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This is why bullshit jobs are hazardous to your health.

I guess when you attempt to keep up with, hold schmoozing sessions with, politick, etc. with a bunch of companies where 95% of them will end up doing nothing actually valuable for the human race (and only 70% doing it on purpose to climb the VC ladder), you are not actually getting anything real done, and your brain then readily adapts itself to being an efficient but almost non-sentient gossip processor.

At first it resists, hitting you with stress signals and thoughts of pointlessness and depression. Weaker, or more accurately, less indoctrinated individuals would stop at this point and give their lives a once over.

Not in this case. Eventually, article by article, event by event, pointless rambling after pointless busywork session, Michael Arrington's brain capitulates: "Welp, I guess you didn't really need these memory networks after all, let's clear em out so you can be uhh, 3% more sensitive to inane tech gossip-related stimuli. Have a nice life!"

You could apply that subjective value judgement to any number of jobs that are stressful and not world-critical important.

There's absolutely zero evidence that your brain determines its own health based on the importance of your task to the greater world.

Why hasn't Jerry Seinfeld melted down? How did Joan Rivers last so long? How is Howard Stern still functioning? Jay Leno? David Letterman? Sean Hannity? Jon Stewart? How about the thousands of tabloid writers across the nation? How about sports writers / journalists?

There's zero evidence for a link to what you're suggesting, in terms of value of the job being performed according to some external person's subjective determination.

Your value judgement doesn't dictate the self-worth or mental health of someone else, such that they're going to suffer a mental collapse because you think what they do is of low importance.

My subjective value judgement can still be better than yours, and its degree of truth will be seen in the years to come.

The only concept you need to understand to get the truth of my statement is _order_.

A "meaningful and important" job is an opportunity to impose your own kind of order on the outside world. You will instinctively know this, as a human being, when you are in this state.

On the other hand, you will just as instinctively know when your job is to actually generate disorder for the rest of us, dragging everyone else down with you so you can get some small scraps from self-absorbed "important people", because you've given up on aiming for anything more significant.

All the people you talk about have chosen their nation's culture as their canvas, shaping the thought of wide swathes of the population of the United States.

In contrast, everything TechCrunch is known for is a gossip rag that is only read by desperate or clueless startup types whose content is generated by inner circles of bullshit work generators whose claim to fame is simply creating a vanishingly small fraction more noise on Ethernet, fiber optic, the 2-5GHz spectrum, and a few VC bank account numbers.

You tell me what kind of influence you'd rather have.

It's comments like this that make removing the down vote look silly.

FYI: your comment isn't much better.

FYI2: the downvote button is still there

FYI: Not everyone sees downvote buttons on HN. You have to have a certain amount of positive karma - some quick googling suggests it's 500 or more. Onewaystreet has about 290.

That implies that (gossipy/social) information is processed in a single way, that doesn't have dependencies on other functionality of the brain (that which we measure for IQ, or the link between successful startup founders and such).

You can analyze it and try to improve the situation, or you can learn to manipulate some of humanities more 'built in' functionality of socializing and survival. Then factor in that everyone around you has this abstract layer of social processing, and it's back to probability / guessing whether people around you will manipulate it, use it for good, for evil, or for neutral.

Explaining things mathematically, logically, and reasonably can be just as useless. It really depends on what you like to talk about. If you don't like gossiping, there is surely some outlet you have that increases happiness and is nonproductive. If not, find one. It might turn out to be an essential part of success for reasons you can't (and I can't) even begin to pretend to understand.

I don't think most startups try anything valuable either but linking that to memory loss is a little far fetched.

I however do think that boring & non-challenging jobs can affect your health if they are done for over 10-15 years.

99% of people (if not more) do nothing of significant value for the human race. The wealth they create, the value of the product they produce, and the experience they gain all dissipate or become meaningless in the medium to long term. Value for the human race is not a very good criterion to decide whether what you do is bullshit. If you need a purpose in life, get children.

Ok, then let's kill 99% of the people on this earth. Oh no, where did our civilizations go?

Having long term impact that is noticeable is good and should be everyone's goal. But being this confused about value is what leads to shit like this.

Lying awake worrying about whether or not you're adding value to the human race leads to shit like this. What I'm trying to say is: people should just do what they're good at. As long as you make a decent living, you're contributing to society. What is, let's say, a cleaning lady or bus driver supposed to think of your "value for the human race" criterion?

What? The cleaning lady and the bus driver create more value for society than almost anyone.

The problem is only that their contribution is not properly valued.

100% of what you do is meaningless on a long enough term. Unless you find a way to reverse entropy.

> If you need a purpose in life, get children.

Adding a couple more consumers into the sea of billions is more valuable than dedicating your life to science or art?

Do you have any idea what the average scientist or artist is actually doing? I'm not talking about Einstein or Picasso...

They are painting the murals that brighten the entrances to workplaces across the world, or researching incremental improvements to human knowledge that collectively form the foundation of the next generation of science.

The food you have in your plate is coming from "bullshit jobs", you know ?

We need a name for the "bullshit job provides food on your plate" fallacy. The productivity enhancement from the division of labor and technological advancements provides food on our table, the "bullshit job" is just there because we haven't figure out how to destroy it without hurting people.

No, read again what I wrote. The food you get is coming from people who do bullshit jobs, since Farming is probably bullshit in the eyes of the poster I referred to.

If you want to start destroying bullshit jobs, reducing the amount of administration and civil servants is a good place to start, because it's a whole additional layer of friction for everything else in society.

I believe he is using the term "bullshit jobs" to mean jobs that are pointless, produce no producivity and are mainly created for the sake of appearances. In other words, the administration and civil servant jobs that you refer to. Jobs such as farm laborer jobs may be boring and tedious, but since they are very clearly productive, are not "bullshit jobs".

This term comes from the anthoropologist David Graeber in his essay 'On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs' (http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/).

I can't believe that fallacy got around. It's oxymoronic, it is just like the sentence "non-swimming fish moves around in your filled aquarium."

Ok, you are literally equating food production, which includes agriculture which led to humans being able to support groups bigger than a circus troupe, with "bullshit job." Got it.

I think you misread the comment. Agriculture is not a "bullshit job" (well, except in the literal manure = fertilizer sense) because it produces something people actually need. Something like, say, social marketing (my job) is a bullshit job, because it's just made up to encourage people to consume more to keep the economy humming along.

Yeah, the job description of food production fits nicely with the post about bullshits jobs from a couple of days ago. I am assuming you are using the same definition here.

EDIT: on top of that, you could argue that Agriculture is bullshit since most of the food we produce is thrown away?

Nice assumptions dude. I guess this is the internet for ya; post something that is not even very controversial, and your own caricatured projection is jumped on.

On your other note, it is not bullshit as long as it is sustainable and people are being fed. If it was, you bet it'd be fixed, one way or the other, up to, including, and beyond cannibalism to genetic re-engineering not to need food.

On the other hand, there is your typical TechCrunch startup lol.

Don't even bother replying. It seems we are so different in how in touch we are, I could be locked in an internetless and lightless room with no outside communication for the rest of my life, and still be able to do non bullshit work, which I'd scratch into the walls with my fingernails, so when I die and they open the box to take me out they (at least the in-touch ones) will be awed and the world will be a better place, while you could be handed the US presidency, or the leadership of a multi-national corporation, and still cock it up by starving the population and workers to death by removing "bullshit jobs" lol.

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