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Comment by burntbridge | Hacker News Reader

The Pandemic has definitely shown this to be true. A huge number of people didn't go to work and it didn't really matter. It remains a mystery as to what is driving this. Do bullshit jobs beget more bullshit jobs? A kind of multiplier effect?

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If you are a manager doing a bullshit job, or managing people who are doing bullshit jobs, one of the ways out of of the bullshit (at least for yourself) is to employ more people, giveing you more people to manage. Managing people is not necessarally a bullshit job as there is a lot of compliance and HR type work to do, meaning that what you do is no longer bullshit.

You still have the problem of what to get your new staff to do so you run with what you know. more bullshit. In the military there is the concept of painting rocks to keep people busy, the epitimy of bullshit jobs.

From what I can tell the actual weird part of covid-19 job losses is that the bullshit economy has continued unhindered - by going remote - and it is actually propping up the rest of the economy.

The white collar folks are just filing their TPS reports from home and it has tended to be the people who make or do concrete things who are impacted the most.

As well as bullshit jobs there is a bullshit economy. This part of the economy is based on wants rather than needs. As soon as it became unsafe to participate in we collectively decided it wasn't very important at all.

This is the economy based on conspicuous consumption but there isn't much opportunity to be conspicuous right now. Nobody knows whether I'm wearing designer clothes at home or lounging around in my pyjamas.

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