Book Review: "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber

My brother recommended that I read a book called Bullshit Jobs because I might enjoy what it had to say. Now, I have been focusing on reading more nonfiction but I do feel like ever since I read a book called May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans, I have been putting everyone's research methods under the microscope. So even though I enjoyed what the book was about and its clear witty examples and anecdotes, the evidence that it is based on is shaky at best. If I could not use 'trust me bro' as a source at university, then people actually in research shouldn't be able to do it either. Bullshit Jobs is a book which is a great example of good writing and bad research compiled together to make something quite extraordinary: a nonfiction book you probably shouldn't take too seriously.

The author explains that once upon a time he wrote an article for a news outlet titled Strike! and that this article got so many hits that it broke through the journalism stratosphere. Now, back when it was initially published, I did actually read the article, I just didn't remember who the author was and so didn't make the connection between the two. But, when I did find out that this was by the same guy my mind went 'oh yeah, the shoddy research methods definitely add up to make the fact that they are the same person.' Anyways, he explains that this book is like an expansion of the article, delving deeper into the world of anthropology mostly through anecdotal evidence from a 'random' selection of people and YouGov surveys that nobody has ever heard of.

The book does make some points I agree with and some that I find to be laughable. The 'meaninglessness' of work does not destroy the soul. I'm sorry but I almost threw the book in at this point. This point really made me think about how dense one person has to be to make these two points simultaneously:

1. Work should not be the centre of our lives
2. Meaningless work destroys our souls

Someone has a case of the 'should haves'. The author gives absolutely no concrete evidence for 'meaningless work destroys our souls' apart from some people who are cherry picked by the author for their complaining. I know that he offers us the opposing opinion but this is nowhere near as much as the complaining folk.

He makes a point about how people should be doing meaningful work if they want to lead meaningful lives and then discusses how work culture is tipped out of our favour anyway. This is a mental stretch at best. Another thing he states is that people should not just shut up and be grateful that they have a job with nothing to do rather than seeking out more meaningful work.

This actually makes me think that this person has either never had a job, or is being disingenuous on purpose. Anyone who has a job knows full well that those who are doing the bare minimum and still getting paid, or are getting paid for doing nothing are plain sailing and we would all like to be those people. But our spiritualist author thinks it is bad for our soul despite the fact he can never actually define what the soul actually is or why it is actually bad for our soul at all.

I understand it can be bad for our psychology because it makes us disconnected from our work, but if our work should not be the centre of our lives (according to our author) then why does this matter? Another question that is never answered in this book.

I agree with the fact that we have basically sold our time to someone else who now, counts our minutes and works against us so that we more han likely simply die on the job instead of leading any form of meaningful existence. However, this is more true for someone working in the labour industry than it is for the office worker, who has far more freedoms. This is where the author does not factor in the labour worker. But, the author does admit that it is usually the office worker that has the bullshit job.

I did however enjoy the part in Chapter 5 where an interviewee named Irene says that Data Science is a bullshit job because all they do is run software through data to make pretty pictures out of it and then give it to the boss who can't even read it anyway. I don't think this is entirely true but I did find it funny. But then again, I think that this is part of the problem with the whole book. The people that he is asking are just random people, they aren't people who have studied this phenomenon, they aren't people who have investigated the 'whys'. They are just random people who have or work with people who have bullshit jobs. This is not a metric and does not count as data.

There's a lot of Marxism which is left without reference and for that I'm going to say that the author is probably picking inference out of the air. This is again the same for the vast majority of the book - there are no footnotes. For a book which claims to be an academic study to only have a handful of references, I mean I know exactly how my university lecturers would feel about me being so bold in my ideas as to not connect them up to research. If this man is using Marxism so often to support his points then there is likely to be someone else who has also researched this topic. Thus, there is a requirement for referencing ideas - a few graphs is simply not enough.

All in all, I thought that this book was fun though it does have some very obvious underlying flaws. I don't think that this is a book we need to take seriously but it is a book we need to read. I think many people will find things they don't agree with in this book but I also think that this is the whole point of it. I liked it, I didn't love it and I thought it had some apt ideas, though there was no data to back them up.