[temp-dude-87844]

The LinkedIn angle doesn't contribute to the other points, and even as framing it doesn't help. While the stuff put on there may be fictitious and the interactions with it are just signalling, it doesn't relate to the observation that many people seem to place a higher significance on their work than just a paycheck, or that they expect some degree of fulfillment, a chance to make an impact, or an opportunity to leverage their experience and relationships for later gain.

This mainstream self-actualization of work is probably an artifact of knowledge work moving from the domain of the intellectual elites towards the masses, which broadened the prospects of people beyond working on the fields or factories for a lifetime. Two generations of this during an economic boom created a recipe that was immortalized in culture, but didn't work as well this time, and the ones who were spoonfed the dogma are still reeling from the bust, while the ones who were rich enough or lucky enough have made it through fine. The angst about the lack of job-related fulfillment transcends generations, but it mixes with the realization that they likely can't leverage their job experience and relationships to advance forward. And despite all the armchair economists repeating the refrain that the economy is not zero sum, people aren't blind and know that their relative losses to their peers affect their future prospects and likely stunt them for life.

Nonetheless, we shouldn't conflate intellectual fulfillment with financial security, and their respective lack thereof. People earning well who feel professionally unfulfilled have options to find something they like more, without the crushing pressure of needing uninterrupted income. And those engaged in fulfilling work with tangible impacts can get paid peanuts; in these cases it's often their emotional attachment to their work that keeps them going. It's most unfortunate when the two conditions coincide. But it should also not come as a surprise, as there's no morality in the economic system itself; rather, all money being paid out is coming from somewhere else, because somewhere someone thinks it's where it should go. The people in bullshit jobs wish they were in control, but control is harder to come by than money. Others on a different tier of Maslow's just wish for money, and so on.

[TeMPOraL]

> And despite all the armchair economists repeating the refrain that the economy is not zero sum, people aren't blind and know that their relative losses to their peers affect their future prospects and likely stunt them for life.

Economy as a whole may not be zero-sum, but this reminds me of the stuff we did on maths/physics classes. You'd have a thing X with some aggregate quality, but there was a way of "drawing a circle", selecting a subset of X which has the opposite aggregate quality. It's easy to draw circles over our economy that surround areas that are zero-sum, or even negative-sum. I think a lot of complaints about bullshit jobs come from people who realize they're stuck in one of such areas.