Table of Contents
In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a bold prediction. By now, he said, we’d all be working about 15 hours a week. Three hour workdays. A perpetual long weekend. Technology would make us so productive that we’d meet all our needs in a fraction of the time, leaving us to wrestle with the “problem” of how to fill our leisure hours.
He was half right. We did get dramatically more productive. An office worker today accomplishes in one hour what took five hours in 1970. We produce more per hour than Keynes imagined we would. Yet here we are, still grinding away at 40 hour weeks, some of us working even more than our grandparents did.
What went wrong?
The answer might be stranger than a simple miscalculation. We didn’t just fail to work less. According to anthropologist David Graeber, we actively invented vast categories of pointless work to fill the time we should have freed up. We created what he called “bullshit jobs.”
The Dream That Died
Keynes wasn’t just guessing. He’d watched the Industrial Revolution unfold. He saw factories become automated, saw steam and electricity multiply what human hands could accomplish. Between 1919 and 1925 alone, U.S. factory output jumped 40 percent. The pattern seemed clear: better tools, less work needed.
His logic was straightforward. If we can make more with less effort, we have choices. We could make the same amount of stuff and work less, or make more stuff in the same time. Keynes bet we’d choose leisure. After all, once your basic needs are met, how many more things do you really need?
But Keynes underestimated something crucial about human nature and social organization. We didn’t want to just meet our needs. We wanted to compete, to signal status, to feel important. And somewhere along the way, work itself became the signal.
What Actually Happened
The average American worked 38 hours per week in 1950. Today it’s 34 hours. That’s it. Four hours less after seven decades of technological revolution. We got computers, the internet, artificial intelligence, and automation that would seem like magic to someone from 1950. Yet we freed up less time than it takes to watch a couple of movies.
In technological terms, we absolutely could have a 15 hour workweek. We’re more than capable. The math works. We just chose not to.
Instead, something peculiar occurred. As jobs in manufacturing and agriculture vanished, they were replaced not by leisure but by an explosion of new roles. Jobs in finance, administration, human resources, compliance, consulting, and management. The service sector ballooned. But here’s the strange part: many of these new jobs don’t seem to produce anything.
Enter the Bullshit Job
In 2013, Graeber wrote an essay that went viral in 17 languages. He argued that up to 40 percent of all jobs are, in his words, bullshit. These aren’t jobs that are merely unpleasant or underpaid. They’re jobs that even the people doing them believe serve no real purpose.
A bullshit job, in Graeber’s definition, is work so pointless that even the employee secretly believes it shouldn’t exist. The catch is that part of the job is pretending otherwise. It’s being paid to look busy while knowing, deep down, that if your position vanished tomorrow, nothing of value would be lost.
He identified five types. There are “flunkies” whose main job is making someone else look important. Receptionists who spend hours doing nothing because the boss wants a receptionist. There are “goons” like corporate lawyers who only exist because other companies have corporate lawyers. There are “duct tapers” who fix problems that shouldn’t exist in the first place. “Box tickers” who create documentation nobody reads. And “taskmasters” who create work for the sake of creating work.
The testimonials Graeber collected were darkly comic. A man hired to move a computer five meters, which required two people to drive for six to ten hours, fill out 15 pages of paperwork, and waste 400 euros. A consultant paid six figures to produce reports everyone knew would be immediately filed away and forgotten. A security guard hired to watch an empty room.
The Productivity Paradox
Here’s what makes this situation bizarre: it shouldn’t happen under capitalism. That’s the whole point of market competition, right? Inefficiency gets punished. Companies that waste money on pointless employees should be outcompeted by leaner rivals.
This is why we associated “make work” jobs with the Soviet Union. In centrally planned economies where employment was a right and a duty, governments created jobs for their own sake. The classic example: Soviet department stores that needed three clerks to sell a piece of meat when one would do. That was the inefficiency capitalism was supposed to eliminate.
Yet somehow we’ve ended up with the same phenomenon, wrapped in a capitalist bow. Investment banks hire armies of analysts who produce PowerPoints nobody uses. Consultants fly around the world to deliver advice that gets ignored. Entire departments exist primarily to manage other departments that exist to manage other departments.
The money flows. The org charts expand. Everyone’s busy. And yet, if you ask the people doing this work, many will tell you in private that none of it matters.
Why We Can’t Stop Making Up Jobs
The explanations for this mess are layered and sometimes contradictory.
One answer is what Graeber called “managerial feudalism.” In the past, lords kept large retinues of followers not because they needed them but because having followers proved you were a lord. Today’s executives do something similar. Your importance is signaled by how many people report to you. Having a large team isn’t about getting work done. It’s about status. The work becomes secondary to the display.
There’s also the Protestant work ethic on steroids. Somewhere along the line, Western culture decided that work itself was virtue. Not accomplishment. Not results. Just the act of working. Being busy became righteous. Having leisure became suspicious. We started to believe that people who don’t work hard at jobs they don’t enjoy are morally deficient.
This creates a strange dynamic. We know much of our work is pointless. We resent having to do it. But instead of demanding change, we resent people who aren’t trapped in the same cycle. We get angry at those on unemployment benefits, not because they’re getting something for nothing, but because we’re getting nothing for something.
Politicians understand this. Keeping people busy at jobs, any jobs, prevents unrest. A population spending 40 hours a week at work has less time to question the system or organize against it. “Creating jobs” becomes the goal, regardless of whether those jobs serve any purpose.
Then there’s the money question. If productivity gains meant we could all work 15 hours a week, someone had to capture those gains. That someone was not workers. CEO pay increased 937 percent since 1978. Average worker pay went up 10.2 percent. The fruits of automation didn’t buy us leisure. They bought our bosses their third yacht.
The Counterintuitive Twist
Here’s where it gets interesting, and where the research gets messy.
When researchers tried to test Graeber’s theory with hard data, they found something unexpected. Yes, people who feel their jobs are useless suffer psychologically. That part checked out. But the numbers didn’t support Graeber’s claim that 40 to 50 percent of jobs are bullshit.
Studies in Europe found only about 17 percent of workers felt their jobs were socially useless. And oddly, there wasn’t much correlation between the jobs Graeber identified as bullshit and whether people actually felt that way. Garbage collectors and janitors, doing obviously useful work, often felt their jobs were pointless. Meanwhile, some consultants and administrators felt their work mattered.
The better predictor of feeling useless wasn’t what job you had but how you were managed. Bad bosses, toxic workplace culture, and lack of autonomy made people feel their work was meaningless, regardless of what they actually did. The problem might be less about job categories and more about alienation in the Marxist sense. People feel disconnected from the purpose of their work because they have no control over it.
So maybe Graeber was partly right about what jobs are bullshit, but wrong about why people feel that way. Or maybe the problem varies by country, by industry, by era. The truth is probably messier than any single theory.
The Hidden Purpose of Useless Work
There’s a darker reading of all this. Perhaps bullshit jobs aren’t a bug in the system but a feature.
Think about what happens when everyone works less. People have time. Time to think. Time to organize. Time to notice that things could be different. Time to ask uncomfortable questions about who has what and why.
The 1960s and 1970s saw both declining work hours and massive social upheaval. The civil rights movement, antiwar protests, feminism, environmentalism. People had enough breathing room to imagine alternatives. Then came the 1980s and the return to longer hours, stagnant wages, and the “grind” culture. Coincidence?
Keeping people busy, even at pointless tasks, serves social control. You’re too exhausted to protest when you’ve spent all week in meetings about meetings. Too ground down to question the system when you’re scrambling to meet arbitrary deadlines.
The pointlessness might be the point.
The Meaning Crisis
There’s another layer here about what work means to us psychologically. We derive identity from our jobs in a way that would puzzle most humans throughout history. “What do you do?” is usually the second question we ask when meeting someone new. The answer tells us how to place them in our mental hierarchy.
When your job is bullshit, this creates a strange psychological violence. You spend a third of your waking life doing something you believe is worthless, but you’re expected to derive meaning and identity from it. You can’t admit the truth to others because that would be admitting your own superfluousness. So you pretend. You perform importance. You go through the motions.
This might explain why the strongest reaction to Graeber’s essay was relief. Finally, someone said it out loud. All those people sitting in offices, in their business casual, having conference calls, felt seen. They weren’t crazy. The emperor really was naked.
But recognition alone doesn’t solve anything. We’re still showing up Monday morning to jobs we know don’t matter, pretending they do.
The Status Trap
Here’s an irony Graeber highlighted: bullshit jobs often come with prestige and good pay. Corporate lawyers make far more than teachers or nurses. Consultants are respected professionals. HR coordinators have authority and benefits.
Meanwhile, the jobs that obviously matter to society, the ones we couldn’t function without, are often low paid and low status. The people who clean hospitals, who care for children and elderly, who fix our infrastructure, they’re barely visible. We clapped for essential workers during the pandemic, then promptly forgot about them.
This inverse relationship between social value and compensation is no accident. It reflects who has power to set wages and who doesn’t. It also reflects what we claim to value versus what we actually reward.
The result is that even people trapped in bullshit jobs have incentives to defend them. They’re well compensated for their meaninglessness. Moving to work that matters might mean taking a pay cut, losing status, hearing their family ask why they’re wasting their education.
The Way Out?
Graeber’s proposed solution was universal basic income. If people had their basic needs covered, they could pursue work that actually mattered to them without fear of poverty. They could say no to bullshit jobs. The market for meaningless work would collapse.
There’s also the question of whether we even know what meaningful work looks like anymore. Generations raised in the bullshit jobs economy might struggle to imagine alternatives. Our entire conception of professional life is built around performative busy work. What would we do if we admitted we could accomplish everything necessary in 15 hours a week?
What Keynes Got Wrong and Right
In the end, Keynes was wrong about the specifics but right about the underlying tension. We did achieve the technological capacity for abundance and leisure. We just chose to use it differently.
We chose competition over contentment. Status over satisfaction. We chose to keep everyone busy rather than let them be free. We invented elaborate systems of meaningless work and convinced ourselves they mattered.
But Keynes also predicted we’d face a crisis of meaning once our material needs were met. He was right about that too. We’re experiencing it now, just in a twisted form. Instead of wrestling with too much leisure, we’re wrestling with too much pointless work.
The question isn’t whether we could work less. We could. The question is whether we can untangle work from identity, from worth, from the whole moral architecture we’ve built around it. Can we admit that much of what we do serves no purpose except keeping us too busy to notice?
That’s a harder problem than Keynes imagined. Technology can’t solve it. Only we can, by deciding we’ve had enough of pretending. By choosing meaning over the appearance of productivity. By valuing actual contribution over busy work.
The tools for a 15 hour workweek exist. They’ve existed for decades. What we lack is the courage to use them.
