You need to get hold of this book. I’ve been recommending it to just about everyone I know. The author was asked by a new journal / magazine if he would write an article that would be a bit controversial and so he wrote one about how so many people today work in bullshit jobs – and then the journal’s website crashed as a million people went about downloading the article. I was a bit worried when I started this book because I really don’t like shaming people for the work they do. You know, it’s b...

There are 2 huge categories of bullshit jobs, the once we already know about, representative jobs, bureaucrats, people working not even part of the time they are at the workplace, all those professions people tend to see as great if one is lazy, or as depressing if one wants to do something productive, and as a good reason for envy if someone has a real, hard, full-time job with stress and not knowing how to do this all in just 40 hours a week. The other, hidden, part of bullshit jobs is strong...

I was expecting something along the pop-sociology lines of Malcolm Gladwell, and what I got was something far more profound. I wandered my way through affirmation, skepticism, analysis, comprehension, understanding and depression, so take that as a recommendation if you like. I don’t think I have the tools to critique it appropriately, but much of what Graber writes resonates.The book originates from an essay Graber wrote in 2013, “based on a hunch” about the phenomenon of bullshit jobs, or, mor...

Economies around the world have, increasingly, become vast engines for producing nonsense. Reading this was cathartic. Like so many people, I, too, have experienced the suffering that is a useless job—a job that not only lacks any real benefit to society, but which also does not even benefit the company. (Lucky for me, I am now a teacher, which, for all its unpleasant aspects, almost never feels useless.) Even though I got a lot of reading and writing done on the job, the feeling of total fut

This book is about how some jobs are worthless and don't need to exist. Perhaps this book itself is a good example of a worthless job that didn't need to be done and doesn't need to exist?I like David Graeber. His book "Debt" was phenomenal. The book, however, is far from his best. It expands on the short 2013 essay, "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," which is still a provocation worth reading. But it didn't need to be expanded into a book. So the worst part of the book is that it is complete...

“We could easily all be putting in a twenty – or even fifteen-hour workweek. Yet for some reason, we as a society have collectively decided it’s better to have millions of human beings spending years of their lives pretending to type into spreadsheets or preparing mind maps for PR meetings than freeing them to knit sweaters, play with their dogs, start a garage band, experiment with new recipes or sit in cafés arguing about politics, and gossiping about their friends’ complex polyamorous love af...

This made my day :) It's definitely a fav forever. Quirky and cool. We start rating calc at 5 star max.> Some of the things innovative. Seriously, have my star drives never been built because people around the world have been too busy creating BS PPTs and simply had no time to spend building devices for my space travel? F***!!!!!!! (+1 star)> Other points felt like BS themselves and made me feel that the author misses the point a bit: 1. If people are ok being with themselves, on their own, with...

I so appreciated this book for making me think hard about jobs and why they exist. David Graeber focuses Bullshit Jobs: A Theory on the origins and implications of bullshit jobs, or jobs that do not serve any real purpose in society. He does an excellent job describing how these jobs perpetuate capitalism by keeping people employed for the sake of keeping people employed, as well as how these jobs negatively affect people’s psychological well-being. Graeber draws thoughtful and relevant connecti...

Concise summary: the book is a 280-page too long rambling mess consisting of half-baked ideas & inconsequential anecdotes. The author is political where there is no call for politics, and philosophically & mathematically inept.I was planning to write a long critique, but I realised that to write an exhaustive review of everything that is wrong with the book I would need to write one of longer length. Instead, I will point out that the book goes off the mark starting with the very definition of a...

Facebook Salvation for BS JobholdersThe astounding number of hours spent weekly by social media users is a direct result of bullshit jobs, says David Graeber, in his book of the same name. In this context, the average smartphone being consulted 221 times a day is no longer unbelievable. Graeber has uncovered a whole new field for research: jobs where nothing real happens.We often think of neoliberalism as the era when companies are lean and mean, all the fat is excised and operations optimized.

What would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dockworkers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science-fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. (xxi)You had me at "ska musicians." But our author pivots quickly:Writing this book also serve...

Modern capitalism is rebranded feudalism.There is so much to say about this book. Tl:dr: read this book. Read it soon because it will completely change your world view about employment, society and capitalism. Graeber takes his theory about bullshit jobs, which he lays out very well, and then expands it into a theory about the very fabric of our economy and how our corporate world has been fashioned into a modern-day feudal state where managerial lords preside over a vast and bloated private bur...

This book rubs salt into old wounds; it chips away at all my illusions of self-importance, and increases my doubts about how I have chosen to spend my life. Though I am paid very well, I have always felt unessential in the grand scheme of things. There is good reason that spiritually, emotionally, personally unfulfilling and unrewarding work should command higher wages––in essence the worker barters his life away in what he does––but it has often bothered me (like a thorn in the side) that after...

Having read and even cited [for a piece on the rise of extreme endurance sports over the past century] Graeber's original essay in Strike magazine, I eagerly preordered this book. I read it with a kind of surreptitious glee while attending college curriculum meetings and during my usual 4-hour commute, some days just go to said meetings, which consisted of adults with PhDs commenting on font size and whether to use the word "show" versus "demonstrate." But I digress. It takes a lot for me at thi...

I have one.Now I have the book.Wholly cow. This thing could not have come at a better time. I needed it like a drink of cool clear water in a SoCal wild fire in a drought and a heat wave.How so you ask?Well.You see. I, like so many others…hate my job.That’s right. You heard me. I hate my job.I feel ashamed even saying that. Because America and Capitalism. But I do. Not everything about it. I’m a therpaist by training. And I still see a few clients here and there.And I completely LOVE IT. It’s a

So I wasn't sold on the first half of this book--the diagnosis of bullshit jobs. But the last half or third, I read like 5 times because it's Graeber at his best--diagnosing the bullshit in the ways we talk about the economy and money and debt. The reason I didn't love the diagnosis is because I think someone being miserable in their work is so human and so expansive that it's just the human condition--we are all unhappy. However, what does the proliferation of finance do to businesses and the b...

The Good:Engaging a wider audience:--What I appreciate most with Graeber’s books is his ability to take emancipatory history and theory, and play (there is no better word to describe the action) with ways to present them in accessible, engaging, and meaningful thought-experiments/narratives for a general audience (esp. in rich countries). Another review described the results succinctly as “[making] the strange, familiar, and the familiar, strange.”--I like to think this is a principle of anarchi...

Before there was this book, the concept of “bullshit jobs” was examined extensively in a popular American film. I present to you “Office Space” (1999) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iiOE...Watch the movie if you have a bullshit job! I'll never forget this moment in 2006. I was working in Japan for a kid's English school. For that day, it was my job to pass out flyers for about two hours after I was done teaching. As I passed out flyers, I stood across from a woman who was wearing a sign made...

I wanted to like this book. I loved Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and hoped for something closer to that, where Respected Anthropologist David Graeber walks us through the evolution of labor, and explains how we arrived at our current model. Unfortunately, we got David Graeber, "Researcher"* who spends the first half of his book reading comments and emails from people who read his original article in Strike! magazine, and the second half of his article trying to taxonomize, opine, conject, and ho...

I have worked many bullshit jobs. I will work them in the future. This is what you do if you're of a certain caste. Notice I said caste not class, for a reason.Simply put, this is a rallying cry, and should be treated as such. I really wish there was some more substantive data here, but I prefer to think of Graeber's style as polemical rather than academic, and books like this are what change public opinion, at the end of the day, and I want him to receive an audience.Not because it's groundbrea...