What are the most useless jobs in society?
Sunday, September 10, 2023. The heat dome collapses …and Fall returns to the Berkshires!
Sometimes important insights come along through imperfect interpretations.
A passionate essay penned by the late David Graeber, an American thought leader, anthropologist, and anarchist put forth the notion that many humans work in jobs are socially useless.
Topping the list of most socially useless and pointless job are those in sales, finance, and administration — as rated by the humans who actually work those jobs.
Workers in sales, admin, and finance were more than twice as likely as humans in other occupations to see their jobs as pointless, offering no benefit to their community, or society in general.
Why is doing personally meaningless work a concern of researchers? It’s because boring, unfulfilling, meaningless work is tightly correlated with poor mental health, and diminished well being overall.
On the other hand, humans working in social service, training, education, construction, geology, engineering, and healthcare deemed their occupations to be socially useful.
An essay Graeber published in 2013, which was later translated into 12 languages and whose underlying premise became the subject of a YouGov poll, lit the thinking world on fire.
Graeber subsequently curated hundreds of testimonials from people with meaningless jobs and expanded his controversial essay into a book, Bullshit Jobs, a theory which was published in May 2018.
Here’s how Graeber nailed his theses to the door of international corporate elites:
“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.”
The American study’s authors describe their response to this article:
“David Graeber’s ‘bulls**t jobs theory claims that some jobs are in fact objectively useless, and that these are found more often in certain occupations than in others.
Graeber’s original piece quickly became so popular that within weeks, it was translated into more than a dozen languages and was reprinted in many newspapers across the world.
However, the original evidence presented by Graeber was mainly qualitative, which made it difficult to assess the existence, never mind the magnitude of the problem.
This study extends previous analyses by drawing on a rich, under-utilized dataset and provides new evidence.”
How the study was conducted
For the American study (Walo, 2023), almost 2,000 people in the U.S. working in 21 types of jobs were surveyed to determine if their work provided them:
A feeling of making a positive impact on community and society.
and/or the feeling of doing productive work of measurable value.
Nearly 20% (ok, 19% to be precise), answered “never” or “rarely” to this question.
Overall, it seems that the data is telling us that a segment private sector workers consider their job socially useless compared with the public, and non-profit sector.
The study’s authors write:
“It finds that working in one of the occupations highlighted by Graeber significantly increases the probability that workers perceive their jobs as socially useless, compared to all others.
This article is therefore the first to find quantitative evidence supporting Graeber’s argument.”
Here’s a curious thing about lawyers. Law was the only job type that Graeber argued was useless, that, in fact, there was no evidence that its practitioners thought that their legal endeavors were either meaningless or pointless.
A more sanguine number from Europe…
Because Graeber’s essay also caught fire in Europe, researchers there also attempted to quantify what constitutes a bullshit job. Another European estimate of the number of people in socially useless jobs is more conservative, at around 5% (Soffia et al., 2021).
This study also found that the number of people who consider themselves in socially useless jobs is declining over time.
It did find, though, that people doing useless jobs had significantly lower well-being, endorsing Graeber’s central preoccupation with “moral and spiritual damage,” but where the American Graeber saw “bullshit jobs” the European researchers had a more Marxist analysis about worker alienation.
Here’s how the European researchers chided Graeber’s analysis:
Although we find that the perception of doing useless work is strongly associated with poor wellbeing, our findings contradict the main propositions of Graeber’s theory.
The proportion of employees describing their jobs as useless is low, and declining, and bears little relationship to Graeber’s predictions.
The importance of spillover stress
I feel that the notion of moral and spiritual damage is a bit too vague. For me, the value in these studies is how they add to our growing understanding of spillover stress.
The Spillover-Crossover model is used in psychological research to consider to impact of how stress from external stressors (such as those from work), seep into the intimate domain of home and family. COVID taught us a lot about this, and we’re still unpacking the research.
Do you think your job is meaningful? If not, how is that lack of meaning impacting your marriage and family life?
Be well stay kind, and godspeed.
RESEARCH:
Soffia, M., Wood, A. J., & Burchell, B. (2022). Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs. Work, Employment and Society, 36(5), 816–840. https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170211015067
Walo, S. (2023). ‘Bullshit’ After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially Useless. Work, Employment and Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/09500170231175771
