The Bullshit-Job Boom

For more and more people, work appears to serve no

purpose. Is there any good left in the grind?

By Nathan Heller

June 7, 2018

The anthropologist David Graeber, in a new book, seeks a diagnosis and epidemiology for what

he calls the “useless jobs that no one wants to talk about.”

Illustration by Martina Paukova

Bullshit, like paper waste, accumulates in offices with the inevitability of February snow.

Justification reports: What are these? Nobody knows. And yet they pile up around you, Xerox-

warmed, to be not-read. Best-practices documents? Anybody’s guess, really, including their

authors’. Some people thought that digitization would banish this nonsense. Those people were

wrong. Now, all day, you get e-mails about “consumer intimacy” (oh, boy); “all hands” (whose

hands?); and the new expense-reporting software, which requires that all receipts be mounted on