| >Now I am curious: was there ever "meaningful work"? Have people "always" searched for such a thing and "never" found it? Sure, Farmer Joe [or whoever] can declare that s/he finds meaning in what they find themselves doing to live, perhaps after the fact of becoming entrenched in the doing of it ... Meaningful work is not about fulfilling someone's dreams or them "becoming entrenched in the doing of it". It's about the work itself having meaning. If farmer Joe didn't farm, people wouldn't be able to eat their veggies. If some office drone doesn't do his job, chances are nothing much would change to the output of their company (assuming the company is actually doing something meaningful and not harmful itself). If anything, some jobs just create more work for other parts of the company, without meaning (e.g. just to satisfy some state or company bureaucratic procedures) as opposed to improving workflows. >ut how common is it for Newboy Johnny to boisterously look upon the world with his newly minted College University degree in hand and say "Yes, this one lifetime career path is just for me and I'll take it!"? It's not 1952 any more. I don't know why anybody younger than I am still believes that any of this is real. They might not believe that any of this is real today, but they could very well believe that the old way is better, and that as active citizens that shape our society and steer it (as opposed to mere pawns that go this or that way randomly as technology or time changes) we should recreate that kind of environment. Changing multiple jobs throughout one's career should be a personal choice, not something imposed by a thankless and merciless corporate consensus -- alongside discarding people after a certain age because they can hire young starry eyed idiots to pay them way less while overworking them. |
In the Graeber "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" sense, it literally is exactly this. It all kicked off with an article whose most concrete example was a former musician who had failed to sell enough albums to not end up as a corporate lawyer instead, but remained convinced his music provided more value to a society that hadn't shown much interest in paying for it.
I suspect pretty much everyone who failed to have a successful music career and subsequently ended up on a production line at a farm, as Graeber puts it in his original litmus test for bullshit jobs "rant about how pointless and stupid their job is" if asked about it at parties. And for that matter I'm also sure there are a whole bunch of people flogging zero-insight reports to the network they made at business school that genuinely believe what they do is extremely valuable to society, even if they never get repeat customers. So the claim that the meaningfulness of work is better defined by the employee than the employer is far from convincing.
I doubt many bright graduates disillusioned with their inability to make much difference to how their corporate employer operates and convinced some of the decisions they're required to implement are counterproductive (yep, I know that feeling well) would start considering the work they performed meaningful if they were redeployed to pressing buttons on a food production line, even if their link in the food production chain directly stopped hundreds of meals from premature decomposition every day. It might even make some of them nostalgic for micromanaging task allocations, whiteboarding brand values, taking this week's compliance course and politely telling the customer to try turning it off and on again. After all, Marx's theory of alienation which Graeber updated for the service industry was entirely focused on people who actually directly contributed to making stuff whilst still feeling useless, powerless and disassociated from what they actually made.
The irony is that there actually is a vast literature out there on principal-agent and adverse selection problems in the workplace, positional goods, regulatory capture etc means that employers might actually pay for services which don't increase their output, but this gets far less currency than Graeber really all about "the ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger"; a theory which doesn't survive contact with reality.