What if the modern economy is full of jobs that everyone secretly knows are meaningless but no one is allowed to admit it?
In this incendiary and darkly funny essay, anthropologist David Graeber takes a flamethrower to the world of pointless bureaucracy, soul-crushing middle management, and the quiet misery of workers paid to pretend.
Bullshit Jobs is part polemic, part social theory, and part cathartic scream - a razor-sharp diagnosis of a system that rewards appearance over substance, and a call to imagine something radically better.
This iconic essay was originally published in 2013 in Strike! Magazine and immediately became a viral success, with over a million hits in a day crashing the magazines website. The essay was translated into 12 languages and quickly went global. In the UK, the popularity of the essay triggered a YouGov poll which found that 37% of workers felt their job contributed nothing meaningful to society or the world. There is a curious distinction between essential workers who feel their job is pointless and workers in objectively meaningless jobs appear convinced they are doing worthwhile work.
Graeber received lots of testimonials for workers about their attitude to their job, which allowed him to expand the essay into a full book published in 2018. The original short essay is the thing though, an essential read and a great cultural moment that now has resurgent interest with the imminent impacts of AI.
This 12 page essay is a classic.