Lots of Americans think their jobs have no purpose

Work in the modern world doesn't fulfill the soul like it used to according to a study from August 2023. Most people don't think their jobs have any good impacts on society and that's a big problem.

The idea of useless jobs has become somewhat of a controversial topic among professionals in the academic community who have attempted to examine and define how humans work in the modern world. 

American anthropologist David Graeber is one such academic and he proposed the theory that roughly half of all modern jobs are meaningless in his book: 'Bulls**t Jobs: A Theory'.

Photo Credit: Twitter @davidgraeber

Graeber had several nicknames for different categories of jobs that he saw as useless, which included flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters according to a Wikipedia explanation of his work. 

Flunkies were there to make higher-ups feel important and included jobs like assistants while goons were hired to harm others on behalf of their employers and working jobs as corporate lawyers and lobbyists according to Wikipedia’s description of Garber’s book. 

Ductapers were people employed in jobs to fix problems and could be programmers hired to fix bad code whereas boxtickers were only working temporarily to fix problems permanently, an example of which might be a corporate compliance officer. 

Finally, taskmasters were only employed to create extra work for employees who didn’t need it and worked in positions of middle management and as leadership professionals. 

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Interestingly, it turned out that there was a large group of workers who would agree with the assessment by Graeber. According to research from a sociologist in Switzerland, most people don't think their jobs are providing any social good. 

Simon Walo of the University of Zurich showed the first quantitative data proving that a large group of people see their jobs as useless according to a press release on his research. 

Photo Credit: Twitter @SimonWalo

Published in the journal Work, Employment, and Society, Walo explored Graeber's concept of bulls**t jobs to better understand how problematic the issue might be in modern society.  

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Walo interviewed over 1811 workers in the United States employed across 21 different professions and asked about whether or not they believed their work was useful or not. 

The respondents were also asked if their work gave them “a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society” according to the press release on Malo’s research. 

One-fifth of people or 19% of respondents from a range of occupations replied never or rarely to each of the questions, showing that there really was something to the idea that the working world is made up of BS jobs. 

The distribution of workers who thought their jobs were useless wasn't evenly distributed either. For example, PsyPost pointed out that only 4.6% of those involved with education, training, and library occupations thought their jobs were useless.

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However, 31.7% of people who worked in transportation and material moving occupations thought their jobs were socially useless. Moreover, several of Graeber's predicted jobs such as those in sales, finance, administrative support, and those in the managerial class had statistically higher rates of perceived job uselessness.

Psypost noted several of the jobs Graeber pointed out in his book—including sales, office and administrative support, business and finance, and managers—were a lot more likely to be associated by those working them as useless versus other jobs. 

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“I think the most important point is that people actually consider their jobs socially useless more often if they work in occupations that Graeber described as ‘bulls**t,'” Walo explained to PsyPost.

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“I already expected that people working in Graeber’s occupations would consider their jobs socially useless more often than others. However, I did not expect to find that these occupations would all be at the top of the list together,” Walo continued. 

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Walo went on to explain that his work supported the theory that certain types of work were useless in the minds of some and said society should start thinking about how to stop wasting people's time and resources, especially in light of the climate crisis.