless dead ends that do nothing to make the world a better place.
“Imagine what we could achieve if we committed our labor to actually improving the human condition.”
If things were different, if we cast off these pointless jobs, our entire system would start to come undone. The 40-hour workweek, minimum wage jobs, regular economic crashes, a permanent pool of the unemployed that we cycle in and out of, unaffordable housing, homelessness, funneling wealth to a small group of billionaires and oligarchs — none of it would be justifiable if we eliminated our attachment to the profit motive as the primary driver of our economy.
If we all worked exclusively to improve the human condition, we could all work less.
We could choose a different world; work less and enjoy life more.
Work is an essential fact of life. However, it’s not what life is about. Our purpose on this planet is not to endlessly toil for the benefit of an elite few. We don’t live to work, we work to live.
The point of work should be to guarantee our ability to experience life. We only get one shot at it, and there are so many things to enjoy — from community and the love of friends and family, and appreciating or creating art and eating good food, to say nothing of forming new friendships or bettering oneself. A good job can offer some of these things, but work for its own sake has taken over most of our waking hours.
Every president in the last 100 years has promised to create more jobs and better-paying jobs, but that’s not what we need. More jobs don’t always make things better, especially if those jobs are pointless, alienating, dangerous, or demeaning.
“We can achieve all the necessary benefits and even rich fruits of our labors with far fewer hours.”
What we need is a better understanding of the role work is meant to play — creating a world where we all can thrive — so we can make jobs better reflect that. Jobs shouldn’t be a means to mere survival while we shovel more money to billionaires.
Imagine what we could achieve if we committed our labor to actually improving the human condition. By replacing the profit motive with the drive to improve the human condition, we could set about building infrastructure in forward-thinking and sustainable ways, ensuring everyone is housed and receiving any necessary medical care, building our green energy capacity, focusing on tangible, positive changes for our communities. These kinds of projects are rarely profitable and that’s why we don’t see many of them today.
Under our current system, work exists solely to generate profit for someone else. And since there is no natural cap to how much profit is desirable, nor how much work is necessary, we just work more and more. We can achieve all the necessary benefits and even rich fruits of our labors with far fewer hours. But, to do this, the aims and outcomes of work must be focused not on profit, but on improving the human condition.
We could work far fewer hours for far fewer years of our lives and in far better conditions. The only reason that we don’t is that a profit-based economy simply does not function that way. In a world of abundance, we’ve been made to endlessly toil for tyrants whose names we often don’t know — unless they are Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg — building their wealth, their mansions, their compounds, and their futures.
We must dismantle the system that abuses work for the benefit of a vanishingly small few. Fighting for a world where we are all prosperous is the most fundamental of human endeavors.
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