• Daniel Quinn
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    28
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    I normally like his stuff, but I think he missed a key point this time.

    Bullshit jobs aren’t about the uselessness of that work. Most of the useless work we do is critical… for the furtherance of capitalism.

    Whole swaths of the planet work 8+ hours a day making products worse than they should be, finding ways to squeeze in advertising, tracking, or schemes to manipulate customers into “upgrading”. We even burn through skilled psychologists, passing them to design advertising that compels children to badger their parents.

    This is the sort of work that only needs to exist because capitalism requires it, and that has a huge effect on people’s morale.