Culture Many people feel their jobs are pointless - A sociological study by the University of Zurich confirms that a considerable proportion of employees perceive their work as socially useless.

https://www.news.uzh.ch/en/articles/media/2023/Jobs.html

“Do I have a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society?” In US survey data 19 percent of respondents answered “never” or “rarely” to the question.

In recent years, research showed that many professionals consider their work to be socially useless. Various explanations have been proposed for the phenomenon. The much-discussed “bullshit jobs theory” by the American anthropologist David Graeber, for example, states that some jobs are objectively useless and that this occurs more frequently in certain occupations than others.

Other researchers suggested that the reason people felt their jobs were useless was solely because they were routine and lacked autonomy or good management rather than anything intrinsic to their work. However, this is only one part of the story, as a recent study by sociologist Simon Walo of the University of Zurich shows. It is the first to give quantitative support to the relevance of the occupations.

Office jobs twice as likely to feel socially useless​

In his study, Walo analyzed survey data on 1,811 respondents in the USA working in 21 types of jobs, who were asked if their work gave them “a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society” and “the feeling of doing useful work”. The survey, carried out in 2015, found that 19 percent of respondents spread across a range of occupations answered “never” or “rarely” to the questions.

Walo adjusted the raw data to compare workers with the same degree of routine work, job autonomy and quality of management, and found that the nature of the job still had a large effect on their perceived pointlessness once working conditions were excluded as a factor. Employees in the occupations that Graeber deemed useless were more likely to reply in a negative fashion.

Those working in business and finance and sales were more than twice as likely to say their jobs were socially useless than others. Office assistants and managers were also more likely to say this, though less strongly (1.6 or 1.9 times more likely than others).

Private-sector jobs suffer from higher perceived pointlessness​

“The original evidence presented by Graeber was mainly qualitative, which made it difficult to assess the magnitude of the problem,” says Walo. “This study extends previous analyses by drawing on a rich, under-utilised dataset and provides new evidence. This paper is therefore the first to find quantitative evidence supporting the argument that the occupation can be decisive for the perceived pointlessness.” Walo also found that the share of workers who consider their jobs socially useless is higher in the private sector than in the non-profit or the public sector.

Bullshit jobs – a complex issue​

However, Walo’s study also confirms other factors that influence employees’ perceptions of their own work, including, e.g., alienation, unfavorable working conditions and social interaction. “Employees’ assessment of whether their work is perceived as socially useless is a very complex issue that needs to be approached from different angles,” the author therefore concludes. “It depends on various factors that do not necessarily have anything to do with the actual usefulness of work as claimed by Graeber. For example, people may also view their work as socially useless because unfavorable working conditions make it seem pointless.”

Literature:​

Simon Walo: ‘Bullshit’ After All? Why People Consider Their Jobs Socially Useless. Work, Employment and Society. 21 July 2023. DOI:10.1177/09500170231175

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Part and parcel of living in Clown World. I believe Bukowski said it best:

I, for one, am working towards early retirement, since I know for sure that before I hit 50 I'll be pretty burned out from the corporate world (I am already pretty fucking tired but I put up with it), it's all a clownshow and I want out.

Very relevant.

 

[Testacles Maximus]

I felt that way back when I worked in accounting. Restaurant, retail, and general blue collar workers do more for society than I did in that job.

 

[Megaton Punch]

99.999% of humanity: I must labor in the fields because if I don't my family will starve

Modern soys: I can't work unless it meeeeeeeans something! Life is so empty! Sent from my iPhone

Just accept the fact that virtually all people are born, toil in obscurity, and die. You don't mean anything and neither do I.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

It's not the job that's socially useless, it's you that is socially useless. KYS.

 

[Divine right to rule]

That is actually a phenomenon Marx wrote about concerning the industrial revolution.
He called it "alienation".
If your work is completely alienated from the actual product of the whole progress, the more abstract, the more depressing and less fulfilling your work is.
Compare a carpenter who builds a table to a factory worker who makes one of the end-parts of the table legs. The carpenter has control over the whole process, and sees the end-product slowly grow through his own work, and as such the satisfaction is greater. The factory-worker is a cog in a machine in comparison.

He might have been on to something with that concept.
For once.

 

[Neo-Nazi Rich Evans]

file this under "uncle ted was right once again" modern office jobs are useless and humans feel less fulfilled doing them than they do when working in the fields providing a living for their family and communities.

 

[Absolutego]

That is actually a phenomenon Marx wrote about concerning the industrial revolution.
He called it "alienation".
If your work is completely alienated from the actual product of the whole progress, the more abstract, the more depressing and less fulfilling your work is.
Compare a carpenter who builds a table to a factory worker who makes one of the end-parts of the table legs. The carpenter has control over the whole process, and sees the end-product slowly grow through his own work, and as such the satisfaction is greater. The factory-worker is a cog in a machine in comparison.

He might have been on to something with that concept.
For once.

Marx was pretty on-point diagnosing the various maladies with industrial/post-industrial work, it's just that all his solutions to those problems were utopian claptrap.

 

[saintJogger]

In his study, Walo analyzed survey data on 1,811 respondents in the USA working in 21 types of jobs, who were asked if their work gave them “a feeling of making a positive impact on community and society” and “the feeling of doing useful work”.

Well, I have a feeling the people who partook in this study are whiny faggots, since I have no idea what these two claims mean and how they would be assessed. Then again, it could be just a shit article. It's certainly not very specific in explaining the study.

 

[ITK]

99.999% of humanity: I must labor in the fields because if I don't my family will starve

Modern soys: I can't work unless it meeeeeeeans something! Life is so empty! Sent from my iPhone

Just accept the fact that virtually all people are born, toil in obscurity, and die. You don't mean anything and neither do I.

That's exactly the point. A man's labour was once intimately connected with the good of himself and that of his family, it literally sustained their lives. Work nowadays is instead at best completely worthless and at worst it is actively sustaining a system that hates you. If you genuinely think these two things are even remotely comparable you are a total bugman and you do not have a soul.

 

[rel=alternate]

Of course it is "socially useless". It does not mean it is useless per say. People don't need to understand how things work as long as they keep working.

This reminds me of a politician in the EU, who at the time of the 2008 crisis was telling people " they are bailing out banks for billions when they could just give it to you". And believe it or not, many were behind the idea.

This article is really deceptive in this way. It says people think their job is "pointless", then goes on to using qualifier straight away by stating :

many professionals consider their work to be socially useless

This does not mean pointless. Mostly people at the very bottom of the supply chain, like builders, farmers or police can claim to feel socially useful. And the way others may feel about it is not representative of the actual impact they have on society.

 

[y a t s]

This feeling hit me hard a few years ago. I left a decent research position because I felt I was only contributing to our downfall. Most relevant scientific advancement gets repurposed to make our lives worse. Creative pursuits, while not paying nearly as well, feel a lot more like a contribution to society. Even if it's a small contribution, it's better than working on AI.

 

[draggs]

I consider anyone who is worried about the social usefulness of their work to be a retarded communist

The social usefulness of work is to produce wealth so there are things available to be bought and sold so we aren't grubbing worms and living in caves ffs

 

[Kheapathic]

It was already said; but a lot of the emptiness is probably because their non-work lives are empty. No wife, children, or family to labor or toil for. You do your job, get your check, and burn it on frivolities or save it for no purpose just to have it. Your job isn't the problem as much as the rest of your life is, you need purpose to be fulfilled; your job is just burning time with nothing to show for when it's over.

 

[Hollywood Hitler]

If you want to feel a sense of fulfilment with your job, quit you cog in machine office job and do some Mexican work. Pay might not be what you like, but it's off the books, good for fitness, no HR, no Zoomers, and you actually accomplish something.

 

[Harvey Danger]

To survive, humans need: food, water, shelter/clothing, fuel (for a fire or its equivalent), and the tools necessary for those things. Plus a little medical care from time to time.

If your job is directly providing any of those things, you're doing something you instinctively feel is meaningful. The further you get from those activities, the less useful you are, and eventually you feel it. Everything is is nice to have and optional.

Office jobs are automatically pointless, even if you accumulate wealth by doing them.

 

[Kheapathic]

If you want to feel a sense of fulfilment with your job, quit you cog in machine office job and do some Mexican work.

I'm not interested in drunk driving or raping 12 year old girls.

 

[rel=alternate]

That's exactly the point. A man's labour was once intimately connected with the good of himself and that of his family, it literally sustained their lives. Work nowadays is instead at best completely worthless and at worst it is actively sustaining a system that hates you. If you genuinely think these two things are even remotely comparable you are a total bugman and you do not have a soul.

I agree. Now what do we do from here?

Does it not sustain your life anymore? Soul-feeding is the missing part. And that's up to you.

Before you think to idealize what roles were like in the past, you should think hard. You can't even begin to compare what a peasant had to endure to feel "worthy" with you being bored at work. They were literal slaves. The name was just changed to "subjects".

I don't know if I have a soul, but what choice do I have but to shoot my best shot in the boundaries I am given?

I was an idealist when I was a kid, now I am just a cynic. I know enough to know I can't change it. The best I can do is to look out for myself and play the system as much as I can.

If we lived in some type of utopia, maybe things would be different. But we do not. What do you suggest I do? Leech? Go live in a tent or a drain?

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

If your job feels pointless maybe find a hobby that doesn't?

 

[Megaton Punch]

That's exactly the point. A man's labour was once intimately connected with the good of himself and that of his family, it literally sustained their lives. Work nowadays is instead at best completely worthless and at worst it is actively sustaining a system that hates you. If you genuinely think these two things are even remotely comparable you are a total bugman and you do not have a soul.

A man's labor was once growing grain, almost all of which went to feet his lord's army. If he didn't grow enough, they just took it all and left him to starve.

Work never meant anything except for through a pastoral nostalgia for a way of life that never existed. Real life isn't Harvest Moon.

 

[ITK]

Does it not sustain your life anymore?

Our work is nowhere near as connected to our survival as it once was. This is obvious. Back then your life depended on you doing the labour required to sow seeds and harvest, feed your cattle and slaughter them. Now the chain from the production of vital necessities to your consumption of them goes through a system of middle-men, all completely outside of your control and dependant on money. The main way in which your work maintains your life now is through money, but even that's not really true. You would have to go out of your way to starve to death in the modern, industrialized parts of the world. There will always be some welfare program, or some foodstamps, or some soup kitchen, or some people who leach off of. Yet we do not live this way because most people are not content with a life of passive parasitism (as you mention yourself). There is an inherent need for production, for building something. The crux of the issue is that most modern work does not fit this criteria. It contributes in no way to any immediate individual or social good. This is true even for jobs of production, where you actually create or maintain objects, but has been exaserbated by our economy being almost totally subsumed by the service industry. There is simply no way 80% of people are able to create services which actually edify the human soul, which is why historically work pertaining to culture, spirituality or scholarship has been limited to a small subset of the population.
I don't know what the solution is. Not exporting our industry to the thirld world might be a start, though.