Look at the above image. If you have never lived in Germany, it will probably seem cryptic to you. It is the recently released German high-speed railway map for the next year. A lot is going on there. Rectangle shapes indicate cities, solid lines coiling left to right connecting stations, and an eclectic colour palette evoking the emotions of an expressive oil painting. The metadata of the image reveals the software with which it was created is not some sophisticated illustrative software; it is MSPowerpoint.
This fascinates me. Someone is sitting in a comfortable office chair, maybe in the Deutsche Bahn headquarters tower in Berlin, who, every year, opens a PowerPoint and adjusts, aligns, formats, and moves lines, squares, text boxes to visualise the highspeed german railway map. There is someone sitting in a quality assurance department scrutinising the work. Are all shapes left-aligned? Do all boxes have the same height and width?
Why does a job like this still exist in a changing world of accelerating technology advancement in which new software, precisely tailored to remove these types of repetitive tasks, gets released in shorter and shorter cycles?
In his book Bullshit jobs, David Graeber argues that between 20% - 50 of the workforce is employed in so-called “Bullshit Jobs”. A form of employment so pointless that even the employee cannot justify its existence.
The Deutsche Bahn employee who creates the map with MSPowerpoint holds a specific type of Bullshit Job. He is what is called a “Duct-taper”. This is a role which only exists because of a glitch or fault inside the organisation. A job which could easily be automated, but no one has bothered to look into it. Or it exists purely because of vanity. For example, a manager who prefers to keep as many employees under him as possible to signal his status inside the organisation’s hierarchy.
In capitalism, this is precisely something which should not happen. The theory imagines organisations as rational actors in the market, which will optimise every internal efficiency and remove superfluous jobs. But in reality, we all know from our own experience they exist - predominantly in the managerial and administrative white-collar sector. It’s the project manager creating financial reports that nobody reads, the business consultant creating project status meetings no one cares about.
Why is this a problem? Employees are collecting paychecks, they do not have any pressure at work, and they live an easy-going life. Eating cake for their birthday with colleagues in the cafeteria and going on for prolonged business lunches.
The health impact of meaningless jobs
The problem arises from the mental load of pretending to our colleagues, family and sports club members that your job is meaningful and you are adding something to this world. But keeping up the illusion of productiveness and deceiving your social circle requires energy.
To very few people, we can admit that we spend a big chunk of our life with meaningless activities. The commute to an office where you sit all day pretending to be busy, the overnight stay in the depressing holiday Inn located in some business district to attend a two-day conference to which you are indifferent.
It can seem impossible to justify to ourselves all this time wasted. Accepting that we have traded in an unfathomable amount of time for meaningless monetised activities and therefore sacrificed time we could have spent on releasing untapped potential can cause profound alienation of oneself and, ultimately, depression.
Why are workers forced to pretend?
Why are people encouraged to take on meaningless jobs for a paycheck? Wouldn’t it be in everyone’s interest to acknowledge the existence of meaningless jobs and wipe them out completely? The salaries paid out for these jobs could be distributed fairly across society members - without the enforcement of taking up a form of labour for it.
However, deep resentment and social stigma exist towards so-called Handouts and social welfare beneficiaries. For someone to be worthy to receive money, we want to see them work and suffer for it, even if the work completed is of no use to anyone.
There might also be the fear of giving citizens too much autonomy and free time. Some might start pottery classes, but others might start to riot - just like Soren Kierkegaard said: “Boredom is the root of all evil”.
Distracted and tired citizens are easier to control, so we would rather see them every morning, sitting at a computer desk with the mouse in their hand, a smile on their face and dragging rectangular and oval shapes across the monitor.
Winning back your agency
Most of us do have more autonomy over our lives than we might believe. The people working in the Bullshit Jobs Graeber talks about, fall into the well-paid managerial and administrative sectors requiring, at minimum, a bachelor's degree. These are often well-educated, curious and creative people, making the waste of potential so devastating.
These people have a choice between consumerism and working in a job that might be lower-paid but offers more meaning or more free time; A choice between dining out or learning how to cook, going on multiple holidays a year or limiting themselves to only one.
With every purchase we make, we decide what we value more, the lifestyle we think we must maintain by buying new toys or the confidence we get from proudly stating how we spend our time on this planet.