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by eli_gottlieb 3360 days ago
Look, we all know there are much harder jobs than a 9-5 office job. However, I think an interesting question is:

How necessary is the job? How much does the job satisfy human needs, or contribute to human well-being? If it simply doesn't, if its only function is institutional, why should we consider it anything less than barbaric, or even perverse? Institutions such as businesses exist to serve people, after all, and doing things the other way around has been at the heart of some of the 20th century's major atrocities.

http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

>Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

1 comments

If my job, and even the entire company I work at, disappeared today, not a single soul would notice. Or they might casually notice, but their life would not be affected in any meaningful way.

The work is soul destroying, I'd love to be doing something better.

Yep. There's immense dignity in doing something that society really needs done, even when it's hard work. There's also immense degradation in working hard when you secretly know society doesn't need you, and you're just doing it so someone you think is delusional will pay you.