Are We Finally Reaching Peak Awareness of Corporate Nonsense?

As a pathologically ambitious college junior a few months into my first real internship, a generous, well-regarded full-time employee on my team pulled me aside after my #grindset and I handed in an assignment early. You’re doing a great job, she whispered, but I’m going to let you in on something: Don’t work so fast. She told me that, unlike during school, there was really no benefit to being extremely efficient in a corporate setting: My reward would either be (a) more work for no incremental pay (if there was actually work to be done) or, more likely, (b) sitting at a desk and pretending to be busy for the next five hours. 

This was earth-shattering. While I didn’t discover FI/RE for about two more years, that revelation planted the first tiny seed of rebellion. I was suddenly aware of Corporate America’s large swaths of wasted time, the performative productivity, and the inability to openly discuss that most work does not fit neatly into forty-hour chunks, but is instead accomplished in intense sprints punctuated by long periods of downtime. The absurdity was almost unbearable. 

Unfortunately, acknowledging this reality (and asking to leave for the day) would’ve been career seppuku. One must demonstrate their willingness to “play the game,” as a different but equally generous older-employee-slash-mentor told me: “Perception is reality if you want to move up.” The obligation to constantly appear to be toiling—even when there was genuinely nothing that needed to be done, because there were usually more workers than work—is a charade I’ve experienced in nearly every single job I’ve ever had, even (and especially) in the ones that paid the most.* (Preliminary apologies to the teachers, nurses, social workers, and those in similarly necessary, understaffed fields who are exiting stage left out of this essay, eyes twitching.) I felt ashamed of my resultant apathy—so many people work so much harder for so much less, I’d think, so what right did I have to feel unmotivated? 

In his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, the late writer and “anarchic economist” David Graeber articulated how and why this kind of worklife proliferates in a system theoretically designed to prevent such inefficiency in the pursuit of profit maximization. He compares the increasing “bullshitization” of a market economy, in which low unemployment is considered a unilaterally worthy, bipartisan goal (with no qualification for whether that employment is socially useful), to the “full employment” goals of the Soviet Union, and puts forth a compelling case for why private corporations are often no better than big governments** when it comes to avoiding bloat. 

Based on his quantitative and qualitative surveys and studies conducted between 2013 and 2018, he estimated a staggering 35–40% of work in a modern economy fits his “bullshit” definition, defined broadly as work that could disappear tomorrow with effectively no material consequence for humanity—nobody would even notice it wasn’t being done anymore. A critical part of this theory: If you work a job that’s partially or wholly bullshit, you know it. Very rarely is the person in such a position under any grand delusion that their job is something worth doing, and that knowledge is a sort of spiritual violence in itself. (He makes an important distinction between bullshit jobs and shit jobs, the latter of which are critical to the continued functioning of society but usually go under-respected and underpaid, like the aforementioned teachers, nurses, et. al.)

If you’ve ever worked for a giant multinational corporation, you can probably intuit how this bullshit metastasizes out of control: There’s a managerial game of telephone up, down, and across many levels of hierarchy which inevitably trends toward excess and unnecessary complexity, where those on the bottom rungs of the ladder are usually the only ones actually producing anything. He categorizes the jobs in this B.S. ecosystem into five subgroups: duct tapers, box tickers, goons, flunkies, and taskmasters.

The book is both radical (in that it inspired a lot of backlash from bastions of market-based efficiency) and intuitively, primally obvious if you’ve ever had a “full-time” job that could be completed in an hour and a half each day. A particularly industrious friend of mine noticed this a few years ago about his data analytics role and proceeded to accumulate five simultaneous full-time remote jobs at big-name companies. He said the craziest part was how little people checked in on him or questioned what he was doing all day. This went on for years. Each paid in excess of $100,000. It seems hard to believe that an efficient market could produce outcomes like this, which begs the question: Are we finally approaching a crescendo of absurdity? 

Graeber’s book was an expanded version of his original viral essay, published more than a decade ago, and in the intervening years, it seems to me the situation has only accelerated. It’s captured in reflections like Derek Thompson’s recent piece for the Atlantic, “White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now,” where top Microsoft execs are quoted saying, “I think we’ve hit the high point of max human inefficiency in white-collar work. It sometimes seems as if the modern worker spends more time talking about work than actually working.” 

The exec said later in the piece that he was “optimistic about artificial-intelligence tools” as the fix (of course), allowing people to “focus on their work” (sure!)—but I think a more cynical read is that the very reason there are so many meetings is because there might not actually be that much work to do—just corporate boats against the current, circling back ceaselessly into the prediction of Keynes’s 15-hour week. 

Graeber’s original premise, that most “knowledge work” is just elaborate corporate theater, struck a chord with the Youth™. In general, Gen Z seems altogether more skeptical of big business’s elaborate, bizarre rituals: An Instagram Reel in which a person simply read Thompson’s “White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now” article generated 2.3 million views and more than 1,300 comments, flooded with people contributing their own anecdotes of meetings to plan the next meetings. So if much of it’s pointless, and many of us seem to know it, why do we still play along? On this question, we can consult Occam’s Razor: Most of us just need the money.

Obviously, if much of this effort is really as wasted as I’ve made it sound, you’d expect to see signs in economic data. While American gross domestic product may be higher than ever, it’s become a bit of a popular concern in academic journals and media coverage alike that American innovation has been stalled for most of the 21st century. To me, this indicates that while there might be a lot of money sloshing around in the system (and a lot of people working to get that money), much of that frenzied action—this illusion of growth—might not be accruing toward actual progress, or the material state of things improving. In other words, we’re definitely making more, but we might not be making better. (In 2023, that socialist nanny state Sweden, powered by people all hopped up on adequate social services, overtook the American economy for the #2 spot on the Global Innovation Index.) 

A side note: I assume this sense of futility would be especially maddening for working parents. If one or both parents suspects their job falls into this category of well-paid profligate nonsense, it can feel like a cruel twist of modern capitalism that that (unnecessary, superfluous) junk is what they can be paid to do, while the critical work that must be done at home is relegated to nights, weekends, or other people. In 1975, feminist activist Silvia Federici critiqued the way industrialized economies fundamentally ignore the value of domestic labor in Wages Against Housework. She considered this the core exploitation on which all other labor exploitation relied, and believed the only way to rectify it was to compensate people for caregiving work, thereby recognizing it as work—not just the natural activity We Ladies like to do in our spare time that must be subsidized by The Actual Real Work of generating fancy charts for slideshows so your boss’s boss’s boss can more readily comprehend revenue is down without having to read.

Back in 2018, when I felt trapped by the prospect of spending 40 more years in an in-person office job, I became obsessed with financial independence. The equation was simple, the path was clear, and the connection between money and freedom was obvious; a personalized, depoliticized solution to a collective affliction that I had mistaken for unique to me. This was two years after my first boss pulled me aside to bestow her pearl of wisdom, which meant I had long been equating significant swaths of “working” with “high-stakes pretending that I’d give my life to achieve our KPIs (in exchange for my rent).” This seemed like an inescapably bleak way to spend the bulk of one’s time, even if this truth was complicated by the fact that I felt Kool-aid-concentrate levels of love for my company and the people I worked with. 

With no understanding of all that fancy-shmancy labor theory and nary a whiff of skepticism about capitalism, it still made intuitive sense to me that I would necessarily get to do more interesting work with more social value if I were choosing it not on the merits of whether it could pay me enough to service my car note, but if it served a genuine purpose. If I could play by the rules of the game long enough to “win” and buy my independence from its strictures, I could spend the rest of my life working on things I cared about without any regard for my material well-being or the prestige of a title and direct reports. (Granted, whether my former life determining button copy on WhatsApp pop-ups was more or less socially valuable than my “work” now as a chronically online podcast host is up for debate.)

We all know what happens next. I slashed my spending to the bone, started working a parade of part-time jobs, engaged in spreadsheet rain dances, and mainlined podcasts about how to do everything from eat to travel for free. To my shock and delight, it worked. Over the following years, I accumulated tens of thousands—and then hundreds of thousands—of dollars. The punchline, of course, is that the work I ended up doing for fun once I no longer really needed the money became the thing that generated the most money. (Go figure.) The point is, if you game the game for long enough, you may eventually “win”—and your level of desperation commitment (hustling free food out of lunch meetings you weren’t invited to instead of buying groceries, working 80 hours a week, etc.) will determine how quickly.

The more worthwhile question, then, is whether this is the most sensible way for a society to organize itself. My story illustrates the center of the Venn diagram between Graeber’s thesis and FI/RE dogma: If you accept his premise that a solid chunk (35–40%) of all modern work is functionally pointless, it stands to reason that you could eliminate it and still achieve roughly the same amount of real productivity (that is, results) with a lot less languishing. 

Furthermore, if you accept my premise that accumulating a sufficient nest egg is what enabled me to assume the risk of giving up my “corporate career,” and we agree for argument’s sake that my work now is more beneficial than my trafficking in decks to be attached to emails that nobody read, then couldn’t the existing “bullshit jobs” paradigm be viewed as a sort of wasteful purgatory preventing humans from fully flourishing; from reaching their potential? Employment for employment’s sake? Soviet Union-style Fake Email Jobs?

Ten years and one global pandemic after Graeber’s essay was originally published, it feels as though we’re reaching a fever pitch of recognition that something needs to change. Graeber takes pains to explain he wrote the book to explore the phenomenon, not propose solutions. Still, he says a universal basic income*** might come closest to chipping away at the intractable problem of nonsense jobs, because, like FI/RE, a UBI decouples your livelihood from work. A straightforward, “everyone gets the same amount” direct payment of UBI that’s enough to support a dignified existence would “massively reduce the amount of [public and private] bureaucracy in any country that implemented it.” 

While critics suggest this would be disastrous for “productivity” (a dubious claim if you accept that what we quantify now as productivity is people needlessly pushing paper—or money—around from one pile to another), this strikes me as a cynical view of humanity. The notion that a human with enough money to afford their basic needs would be content to sit around all day watching Love Island reruns and inhaling family-sized bags of Cool Ranch Doritos until they die completely ignores just how fundamental the human search for meaning is; how viscerally we crave purpose and seek challenges. 

“The underlying assumption [of critics] is that if humans are offered the option to be parasites, of course they’ll take it,” Graeber writes, “but leave [people] to their own devices, and they almost invariably rankle even more at the prospect of having nothing useful to do.” In other words, most people don’t need more authoritarian oversight and busy work to keep them contributing to the world—they need more freedom. (The great irony of these concerns about people unfairly leeching off society is that our current system enables some of the most breathtaking examples of shameless parasitic behavior not at its depths, but at its heights, where supposedly the most upstanding among us reign—take the former CEO of UnitedHealth, for instance, whose total compensation topped $142 million in 2021 during the largest global health crisis in 100 years.)

I’ve experienced the upside of financially secure freedom: I started Money with Katie three weeks into the lockdowns of 2020 because my full-time and part-time jobs had skidded to a halt, leaving me with effectively nothing to do. It seems like we used to understand that this is how innovation happens: In 2007, Google engineers were given one free day a week to pursue whatever interested them. They invented Gmail, which is, I’ll admit, alternatively a brilliant creation and a scourge of “Bumping this!” messages. (Eventually, the “free day” policy got relegated to its own siloed group, and these days, the company is more likely to generate headlines like this one.)

Another approach that strikes me as more reasonable than whatever economic fever dream keeps producing ever more jobs like East Coast Dynamic Brand Consultant but not enough, I don’t know, teachers and nurses, would be to approach the economy a little bit like modern newsrooms approach their businesses: The fun stuff (games! recipes! celebrities!) generates most of the revenue, which is then used to fund the necessary, hard, and expensive reporting that sponsors won’t touch. Frivolity’s profits subsidize the essential-but-not-profitable core function of the newspaper. What if all the excesses of trillion-dollar companies were spent not on hiring more “box tickers” and “flunkies,” but instead rerouted where the money was needed for unprofitable essential services? (Did we just reinvent corporate taxation? I guess so, but in my proposal, they actually have to pay.)

The fact that a modern industrialized economy has a bottomless thirst of well-compensated headcount for “digital marketing SEO ninjas” but relatively little demand for artists, educators, musicians, and builders who do work that makes the human experience feel worthwhile is a signal that whichever McKinsey consultant is pulling the strings behind the scenes of our economy with their latest $100 million government contract has been given way too much power to define “value.” Maximum total possible wealth is not, it’s worth stating explicitly, the same thing as maximum shared prosperity, and a society committed to the former will find it impossible to achieve the latter. It seems more and more people are coming around to the idea that this is a foundational, organizational mistake.

There is more than enough money—more than enough real productivity—to accommodate such a shift. And while not every necessary job is glamorous in the traditional sense, things like construction, cooking food, and caring for others are useful to humanity, and thereby inherently meaningful in a way that Graeber’s bullshit jobs, by definition, can’t be.

When people are free to pursue work that is meaningful and interesting to them unbound by the practical limitations of things like keeping a reasonable roof over their head or access to basic medical care, they thrive, and so do the rest of us. This is a somatic truth; I feel it in my bones. As we saw in 2020, when people have more financial breathing room, they are less easy to exploit—and wages for essential jobs rise. Though I didn’t know it yet in 2018, my decision to reorient my entire life around self-insuring my material existence was actually an attempt to expand my autonomy and create more safe options. In doing so, I bought the time, space, and freedom necessary to realize it would probably be more generative to question the systems that structurally limited those options in the first place. 

That’s the paradox of the nebulous monolith that is “corporate culture”—it is enormously powerful and seemingly inescapable, and yet, entirely reliant on unquestioning cooperation from the masses. As Grace Blakeley put it at the end of our show last week, “If we all stop obeying, that’s it.” The challenge, of course, is that disobeying costs money, at least at first. In the meantime, there’s always FI/RE. 

*I have only ever worked for corporations with tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of employees, so I’ll concede working for a four-person startup is—obviously—a radically different experience, but still not immune to BS.

**In fact, a comparison of the growth of “administrative” jobs at public and private universities suggest this sort of Fake Email Job has grown faster in private institutions than public ones, something Graeber explains by pointing to the rich boards of trustees steeped in the logic of the corporate world that are less inclined to question the necessity of layers of coordinators and specialists than the public officials who are more likely to feel pressure to crack down on waste.

***If you listened to last week’s episode of The Money with Katie Show, you know that my guest, Grace Blakeley, doesn’t think universal basic income is a good long-term solution, and is more in favor of universal basic services for the things all humans need to survive. I don’t feel strongly one way or the other, and I think both arguments are worth entertaining.