Many people in finance, sales and management feel their jobs are pointless
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"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
As more and more work becomes automated or done by robots, we have less and less to actually do, but with a growing population. So we make up all this work and have 1/2 the population digging holes so the other 1/2 can fill them in. I fully expect that by the time my [eventual] grandchildren enter the workforce, more than 50% (maybe more than 75%) of jobs will be make-work that just serves to employ people so that society doesn't fall apart.
Now we're supposed to have millions of people face the question and at the same time tell them "no, there's nothing useful for you to do, robots can already do it faster, cheaper, and more efficiently than you will ever manage." So, what? Do we tell everyone "just go smoke weed and play video games"? Or "go kayaking and hiking and rockclimbing and find yourself in nature"? The latter will not scale. Many natural places are already overcrowded and we don't even have a post-work economic system in place.
I think a large portion would choose video games over this...
For myself I both enjoy video games, and enjoyed/felt fulfilled by my time volunteering with an elementary school program to assist children who were having trouble learning to read at the same pace as their peers.
Definitely! I’ve spent a good amount of time volunteering with kids, teaching them to read and helping them with homework.
But demographics are against us on this one. Children and elderly people are very much in the minority on any population distribution plot. I have personally been in situations where the number of adult volunteers greatly outnumbered the kids they were there to work with. It’s funny and a bit awkward but you get through it, usually by shifting over to board games and other large group activities.
It would be a totally different story if everyone was looking to do this stuff. A hundred volunteers with half a dozen kids or elderly folks is just not going to work. Most will be sent home.
I think it’s the same story with any group who might benefit from this. It could work if we doubled or tripled the number of people available to help out, but 10x or 20x (or more) would be unworkable.
You might say that a large number of people already volunteer for this work, but a handful of hours per week. There’s no way we could absorb millions of new volunteers for 40 hours per week each, that would be excessive.
The last thing I would add is that there are tons of people who are simply unsuitable for this kind of care work. They’re naturally disagreeable people. They may also be restless and easily bored. They would much rather be outside working or messing around.
My other conviction is that people find their own meaning with absurd ease when they're children. Then that becomes non-viable. If it ever were to become viable again -- if they didn't have to work at the gas station to cling to existence that keeps them from sleeping under a bridge -- then their ability to find meaning will come back.
Also, the COVID lockdowns gave us a glimpse at "nothing to do". Finding meaning is pretty hard for many people, especially if you can drown any form of boredom in endless consumption of shows, video games and social media.
The FIRE community have won the ruined game -- they're what you get when you remove the financial need, but keep the same psychological objective function, keep the same screwed-up sociality. They might be lounging by the pool but they're still stuck in the old mode of being. The ones who transcend the old workday-grind-mode are doing great. But that's non-trivial.
There was a really good article on this that I found recently ... Ah yes, here it is [1]. This is a thought-provoking take on a similar topic.
[1] https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/notes-on-privilege
looks like someone under influence :)
Finding meaning is simply less important than having food on the table and a social circle, even if it’s just the watercooler talk with colleagues.
Not saying it’s impossible to find meaning outside of employment, but my observation and experience is that it’s not as easy as "stop working bullshit jobs and you will find meaning easily".
This completely discards the premise. We're talking about a hypothetical world where we don't need work from people, and where it would make very little sense to require meaningless work in exchange for having your needs met.
(We're also talking about the actual present world, where we don't need nearly as much work as we're forcing people to do, so the above should still be partially true, but it really isn't.)
Everybody today lives more like the aristocrats of old, we just don't notice it because it's common. If you got a special dress for your wedding, you're imitating what used to be a preposterous display of wealth for the elites. Your great-grandmother probably just got married in her nicest dress.
Meaning-making is harder when you've conquered the problem of mere survival, but not impossible.
Some aristocrats just played cards all day, or engaged in elaborate parties, or invested enormous effort into climbing the social hierarchy, or dicked around incompetently ordering the common people into stupid wars.
And some did philosophy, art, science, engineering, and exploration.
We have an absolutely enormous task ahead of us: the climate crisis. I think we could occupy ourselves with that for the next few centuries at minimum.
Well, it certainly won't be possible as long as we tie people's housing, food, and health care to their ability to convince others they are useful.
Society currently sends the message: "If you aren't useful, you don't deserve housing, food, and health care". I think the existential angst is something we have to address as we transition into that post-work economic system, but I don't think it's actually possible to address until we make that transition.
There really needs to be some return to commons where ownership of certain things is just discarded so that everyone has the opportunity for self-reliance and self-actualization without needing to provide something of value for others. Community gardens, city parks, and city pools are like the fuzzy, myopic, "My memory's not as good as it used to be" view of that commons fitting into the modern world. The problem is that kind of participation doesn't provide a verifiable exploitable value the way that working under someone towards a set goal does, and our modern economic systems BSOD at even the thought.
In short, it's okay to not be useful just so long as you have something you want to do. Intellectual stimulation will always be a core need, but working for sustenance doesn't have to be.
Nonsense. As this very article shows, many people find no meaning in their job. They feel dejected by working bullshit jobs every day and receiving shit pay in return. They do find meaning in things like raising a family, which ironically is something that is less and less attainable for the working man/woman, as the working class gets a lower share of wealth and things like housing skyrocket.
That's one problem but not the most crucial one. There will be a bunch of people complaining that they do all the work while the freeloaders have it easy.
We can see that today as people don't want universal health care or social safety nets because these people feel the freeloaders are taking advantage of them.
Presumably the weed smoker might occasionally leave home. Someone must pave the road he drives on. Someone must build the weed-smoker’s car.
For all those people doing things for the weed-smoker, someone must manage them. They will work in multiple enterprises. Someone must work to sell things between those different enterprises. This might seem inefficient, but humans have not figured out a better way to do it.
And all that explains exactly why, despite what people prattle on and on about with there being useless jobs, people do in fact remain employed and even as wasteful as that employment sometimes is, there is no better alternative on a social scale. Because when it all comes down to it, people want the benefits that modern society provides. That requires that people work. The alternative is living as a solitary mountain man. Not many people try that—and that, lo and behold, takes even more work.
Your implied solution is to have the person sweep the floor by hand before the sweeping robot makes a second pass in half the time. How will that help the person feel any better? If the machines supass us, forcing people to do busy work will not make them feel better.
For example, the pine bark beetle is ravaging the forests of the Sierra Nevadas. Millions of dead trees just waiting for the next PGE power line to drop or lightning bolt to strike so why not head out with a few thousand young bodies and start felling that timber and getting it to mills?
What about some sea walls? Forget waiting for giant cranes and pontoons, how about people start dropping cement rubble in the ocean around coastal communities, one dinghy at a time? The coral is on its way out, time to reinvent some of that Roman cement and mitigate the hurricanes' impact.
How many roads could use some form of a retaining wall in the event of a deluge? There's got to be thousands of spots in the US alone. Wire covered rubble? Gabions? Deadman walls? Whatever works!
The list goes on and on.
I love videogames, but the few times of my life where I genuinely did just play games all day for weeks or months, I felt awful. I just couldn't bring myself to do anything else.
Maybe there is a future where video games optimize around giving life meaning once there is little work to be done.
Designing a game where the goal was to create strong friendships between players would be a pretty interesting task.
Instead if I don't punch in for the day I won't outlive the next paycheck.
The public park gets swept by a robot.
The robot gets repaired by a bigger robot.
The robots are designed by AI.
Then you get into the world of white collar work, where the "let's optimize society to minimize toil" solution, by and large, is to just eliminate the job wholesale. Accounting exists because the tax codes are too complicated, so streamline them and their jobs could be done by some API calls and Excel formulas. The entire finance sector is superfluous if money isn't the driving motivator in society. Entire militaries can be replaced by a "If we are attacked, we glass everyone we have even minor beef with" MAD systems. Trash pickups can be automated by tube systems. Food production is already largely automated outside of the produce aisle, so maybe we just cut back on foods that we can't harvest mechanically.
Frankly, the biggest sector that couldn't be fundamentally altered by a such a societal shift using just yesterday's tech is construction.
I think you underestimate how difficult something like this would be.
I mean, I agree that as long as you have someone/something supplying the food gloop packets to the store, taking out the waste, and fixing the machines, pretty much everything in a McDonalds could be automated as a closed system.
But we're talking about billions to trillions of dollars of investment.
Just maintaining the frosty machines is outrageously expensive.
We haven’t done it yet only because we require people to do menial labor for shit wages so they don’t starve.
Heck, several local restraints have done away with most wait staff. You sit down and order via a web site.
Graeber was an anthropologist. He recognizes that having a purpose is good for humans.
Among the examples he gives are people joining the military. Versus say becoming a corporate wage slave. For many, it's one of the few tracks available which offers "helping people", "serving my country", and other purposeful motivations. And the positive of having a purpose can outweigh all the negatives of serving (low pay, relocation, risks).
Another facet Graeber covers is the "service economy", including "knowledge workers". He challenges the idea that people need results oriented work to feel job satisfaction.
Alternately, Graeber suggests using the category "care work". All the things people and society needs to function well. Nurses, cops, soldiers, councilors, running a soup kitchen, volunteer work, etc.
Sadly, our current economic model devalues "service work". The focus on profits and productivity and efficiency is anathema to the work of people caring for other people.
Just to note the issue, I believe (but cannot prove) "productive work", where labor is part of making something, is orthogonal to "care work", and should be considered separately. Or at least be included thesis which is larger than a drive-by HN comment.
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Highest recommendation for
"The Utopia of Rules" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules
Developing his Bullship Jobs thesis, Graeber tries to take on bureaucracy. Many critics get stuck on his prior criticisms of neoliberal economics. They're missing the point. Bureaucracy is (apparently?) a trait of modernism and (apparently?) central to all systems of government and economics.
I would LOVE continued exploration of the territory scouted by Graeber, Scott's Seeing Like a State, the Ehrenreich's professional middle class (PMC), and I'm sure many others. (Sorry, I still haven't read much about Marxism and its critics.)
It's so sad that Graeber passed.
There's a huge chasm where a leftist criticism of bureaucracy should be. Like the failed promise of the administrative state. Like how "the system" is dehumanizing when it should empower. Like if we understood it better, maybe we can minimize capitalism's dark pull on the state (panopticon, taylorism of all things, cost disease, accelerating credentialism). Etc, ad nauseum.
The closest (adjacent) work that I'm aware of is now being driven by the Inflation Reduction Act. Stuff like permitting reform, better governance, scaling up the administrative state (necessary to roll out renewables at the scale required). All the PvP stuff where opposing concerns and incentives are in tension.
Administrative capacity is one of David Roberts' obsessions. His Volts podcast has terrific episodes tackling this and related concerns. https://volts.wtf
Please share anything you might think is relevant. TIA.
I understand what he’s saying the problem is, I think it’s just part of how complex processes such as companies and governments expand.
However, part of me leans in the efficient market side of, yes there are inefficiencies but once capital is justly expensive, then the wheat is separated from the chaff. If a company could do something more cheaply with equal quality, they will probably try that.
Though the larger a company gets, the easier it is to “hide” these busy-work jobs.
Further, we don’t know the outcome of UBI. We saw a glimpse of it during covid.
A very rough trial, but many people were getting more money via unemployment than by a minimum wage job.
Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking. Surely part of the pandemic in general, but I think there’s a human-nature aspect of path-of-least-resistance.
I’m not convinced our society has the proper values to take UBI healthily, I think it will exacerbate the existing meaning crisis we’ve been in since religion has started to decline. We have young kids going to nihilism and mainstream outlets justifying this as a good thing. I think the last thing we need is to give people more time to ruminate on these ideas with a slosh fund.
In a perfect world we could have UBI, have a subset of the population be the productive earners that can make more money over the UBI, and those on UBI would use the time and money for creative enhancement of themselves and society.
But I think that’s too optimistic an outlook. We have foundational problems with many aspects of western civilization that need to be addressed before we add fuel to the fire.
I know people who, if they didn't have to work, would just sit around binging TV all day.
I also know people who, if they didn't have to work, would probably somehow discover faster-than-light travel or solve world hunger or something.
It might not be culture. It might be personality that determines what we do in "idleness." More likely, it's a mix of both.
Lots of people project this “you just want to be lazy”, but honestly, that’s not it at all. Hordes of people cannot just sit around and watch tv, as is demonstrated by the wealth of people who retire and then become extremely bored.
Contributing where you want to contribute is a very much different thing than just wanting to be lazy.
>Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking. Surely part of the pandemic in general, but I think there’s a human-nature aspect of path-of-least-resistance.
Reminds me of an Onion article that's stuck in my mind: "Man Not Sure Why He Thought Most Psychologically Taxing Situation Of His Life Would Be The Thing To Make Him Productive"
https://www.theonion.com/man-not-sure-why-he-thought-most-ps...
It's very hard if not impossible to extract lessons from the pandemic that aren't about pandemics or basic proofs of possibility. E.g., we learned that the economy doesn't collapse during "shut downs" of certain activities, but we can't get any good numbers of monetary damage for a future shutdown choice. We might estimate the COVID shut-downs caused $X of damage, but good luck removing the influence of COVID's medical specifics and surrounding culture war.
For your example, COVID-related unemployment assistance tells us nothing because (1) a pandemic restricts activity; (2) a pandemic is stressful and people look to mindless activities to cope; and (3) everyone knew the checks would end one day, but some didn't know if they'd find a job by then. It wasn't a good analogue to UBI.
This will never, ever not be the case. Working age people today don’t even expect social security to exist when they need it. How could you possibly guarantee a UBI to the level you’re asking?
==Most these individuals sat around hedonically watching TV, smoking weed, or drinking.==
Is this from your personal experience or is there a study that shows this outcome?
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...
Is there evidence for that statement?
I remember I was very motivated at the start of lockdowns but 3 months in I had basically resorted to binging video games for the rest of the 7 months.
With all due respect to mister Fuller, this sounds like bullshit from someone that hasn't worked in manufacturing.
Quality manufacturing processes are hard, and this complexity only increases with the sophistication of what's being produced. Usually, the measurement systems in place are a tradeoff between cost, efficacy, and regulatory requirements - and I guarantee if an inspection can be removed, some engineer is begging to do it.
There's always more work to be done. There will always be details discovered that are not automated yet. There will always be new topics unexplored that robots have not been built for yet. A general purpose robot is by definition a "jack of all trades" compromise that cannot do what specialized humans do first.
This need for humans to explore is where all the progress and all the money is, and how you fight off both the bullshit jobs and AI taking our jobs.
Being able to survive without 'working' sounds like a dream, but I get hung up on the technicalities of it all.
One technicality that blocks me is something I encountered not that long ago...
How do you compensate those that will come dig in human manure, sometimes for hours, to fix a house's clogged pipe? I had to do that: toilets wouldn't flush anymore, shits floating and all. I didn't know where the pipes were exactly and one them, the last one before the sewers, was clogged. So basically 40 meters of shit blocked inside the pipe, which then started overflowing on the property, for weeks (or months), unnoticed.
The plumber couldn't come immediately (it was a sunday late in the afternoon) but would be there next morning.
So for five hours I dig into human manure to find the damn pipe (which I more or less knew where it was located). It saved the plumber five hours of digging into, literally, shit and piss (saved me five hours of billing and five hours of waiting for things to be fixed too).
In that "without working" society, who digs into human manure? Who comes to pick up the trash? Who comes to fix a broken AC? Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren't working?
That's what I don't get.
If you do 30 hours of plumbing a week for 80$ an hour, you make that UBI + 2400$ a week (or wherever the market seems your work worth).
There is always an incentive to do more, and especially as long as the market incenctivises/rewards more or less useful things (e.g. externalities get properly accounted for), then people which aren't content with bare survivability will at least for part of their time do something deemed "useful" or undesirable.
Society then probably gets restructured so that everyone is expected to get at least a PhD rather than a bachelors. Mathematic literacy matches that of linguistic literacy - it will no longer be socially acceptable to claim you are bad at math the same way it's no longer acceptable to be unable to read or write. Almost everyone will have the engineering knowledge necessary so they know how to fix and program the robots. Everyone learns multiple languages and does part of their studies abroad so there is less destructive nationalism. Society starts to value knowledge and the dissemination of knowledge more than the accumulation of capital and wealth which only leads to the destructive forces of extreme inequality and wealth. We start moving towards a more utopian Star Trek vision of the world, hopefully culminating in the creation of a machine like the replicator and the ability to perform interstellar travel which would truly be the end of the scarcity dynamic and a new era of humanity based on abundance and scientific exploration.
Number of People with Bachelors degrees continues to grow:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2021/02/22/new-...
Number of People with Masters and PhD degrees doubled since 2000:
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/02/number-of-peo...
Same as today, with money.
Unlike today, someone receiving poverty support who does this won’t lose nearly as much in poverty support as they make digging in shit, so the marginal return on digging in shit will be greater.
UBI (under some different names) was initially proposed as a conservative alternative to means-tested poverty support, specifically because it relieves perverse incentives and reduces duplication (with the tax system) of function in means-tested benefit programs.
> In that “without working” society, who digs into human manure? Who comes to pick up the trash? Who comes to fix a broken AC? Who wants to spend 12 years studying medicine to save the lives of those who aren’t working?
Being able to minimally survive without working and not being punished by having the support rapidly, at a high ratio, reduced when you have outside income separate from the basic support does not mean not working is the norm in society.
In the situation you describe, I would have a pretty strong motivation to fix the problem if it was my property (deeply unpleasant living conditions). If it was my neighbor's property, I would also have a strong motivation to fix it (sense of community). Neither of those things is tied to money.
Not everyone is motivated by the same things. Avarice is not the root of all industry.
I think the argument is that there is inherent value in helping fellow man/woman, self actualization, etc - and that is the reward in itself.
I do not agree with this.
If I have to do work or starve, maybe I'm willing to dig shit for $15/hr.
If nobody has to do work to survive, suddenly you have to shell out $300/hr to motivate someone to do it.
And tbh, the kind of person that would study medicine for 10 years is probably not gonna be the kind of person to settle for the survivability-level income of UBI.
Of course, those who do want to show up on that 30 under 30 list can make different choices to get ahead in the way they interpret that meaning.
UBI brings more options for people to dedicate to new ideas, new inventions, new ways of thinking. It doesn't restrict the choices of any citizen, it opens up more choices. Getting ahead still exists, and those who want it can go for it, that option wouldn't be taken away from them.
All it does is give everyone access to enough resources for basic survival, not Ferraris, which will still exist and continue to motivate some to be Vikings.
It never truly answered where the non replicable resources come from.
By learning things? By knowing and liking many things? By knowing and liking many people? By being very good at a unique permutation of skills, and using them to improve your life and that of your friends, having great adventures and whatnot?
> The robot owners aren't going to just hand out money, so would have to be taxed at some insane rate, I think.
Which would not be a problem, since all other super rich people would be taxed at the same "insane" rate, leaving the "getting ahead" relative to your peers completely untouched -- if that was really the issue, if people really couldn't think of ways to stand out amongst others other than the amount of money they "make" (it's just shifted around after all).
The problem is exploitation I'd say, and even that is not an end in and of itself, it's just a necessary nuisance that is optimized away wherever possible, leaving pure ownership of pure [0] means of production in very, very few hands. The rest gets nothing, and since humans cannot persist on that, cease to exist shortly after.
Compared the trajectory we're on -- the scenario we're in -- the technicalities of how to make the world somewhat human and livable instead of just an insane runaway train seem rather minor to me.
[0] As in, basically no workers, no more than you can personally oversee or even be yourself. I know that will never be "fully achieved" but I think that's splitting hairs. It's the trend, we keep accelerating and making previously thought impossible tools of dystopia real, who cares if there will ever be just one dude in a toga living forever commanding a blob of energy that can do and create anything, except make him sane.
As tech enthusiasts, we often envision a Star Trek future where all value originates from science and technology, and everyone else has to justify their existence. To some extent, I understand this view, but it will never fully materialize.
Any practical system will be shaped by its current participants: politicians, governments, etc. So, by definition, "bullshit jobs" will be recognized as respectable in any system designed by humanity. In fact, they will be enshrined as the elite class, and then the entire utopia morphs into a mirror of our existing society. Those at the top remain entrenched indefinitely, while those at the bottom are viewed as providing no value—except now, this perception might be closer to the truth.
More than that are capable of great work and breakthroughs, but they're too busy doing bullshit work.
It takes a huge amount of actual human effort to do all the most important jobs in society: grow food, transport food, make clothing, transport it, build housing, repair housing, build things for growing food and transporting clothing, healthcare, building hospitals... we are not remotely close to replacing the need for vast amounts of human labor for our most basic needs. We have huge trade shortages. We have bridges collapsing. Fuller's assertions are total fucking nonsense, only someone extremely insulated from the real world could believe what you just quoted.
The number of bullshit jobs is always small; first level managers manage a team of people. You have mid level managers managing several managers, etc, but the frontline workers always vastly outnumber management, even in bloated organizations.
And yeah, people should justify their existence by contributing to society. Dismissing that idea off-hand is absurd.
So what are your intentions regarding those who won't or can't satisfy your criteria for contributing?
Obviously I mean everyone who is capable of doing so. Those who are capable but unwilling? I wish them luck, but they are owed nothing by the rest of us.
This comment misses the alternative - continue working and produce even more. No, not more production for things like cars or other consumer items - more production to pay for things like social benefits, better healthcare, etc.
People will point out that the solution would be the opposite: a decreasing population.
But that is not cost-free and basically is swapping a set of problems for another set of problems. Even then "swapping" is a promise at-best. We could end with two sets of problems instead of one.
Yes, and then firms like OpenAI come in and automate those BS jobs, and take away all the societal upside of their existence. OpenAI will thrive, at first, by undoing the intricate scaffolding of lies that buttresses BS jobs. The country will either embrace socialism at that point, or perhaps there will be a Butlerian (buttressarian?) jihad of some kind in foolish attempt to put two genies back in the bottle.
And who knows what will work to keep us alive and relatively thriving in the future? It seems clear to me that belief in a fantasy panopticon, if not taken to an extreme, was a useful part of society. It is strictly better than a real panopticon or no panopticon - and who could have guessed that from first principles? Perhaps it really is better to have BS jobs than overt socialism. Maybe people really do feel better believing their work makes a difference rather than just existing and knowing they do nothing. Idealists want to believe that people will thrive with the truth, but I think that's demonstrably false.
This is an amazing precursor of the current software equivalent: https://xkcd.com/1629/
Power is when you can tell another person to change and they are forced to do as you tell them. So, the more power-driven your corporate ladder becomes, the more useless jobs it creates. The whole purpose of those jobs is to please the boss and contribute to their feeling of power. The actual economic output of the job can be zero, or negative, as long as is produces "power output" to the next level of management.
Normally, when companies are forced to compete against each other, playing the power ladder too much makes you uncompetitive, so you are forced to bring merit back on the table. Except, the zero interest rates of the whole decade and the uncontrolled mergers have mostly destroyed this. So yeah, unemployment is low now, but every job sucks and people are miserable.
Office work often is in industries that scale very well and they can afford to be less efficient.
That and fossil fuels !
Obviously there are "bullshit" jobs, as people love to reference, in massive company's with thousands of employees and a billion dollars in assets - but... ok? Of course massive bureaucracies contain some level of redundancy and cruft but, even still a lot of that is actually by design from a planning perspective.
I love that we worry about AI maximizing the wrong objective function and killing us all, when our own economic system is already doing that for us and has been for over a century.
And who are you (or anyone else) to decide the utility some thing has for someone else? I say this as a guy that only buys a new phone every 10 years, usually because, after swapping 2 or three batteries and learning how to use a soldering iron along the way, I finally dropped it and broke it beyond repair.
Capitalism is the most amazing "invention" the human race ever achieved. The masses of ignorant fools that spend on things they "don't really need" are what creates the jobs maaaany other people around the world REALLY NEED to sustain theirs and their families lives.
Being born and raised, and still residing, on a 3rd world country it amazes me to no end seeing the childish ignorance the average HN commenter have about how the world works. Being that the average HN commenter is an IT worker from the american coastal regions, it seems understandable that he is going to believe a world can exist, in this thermodinamically bound universe of ours, where resources can be magically given to anyone, regardless of their merits in working towards generating a part of it.
There ain't no free lunches, just as there ain't no free robot technicians to fix them after they invitably broke apart. Even in 1000 years, after maybe humanity could have achieved a level of technological advance where it "could exist", how in the hell would the darwinistic forces of competition, to gather more resources to impress a potential mate, end the necessity to work? It's so silly to see people that reap the benefits of the free market and the hard work of millions of people trying to make their life better every day literally discussing UBI and nonsense like that.
It's important to remember that asking people about stuff like this—the pointlessness of their job, their perception of safety, how happy they are—is problematic because in the end it just comes down to how they choose to define the meaning of a concept to themselves, how they are feeling on a particular day, how the question is asked, and so many other factors. Ask the same person again under different circumstances, or present the question differently, and you may very well get a different response. I don't take studies like this with a grain of salt, I assume they are packed in salt, like barrels of cod on a transatlantic sailing voyage in the 18th century.
Although their announcement states that "employees in financial, sales and management occupations are more likely to conclude that their jobs are of little use to society" this is highly deceptive. If we look at Figure 1 on page 12 ("percentage of socially useless jobs by occupation") then we see that the winner is Transportation and Material Moving. Second top category: Production Occupations.
Well it sure doesn't get more useless than those jobs! Who needs people who make things or move stuff around?
Management actually does much better than Computer/Mathematical and Food Preparation/Service. Business and Financial apparently has the same number of socially useless jobs as Installation/Maintenance/Repair. That result directly contradicts his primary claim, so he just ignores it and announces what he wanted to be true instead.
Right at the bottom with the second lowest percentage of useless jobs is, of course, social science.
This sort of scientific fraud is unfortunately way too common in academic research. In some fields you can't assume the abstract or press release matches what the data says. This specific paper also reinforces the narrative that academia has a high tolerance for Marxists. It cites Marx and then discusses several other sociology papers that are built directly on Marxist theory (p7)! It's not often you see a citation from 1844 in something claiming to be modern science. The premise of the paper is also pure Marxism - words like price, wage, salary and market don't appear at all, and it takes as axiomatic that there's no objective way to judge how useful a job is.
In 1987 I visited Soviet Estonia. Seeking gifts to take back to the USA, I bought a bunch of bottle openers. They were simple and robust. Stamped metal. And (get this) with the price stamped right in the metal.
See the benefits ? No arbitrage/speculation: the price is fixed, and dirt cheap. No marketing costs: that right there is going to bring down the price. No R&D bureau to finance: it's a piece of cheap stamped metal. No pilferage: who in their right mind is going to risk their job stealing cheap stamped metal bottle openers ?
Translate this kind of product idea to an OECD economy. The existence of a cheap stamped metal bottle opener does not preclude the existence of fancy bottle openers, just as the existence of cheap mass-produced coffee mugs does not preclude the existence of hand-thrown hand-painted cat-themed ceramic coffee mugs. But "universal goods" (let's call them that) are made & distributed basically at cost.
Similarly, how about machines that dispense nutritious biscuits for free, if you insert your ID ? Nobody says they have to taste good, but they'd keep ya going. Maybe like in Repo Man: he opens the fridge and takes out a can labeled FOOD.
i've spent many minutes arguing with NYC bodega owners about how "99 Cent" Arizona cans only cost 99 cents (I was even willing to pay an entire dollar for it!)
at the end of the day, us humans are the optimization engines behind "the economy", whichever economy is the style of the time
I agree though, and I do love the minimal stylings of some store-brand Foods
"But the price is on the can though!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMUZ2sVjLfY
We throw away double digit percentages of our food every year and there are laws that ban people from feeding the homeless. It's fucking sickening.
What? That's a very weird take.
Firstly, your goal might be way too high. Even in theory, a system can be optimal without being good enough. If there isn't a way to produce enough food (for example) no matter what, then a system that produces the maximum amount of food that is possible wouldn't be a failure in my eyes.
Secondly, this makes an implicit comparison between the two systems and finds them both similarly wanting. But capitalism almost completely solves the problem of "three meals a day and warm shelter", whereas communism famously doesn't solve it at all. Under capitalism, a tiny minority of people starved. Under communism, millions starved. It's not even close.
And while yes, the fact that we throw away so much food is terrible, but it's definitely better than not having enough, and that happens because of capitalism, for the most part.
Most people do not have a birds eye view that lets them see all the problem spaces and all the solutions. Marketing is increasing the likelihood you are aware there is a solution out there, and sales is the part where you become convinced the solution offered is the right one.
If you are in the lucky position where your company's solution is considered the standard and is widely known, marketing becomes all about maintaining that perception.
Coca-Cola spends ~4 billion dollars a year on marketing. Pepsi spends ~3 billion. Soda makes you fat and unhealthy. This is not solving any problem, only causing them.
The incentives for marketing and sales also aren't really aligned with what is actually best for the consumer. If you wanted them to be aligned with what the consumer wanted, then you as the consumer would be the one paying the marketing company, and they would compete to be the best at finding you solutions to your problems.
This is kind of what Google Search did before they really monetized their search. You paid them with your attention and they helped you find solutions to your problems. Now companies pay them to be brought to your attention, which is why Google Search sucks now.
> Aligned with what is actually best for the consumer
This is a classic straw man.
Who said it needs to be? They are simply educating you on the existence of their product. But marketing doesn't remove your agency to decide if you want to drink them or not, or whether that product is good for you. There are products that I am aware of due to marketing that serve no purpose to me, but I am not helplessly buying them anyways. I agree that in some scenarios (like we saw with cigarettes) this can go awry, and maybe advertising should be restricted for certain types of food. But in general, most products are not like this.
> You paid them with your attention and they helped you find solutions to your problems.
If Google didn't solve a problem for you, you would likely stop using it. You wouldn't continue to use Google simply to see their ads. Their advertisers would disappear if you weren't there, so first and foremost they must deliver a good product to you.
If it didn't to some extent do that there would be little point in spending all that money on it.
The real threat of AI/ML/LLMs are that they're going to get smart enough to do all of this stupid incredibly repetitive work and then there's not going to be much left to do. We might actually reach a post scarcity economy and the transition will be _interesting_.
This discovery you talk about, I am thinking hard about a single case in my whole life. Can't find any.
At some point you may need to buy a new washing machine. If you knew nothing about washing machines, you might have no information to work from.
However, maybe you saw an LG commercial at some point. So now when you walk into the store and see an LG washing machine, that recognition leads you to consider it. Maybe because of that commercial, you saw a feature. Now when you look at the Samsung washing machine and it doesn't have that feature, you consider that model to be lacking over the LG machine.
A personal anecdote here: Amazon now has so many different brands and sellers with product lines I've never heard of before. Their ratings have long since lost meaning. I often find it very difficult to decide on even simple purchases because I don't have enough information to know what is good.
This is the best way, at least in part, because Consumer Reports does not accept advertising or sponsorships.
And you don't find out about Consumer Reports through advertising, either, it's through word of mouth like this post.
I think it is fair to argue that word of mouth, good prices and quality rpoducts would thrive more often without marketing, compared to brightly coloured, cheaply made, nonsense that is easy to sell
But in the end it is utterly pointless. However so is so much other crap in the world.. and if I'm not doing this someone else will. Thus I try to take solace in just the work I do, not necessary what it's applied to.
But yeah- finance is 98% bullshit in this world.
I think this has been famously phrased as “money is the root of all evil”
Here's a simple example: for the entire 19th century (the 1800's), the British empire was at least 20 years ahead of anyone else. Part of this was due to their formidable Royal Navy. But most of this was due to their financial system. All European governments, princes, aristocrats, people with money, kept their cash parked in British banks. Why? They trusted the British banks more than the banks in their own countries. As a consequence, British businessmen had better access to credit, scratch that, infinitely better access to credit, than their continental counterparts. Which meant that more enterprise was happening in Britain, and so, by some form of law of large numbers, more innovation, hence technological advantage, hence higher GDP, and more tax money to fund expensive cutting edge ships for the Navy, and round and round in virtuous cycles.
Finance is fairly unintuitive, and it's easy to perceive it as a waste of people's time and talent. But it's finance and the rule of law (and the Royal Navy) that made a tiny island nation lend its name to the phrase "Pax Britannica", a period of stability and prosperity that humanity had not seen since the Pax Romana, almost two millennia prior.
If you work in finance, don't sell yourself cheap. Your work is meaningful.
The day-to-day job on an individual scale can definitely be pointless. In aggregate though, the point of the job ends up being to keep people employed and pay taxes. That's it!
No one will like that explanation without a perspective change, and for good reason. I'd wager most people do try to put some effort into having skills and holding down a job. It obviously sucks for that effort to go to waste.
This study is, perhaps, a sign that we should view these jobs as a form of basic income in disguise. No one's going to like that ruse because it means your skills are being wasted, sure, but the alternative is ripping the band-aid off (and it's a big one) by eliminating those jobs and moving those people to socially useful ones. This action would cause chaos, which is likely why nothing has eliminated the bullshit jobs yet.
The problem is, there likely isn't enough socially useful jobs as well paying as these pointless jobs. Even if there were, you'd need training infrastructure to transition people to new jobs.
So why then should people change their perspectives? Well, the fault of having a pointless job is not really on the person, but the economy, which has grown very quickly and added jobs without regard to how socially useful they are on a long timeline. Nothing really keeps this job growth in check except market forces, which may not be rational.
If you can mentally deal with the fact that your skills are going to waste and not being used for something socially important, and frankly stop caring as much at your job, you can use the time on the pointless job for more fulfilling things.
You aggregate those together, you just get a bigger net negative. That's how addition works. The collective net-negativity of hundreds of net negative upper managers doesn't magically trickle down into a net positive when viewed in aggregate.
Also, if we're being fair, "pointless" is still net negative in the amount of the person's salary, at minimum, unless we're talking about unpaid volunteers.
So what can the government do that will give us all more free time ? Maybe quit encouraging a dinosaur-ridden 20th-century economy ? Time to shelve those buggy whips.
I don't think there has ever been one in the consumer market, ever, that is actually a net positive. Across the board they take more than they give. And for any example, I could posit that an open source solution (whether it exists or not) would be a better product and more of a net positive.
B2B sure, there are plenty of examples, but that's just capitalists making capitalism tools for other capitalists. These aren't tools that benefit society so it's a poor example.
We use these products because we have no other choice, not because they are optimal for our situation. Even our need for them is often carefully and artificially crafted by corporations, whose ultimate goal is for us to have no choice but to give them money. They would prefer we derive little to no value from their products, because if they can force us to pay anyway, that is much cheaper to manage.
If this were true, then Jeff Bezos would have to be millions of years old.
Unless of course you think he exploits the time of others...
Many startups are great (for consumers) during their bootstrap phase. Once they become large the enshitification process begins as we maximize our shitty profit-seeking objective function.
I don’t think this thesis holds any water. Companies don’t care about keeping people employed and paying taxes on such a micro scale that they’re willing to bite the bullet and hire people because they know it’s for some greater good of societal stability.
Things like lawyers, secretaries, corporate compliance officers generally provide value.
Things like middle management are more dubious, but I think they generally do provide value.
For my self, working on stuff like e-commerce sites or deployment automation can be a bit pointless. Many of those jobs only existed because a particular client felt special and wanted something that was a better "fit" for their particular situation... Most of it is non-sense. Fortunately I've also be lucky enough to work on products that truly makes society better, strangely enough those jobs pay way less.
I've also noticed sales are there to bullshit their way to getting somebody who isn't sure to buy something you're selling. Talk to an engineer, they'll tell you a paperclip holds paper. Talk to sales, you'll be on the line for an hour while he explains the majesty of the holy invention of paperclips, and why Paperclip Co.'s are the best. People who need paperclips will just buy them, bypassing the time sink.
Sure, in some cases what you say is true, when you have an undifferentiated product in perfect competition with other products where potential customers have perfect information, a smoother spokesperson can make the difference.
But in complex sales, the sales staff’s job is to understand the client’s needs and opportunities well enough, then coordinate experts on their team to present promising solutions. A sales person who is a value add is going out and finding people with problems that can be solved with the company’s product, thus pulling a customer into increased productivity.
The role does not need to be a waste, even though many are wasteful.
None of them have a brain. Not one.
Go to 1800 and a person that needs to get somewhere may have told you they needed a faster horse. The idea that fast personal mechanical transport would exist and would be widely available was still an idea to be sold. Even moreso, that you may not even have to 'go', the idea you could pick up a wire and communicate nearly instantly was still near magic.
To the end user, a car is a faster horse.
Once reasonably reliable automobiles were being built, the value add was plainly obvious.
This is true to the same degree that "engineering are there to take something that works and reinvent it in a shitty flavour-of-the-month framework that guarantees them extra work by breaking every day"
Sure, some of them make their entire living from doing that, some of them aren't above doing that when it'll work for them, but most of them do other things.
Also companies employ salespeople because (i) not everybody in the world knows every product they could ever want to buy exists and (ii) most people outside HN don't assume that nobody could ever answer their "does the product do this" questions (never mind make a useful suggestion of something they hadn't considered) or want to figure it out from first principles by reading the tech specs.
"The author contends that more than half of societal work is pointless, both large parts of some jobs and, as he describes, five types of entirely pointless jobs:
[...]
*duct tapers*, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, *e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code*, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;"
Part of what makes it so terrible is that Bullshit Jobs is an interesting premise. The fact that some percentage of people think that their jobs don't need to exist is an interesting observation that merits deeper study. If anyone ever does that study and writes a book about it I would love to read it but Graeber's book is not that.
Rather his book discusses the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs and then diverges into an incoherent political rant.
I saw Sam Harris on the Lex Friedman podcast talking about debating 9/11 conspiracy theorists he said:
> I could see the nature of how impossible it was to play Whac-A-Mole sufficiently well, so as to convince anyone of anything...
> ...it's not actually a thesis. It's a proliferation of anomalies that you can't actually connect all the dots that are being pointed to because they don't connect in a coherent way...
> ...I know what it's like to be in the weeds of a conversation like that and the person will say, okay, well, but what do you make of the fact that all those F-16s were flown 800 miles out to sea on the morning of 9/11 doing an exercise that hadn't even been scheduled for that day...
> ...how long would it take to track that down, right? Did it happen, was it supposed to run that day, was there a completely mundane reason it would happen? And unless you're knocking down each one of those things to that audience, you appear to just be uninformed ... He doesn't know about Project Mockingbird?
That's what reading this book is like.
There is no central thesis just a list of incoherent complaints.
In his other works he proposes a Universal Basic Income, and some have read his book as an argument for that. But not only does he not directly argue for it in the book, even if he did his writings much like the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are not set up in a way that could even lead to a logical point because they're just disjoint misrepresentations he deliberately misinterprets to make them seem like they don't make sense.
It is a mentally exhausting read.
I never felt my job was pointless. I felt the opposite. If I didn't answer my phone, a total idiot was going to answer it. If I didn't get to the customer, someone was going to lie to them or omit useful info and they'd get screwed a bit. Someone would frustrate them so much they'd buy something they don't even want just to avoid that dealership.
So I felt a mission to get to as many people as I could.
If you're good at your job, and have some integrity, it's easy to value your job even if it's sales.
I don't see how we can continue down this path and see positive results.
A job is a means to an end.
These discussions regarding which jobs are pointless vs meaningful don't do anything to address that people lacking purpose are more likely to call their job pointless.
But, assuming you're not in an alienating job, working together on a problem connects you to other people, which gives you friends (or at least some mild human connection/interaction), and it might even leave you with a sense of fulfillment. The work itself can make you happy.
> My view is that nihilistic tendencies create the feeling of pointlessness in occupation.
I think it's the opposite: a pointless job creates a sense of nihilism. If the thing you're forced to do every day to survive seems pointless and meaningless, it drives you to think that life itself is just pointless and meaningless, and the job leaves you with nothing but a sense of emptiness.
If you feel like you're helping people in your community and doing something meaningful and indispensable, it can easily become your identity.
Many pointless jobs could be ended by taxing zero-sum activity. That includes most advertising and about half of finance. Finance in the US has doubled in size since the 1960s. Despite this, managed funds, as a class, under perform index funds.
So, yes, there are a lot of pointless jobs. Where does that leave us?
[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...
https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...
Great read, right on topic :)
Lots of the pointlessness stems from the many hours spent by white collar workers making up for other peoples laziness/uninformedness/stressedness, basically bridging the knowledge gap.
So instead of feasting in the idea that whole segments of society should succumb to government allowances (effectively ending social mobility) we might show more virtousness toward human progress by focusing on not wasting other peoples time.
Feelings are important for individuals and that can have an impact en mass.
But they are not accurate or meaningful ways of measuring someones actual worth. For that we have money.
This is why bankers earn more than nurses and teachers: everyone pays lip service to the urgent need to care for the sick, educate kids etc. But when it comes time to spend money or cast votes what they actually want are cheap credit and cheap goods and services.
This is the problem with all sorts of commentary like this. It relies on people's own internalized hypocrisy. And that's both very strong and very misleading.
I think it has more to do with the proximity to money. A banker is close to lots of money moving around, and in a position to craft some scheme to extract parts of it. This basically applies to all of finance. The closer you are, the more opportunities to extract large amounts. A nurse is far removed from the flow of money.
Most people would rather keep $25 (or spend it on an overdraft fee) than give it up to pay a nurse to nurse a sick, poor person.
These are the unpopular truths we all deny and yet all see daily.
That is not the case. In the US, only 41% of the people who went overdrawn did so willingly. About 20% knew they were low on funds and expected their deposit to clear first, and for the remainder, the overdraft was a surprise.[1]
The popularity of fees indicates that those who charge them want to keep charging them; it does not indicate that those who pay the fees are in favour of going overdrawn and paying fees.
1. Page 15 of https://curinos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Curinos_2021-... (2021)
My interpretation of the evidence is that 41% happily admit it. And another 50 plus pretend they don't. A few are unlucky as you say.
If this were not the case, those 50ish percent would stop doing it. The fact they keep paying these fees tells us one of 2 things is true: EITHER they are honestly not capable of managing a current account OR they (like the 41%) choosing not to but are conditioned not to admit it.
Personally I find the second option much more likely.
The same is true in a lot of other pieces of evidence: people routinely vote against their own interests for instance. And they knowingly eat food that's bad for them despite being offered alternatives.
This is a fundamental part of human nature no one wants to address: people are not logical, dispassionate, long term thinking, selfless, analytical, strategic entities. They do dumb shit that is bad for them. And then they lie about it.
"Lie" might not be the right word, people will claim passionately they want X then do Not X without a moments hesitation.
The fact that people keep getting robbed at gunpoint tells us one of two things is true: EITHER the victims are honestly not capable of living in a crime-infested world, OR they choose to get robbed but are conditioned to not admit it.
See the issue with your logic? There's a third option: there is a large power imbalance (like people designing exploitative bank account UXs/people in shady corner with guns) and that is being exploited against the wishes of the people who are victimized by them.
I am all for clearer labeling etc. The few who legitimately don't want to go overdrawn should be offered all the assistance possible.
I just think we need to acknowledge that 40% admit they choose this and another 40% choose it but won't admit it...
Or rather, there is a robber at every alley, because there is no law that prevents robbing, and no enforcement of the laws that exist. In that society, if you have a gun but aren't robbing people, you're giving up money. What are people without guns gotta do?
Same goes for nursing, a single nurse can only nurse so many people in single month. And it only gets worse if you want 24/7 coverage. At least with teaching you could do 6 hours teaching + 2 hours other work during weekdays.
Money, initially, may have been a good metric to judge which role is contributing more to society. But soon, a parasite class emerges whose goal is to maximize "money" itself regardless of what value they are providing to society. Just like any other metric, the concept of money as a yardstick of "good for all of us" has failed a long time ago because of that.
I think it's a problem people pursue money they don't actually intend to spend. But I also think people buying the "wrong" things (chocolate instead of vegetables, bank bailouts instead of universal healthcare) is a weird mix of feature and flaw. Or at least it is just a reflection of human beings own flaws.
Prices in an efficient market (which the labor market is not, but that's another discussion entirely) are determined by marginal cost and marginal utility, not value. The value I get out of having as much water as I do is enormous, but I'm basically indifferent as to whether I get even more water than that, and so water is cheap.
The person paying is the customer. The person receiving the service is a "cost centre" in basically all underpaid, "socially useful" roles.
Despite all that, I find it surprising that some of the corporates are unaware of some of the main players (at least from my perspective) in their target sectors.
Feels like we have never achieved that. Even some companies are reverting back to pre-pandemic and going back to 5 day work weeks and returning back to the office for no good reason other than "CuLtUrE"
Especially when so many people here have tried to create something tech based that solves a problem, but their endeavor fails because...they don't know how to sell it.
> Of course, this definition raises the question of how one is to decide whether a job makes a positive, a negative, or no contribution to society at all. To make such a decision, one clearly needs a theory of social value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_economics#Approaches
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency :
> Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off.
"Ask HN: Any well funded tech companies tackling big, meaningful problems?" (2020) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24412493 ; Impact_investing, Strategic_alignment, #GlobalGoals (UN SDG Sustainable Development Goals) ;
> You can make an impact by solving important local and global problems by investing your time, career, and savings; by listing and comparing solutions.
Impact investing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing
Strategic alignment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_alignment
There are 17 Global Goals. GRI Sustainability Reports are aligned with the Global Goals. Helping keep the information for the [GRI] Sustainability Report ready all year may afford additional opportunities to find meaning and impact.
There might be people who feel their jobs do not have social impact but important nonetheless on a personal level. In that case, they don't exactly feel their jobs are pointless.
And jobs like the ones in finance have been specifically targeted for adding nothing to society. Or sales being scummy. So, people might feel the overall impact of such labeling and feel that they have net zero impact on society.
Cheating on the math test while in high school was as pointless (sooner or later the chickens come home to roost) but it felt amazing in the moment because you were doing it with your buddies and against the “enemy” (teacher, school etc.)
Adults all of a sudden feel the need to be important so they suffer in that same scenario
For whom? For those of us who became STEM majors, absolutely. Math and its tests only got more advanced after I got into college. But for humanities majors who's requirements only required a single math class, if that, to graduate never had "the chickens come home to roost". At most they bribed or cheated their way though that one college level math class.
Also I was talking about high school where you have a set of mates to violate rules with as opposed to college where you kinda rotate people based on circumstance and location.
Also you seem really triggered and stressed out, maybe the humanities people weren't wrong picking their path after all /s
Is there a way that my point, that cheating on a math test actually doesn't end up hurting people that it turns out actually didn't need that math, could come across as not bitter to you?
I'm really not bitter about it. I'm quite happy with my math minor.
It's relevant in that if they cheated/bribed, and didn't learn that modicum of math, to your earlier point, that the chickens don't come home to roost.
This is not a humanities forum, they are not here to debate, so why mention them at all?
I work in biotech and feel my job is pointless because we don’t make any sales.
I’m trying to learn sales actually.
Sexy indifference.
She was previously a highly paid finance person who hated her job (60-hour weeks).
When the economic unit is the household, as it was in basically all pre-industrial periods, basic upkeep means that you have to complete a relatively wide variety of tasks. Farming, cooking, cleaning, home construction and repair, furniture production, clothing production, tool production, animal husbandry, tending/nursing, child care, etc...
Even divided on traditional gender roles - there was a lot of diversity in available work. Tasks changed by season and need.
Modern society rewards you for specializing - do one thing forever, better than others. But people are hardwired for exploring and learning. We can get bored, tired, apathetic and disillusioned if we follow a monotonous routine at work. Even if that routine is genuinely beneficial to society at large.
Banks are seen as the epitome of capitalism but they have just as much in common with Soviet organizations as with market institutions at this point. They are in effect junior partners of the government. The weight of the regulations keep outsiders out and shield them from competition. All they have to do is keep the politicians happy and rake in the dough.
It may be that engineering / production jobs are more likely at companies with clearly useful missions.
Sales & marketing get a bad rap, but if we want to move into the future, someone has to convince people to do so.
The problem is more that there are a lot of shitty/exploitative products that shouldn't exist and S&M folks are asked to sell shitty futures, and that feels bad unless you're a sociopath... which explains why Wall St / consulting are still so attractive to a certain set.
The bittersweet decadence of a superfluous but well-rewarded, perhaps even parasitic existence.
Life is hard, but fortunately everything is meaningless if you take the right perspective.
Nobody is forcing them, right?
"The game of life is hard to play, I'm gonna lose it anyway, The losing card I'll someday lay" - Johnny Mandel