Bullshit jobs

I was reading an article in The Economist from 2018, an interview with David Graeber entitled “Bullshit jobs and the yoke of managerial feudalism,” and thinking about my own professional experience.

Broadly, I did non-partisan research for parliamentarians. The concept, presumably, was that it would help make for better law to have independent materials produced by highly qualified researchers. The impression I formed during my tenure is that many politicians in a partisan environment are uninterested in non-partisan research.

I couldn’t say how much of my work went unread by the target audience. And it wasn’t just researcher work: there were reviewers and translators and formatters too. All of us getting paid — some of us getting well paid — to produce high quality information that had no appreciable impact on governance.

There was a game that spoke to the futility of the work. If a parliamentarian actually asked one of the questions you’d prepared, you got a point! Points were also futile but were prized in their rarity. My recollection is the vast majority of my points came from parliamentarians whose political affiliation meant they would likely never govern.

The parties who take turns governing seemed to prefer partisan research and presumably had their own budgets dedicated to that purpose. So instead of asking questions designed to identify problems with the law that should be addressed in order to make citizens’ lives better, there’d be “questions” ranting about what the other team did or would do in power. Sometimes parliamentarians would monologue for so long in the guise of a question that the experts flown in to share their expertise for the betterment of Canada would have no time to answer. Thanks for stopping by.

Other questions for other witnesses basically boiled down to: “Could you run out your time elaborating on how great my team is?”

It was, per David Graeber, bullshit, and I burned out. Not only did my work feel pointless, I started to feel complicit. I felt like my participation as a professional gave credibility to a system that does not deserve it.

So now I’m trying to figure out a better way to use my skills and expertise than preparing research that goes largely unread.

So far my solution is a website that goes largely unread. But I’m working on that.

I’m also working on connecting with others like me, who have trouble contributing to a very bad status quo. I want to talk more openly about the bullshit, and the “awful sadomasochistic workplace dynamics” of institutions that in practice exist just to perpetuate themselves.

I especially want to hear about work that isn’t bullshit.