It’s worth pointing out that feeling like you work in a pointless, meaningless job doesn’t necessarily make it true. This paper is solely about people’s perceptions, not facts.
The opposite of that is also true - feeling like you’re doing something useful doesn’t make it so
Yes. I wonder why they chose the wording they did. It seems like it would be more useful to know if people think their jobs actually are bullshit. Even if office assistants feel like crap about their job I imagine a lot of them would be missed. Likewise, I imagine there’s plenty of teachers that would criticise the way they’re being utilised.
For referance:
He analyzed survey data on 1,811 respondents in the U.S. 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.”
Edit: Ah!
To test the hypotheses derived from Graeber’s theory, binary logistic regression models are estimated with perceived job-uselessness as the dependent variable, using data from the 2015 American Working Conditions Survey (AWCS) (Maestas et al., 2017). The AWCS is based on the RAND American Life Panel, which is a nationally representative sample of individuals living in the US who agreed to participate in regular online surveys.2 From this panel, a probability-based sample was drawn for the AWCS and 3131 responses were registered in total, which accounts to a response rate of 64%. This dataset was chosen mainly for two reasons: on the one hand, it includes a wide range of work-related variables. To the author’s knowledge, it is in fact the only dataset available that allows to control for all factors mentioned above, which is a crucial part of the analyses in this article. On the other hand, it provides data from the US, which is especially interesting since Graeber’s theory may only apply to heavily financialized Anglo-Saxon countries and the US has not yet been analysed individually to date.
Data collected for another purpose was being used. That’s why.
Why does the purpose the data was collected for matter? Either the data is suitable or not. The motive of the pollsters who gathered it is irrelevant, isn’t it?
To be clear, that wasn’t a criticism, just an explanation. Collecting a bespoke survey would have been better but almost certainly was beyond the abilities of this researcher. This is the next best approach.
Great so if I think my job is pointless and meaningless and hate it, I should just keep doing it? Because reasons?
Obviously most jobs are not pointless or meaningless. They exist because we need them to exist for things to function. Perception in this case is ultimately a much more useful metric for nearly any question you may want to answer about jobs.
Job satisfaction? Perception matters more. Job demand? Definitely perception. Mental health of workers? Perception.
What questions do you think are better answered by some kind of more ‘objective’ measure of job meaning?
A person’s perception is highly informed by how well or poorly they understand the subject or situation in question.
Let’s say you got stood up by a first date because they got hit by a car on their way to you. Your perception of them is going to vary wildly depending on whether or not you know the facts behind why they didn’t show up.
Similarly, knowing how you actually fit into things at your job - i.e. your importance to your working group, the company, it’s customers, society itself, allows you to have a more accurate set of facts to base your perception on.
So yes, the truth matters.
yes but ultimately perception is reality.
I’m going to have to disagree with you on this.
People have all sorts of beliefs that can qualitatively be proven as right or wrong. For example, all the wingnuts who believe that the COVID vaccine has trackers from Microsoft. Their beliefs are 100% bereft of reality.
Now, can they go ahead and act on those mistaken beliefs? Sure. But that doesn’t make their beliefs correct in any way.
You’re right of course, but we are talking about two different things.
Oh no, it’s a philosopher. /s
Had the bolsheviks ensconced themselves within the flames of Jesus H Christ they would still be here today. It was right in front of them, but alas they were too short sighted to understand the power of emotion.
I’ve sort of just accepted it. I work in a niche position in a software company that’s in a niche sector and while people do depend on me for their livelyhoods, I wouldn’t say the products I produce are, in the grand scheme of things, meaningful. What I do only exists as a job in the 20th and 21st centuries and humans got on just fine before that.
I instead find meaning in my hobbies and out of work activities. My job, while pretty meaningless in my mind, does pay me enough to allow me to have a good life outside of work. I don’t need my job to be meaningful, I just need it to not suck.
Same here
What I do only exists as a job in the 20th and 21st centuries and humans got on just fine before that.
And your job is probably severely threatened by AI just like every other job out there. Hopefully humans will get on just fine after that, too.
And those who are in crucial meaningful jobs are pushed to their very limits, overworked because “your job is your calling.” (Nurses, teachers, social workers, etc.)
Lol, this is why I left comp engineering to work in a nature preserve
I would LOVE to go back to the tree farm or become a park ranger or something. It just doesn’t pay the bills that my cloud engineering does.
Yeah! Hey in this economy, I regret it at times! In the world we live in, there are always trade-offs. No shame in whatever path you take, as long as you don’t vote Republican!
No shame in whatever path you take, as long as you don’t vote Republican!
Oh you don’t have to worry about that!
plus as a park ranger you gotta be a fucking cop. no thanks, never. ACAB.
Conflating pointless and meaningless is an odd choice. My job, sending invoices, is meaningless but not pointless.
Nothing highlights this as much when your management actually says and believes that “the purpose of our organization is to make money”. Totally clueless people.
No… the purpose is to deliver value to all stakeholders including customers, and society at large and by doing it well make some money. So it maters what you do and how you do it and the vision around it.
completely agree. the market system is just not the best model for resource allocation. we need a more socialised way of allocating resources. the first thing to do is to throw the billionaires into jail and seize their assets.
Some of this and maybe a lot of this is a reflection of ourselves. By this I mean the values we collectively espouse and that come to be represented in media, politics, education including what is learned in business schools, etc. When nothing is enough and competition and winner take all view points are highly valued, well this is what we get.
Reason I say this is that it strikes me that perhaps this is a lot more about ourselves than anyone wants to admit.
This culture/philosophy has been created over time and is called liberalism, it follows follows from the reformation (of the church) and feeds off support from capitalists(and political allies) themselves. This culture that upholds hard work as virtuous and discourages compassion is being taught to almost everyone even though it doesn’t mesh with the real world all that well. Especially what is commonly believed to be the result of hard work is more often than not inheritance or sheer luck.
Yes we all propagate this culture nowadays, but it isn’t actually part of humanity(in some human nature way) it’s just very ingrained propaganda.Some mainland Chinese people might have a very different ingrained culture regarding these things.
I mean, legally, that is the purpose of a for-profit company. From a policymaker’s perspective it has wider purposes, but to the managers that’s basically “not their job”
That is kind of my point exactly. The purpise of companies was not originally so. I is just a view heavily promoted by elites. Even the courts believe it now. Was not always so. Hence it does not always have to be so.
Yes, but what the alternative is isn’t so clear cut. Every corporation thinking through the impacts of their decisions on every other person in the world is obviously unfair (even governments have trouble tracking stuff), and even if they could how do you make them? Benevolent leadership is, if you look across history, a myth.
How do you allow a CEO to work against their shareholders without basically legalising embezzlement? You can’t write every possible scenario into your law, and shouldn’t ever try. How do you get random shareholders to care about a social issue, and how do you assure whatever social issue they pick is a good one and not “putting down the gays”? You could tear up the whole market system and start fresh but I’ve yet to see that done in convincing detail.
The solutions aren’t obvious. I do think they exist, but I’m trying to quit value judgements on the internet, so I won’t write a manifesto here.
PS on the history bit you mentioned, it seems to me a corporation is just an overgrown street peddler, and street peddlers have always been looking to make a profit. The occasions they don’t have been flukes.
Lol, this is why people need hobbies and community involvement. And why they need time off to do those hobbies and other activities.
It helps to get paid a lot to not think about that
very happy i landed a job doing web work for mostly non profit clients. a few lawyers here and there, but we need them, too.
most non profits are just fronts for scams. they always say non-profit, but the profits are taken by the greedy backers. sorry to bust ur dream.
i’ve had the chance to see their work, and they’re bringing good into the world. i care less about where the money is going and more about the net positive for the folks who otherwise wouldn’t have it without the “greedy backers.”
That’s a gross over-simplification. I’d wager that you’re correct that the majority are scammy in nature since it’s so simple to create a nonprofit. But, there are thousands of important nonprofits out there doing good work. In my experience, the people that choose to mostly work with nonprofits are working with important organizations doing good work. That’s anecdotal, but it just seems pointlessly dismissive to lump nonprofits together as bad simply because they’re nonprofits.
Why not assume that this person’s job does some very basic due diligence to confirm they’re working with an authentic organization that’s doing good, rather than trying to “bust ur dream”.
Vox did an interview with David Graeber about this back in 2019.
I moved out of finance into non profit but still doing tech. Every day I try to find “purpose” in my work but a tech job is a tech job. The income is the only reason I can’t jump ship out of BS and into something that I find meaningful.
Sometimes donating to the causes you care about does more good than working in the industry itself. A friend of mine who is really into dancing came to that conclusion.
Not all that surprised.
