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This is not a book about a particular solution. It's a book about a problem—one that most people don't even acknowledge exists.

(continued) This is the kind of question that concerned Aristotle, Confucius, and Ibn Khaldun, and in the final analysis it's still the only really important one.

As Karl Mars once pointed out: prior to the industrial revolution, it never seems to have occurred to anyone to write a book asking what conditions would create the most overall wealth. Many, however, wrote books about what conditions would create the best people—that is, how should society be best arranged to produce the sort of human beings one would like to have around. (continued)

(about Stanislaw Lem's scifi)

Before long, the Drudgelings, though—as Tichy's interlocutor insisted, entirely free to do what they wanted provided they did not interfere in anyone else's property rights—were dropping like flies.

I have yet to see one [futurologist] suggest that the basic functions that capitalists are supposed to perform, which mainly consists of figuring out the optimum way to invest resources in order to answer current or potential future consumer demand, could possibly be performed by a machine. WHY NOT? (emphasis mine)

this makes the old leftist question—"every day we wake up and collectively make a world together, but which one of us, left to our own devices, would ever decide they wanted to make a world like this one?"—more relevant than ever.

I remember thinking, "Wait, so most of these people really want to be in the Peace Corps?" And I duly looked it up and discovered: sure enough, to be accepted into the Peace Corps, you need to already have a college degree. The US military is a haven for frustrated altruists.

Paraphrase: overseas military bases have social programs (repairing schools, providing medical care) that have been found NOT to improve relations with the surrounding community, but are continued because they have a positive impact on the troops who do the work, who are 2-3x more likely to re-up.

Teachers are seen as people who have ostentatiously put themselves forward as self-sacrificing and public-spirited, as wanting to be the sort of person who gets a call twenty years later saying "Thank you, thank you for all you did for me." For people like that to form unions, threaten strikes, and demand better working conditions is considered almost hypocritical.

(continued) They were widely denounced as coddled for having union contracts that allowed them generous health and pension plans, vacations, and $28-per-hour wages, and forced into massive give-backs. Those working in the financial offices of the same companies who... were the ones who had actually caused the problems were not expected to make similar sacrifices.

During the 2008 bailout of the financial industry, while there was a public outcry against bankers' million-dollar bonuses, no actual sanctions followed; however, the consequent bailout of the auto industry did involve sanctions: on assembly line workers. (continued)

Within a community of do-gooders, anyone who exemplifies shared values in too exemplary a way is seen as a threat; ostensibly good behavior ("virtue signaling" is the new catchword) is often perceived as a moral challenge

often middle managers... clearly do resent factory workers, for the simple reason that the latter have legitimate reason to take pride in their work. A key part of the justification of underpaying such workers is simple envy.

(continued) Those trapped in bullshit jobs resent workers who get to do real productive or beneficial labor, and those who do real productive of beneficial labor, underpaid, degraded, and unappreciated, increasingly resent those who they see as monopolizing those few jobs where one can live well.

Those struggling and without work resent the employed. The employed are encouraged to resent the poor and unemployed, who they are constantly told are scroungers and freeloaders. (continued)

Paraphrasing:

"Compensatory consumerism" = "the sorts of things you can do to make up for the fact that you don't have a life, or not very much of one."

the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of—as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it—"a life," and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford.

we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures

The less the value of work is seen to lie either in what it produces, or the benefits it provides others, the more work comes to be seen as valuable primarily as a form of self-sacrifice, which means that anything that makes that work less onerous or more enjoyable, even the gratification of knowing that one's work benefits others, is actually seen to lower its value—and as a result, to justify lower levels of pay.

The more the economy becomes a matter of the mere distribution of loot, the more inefficiency and unnecessary chains of command actually make sense, since these are the forms of organization best suited to soaking up as much of that loot as possible.

"I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think."
— George Orwell, 'Down and Out in Paris and London'

Of particular interest given that our production of '1984' opened last night.

(continued) other than a widespread feeling that if one does not engage in labor that destroys the mind and body, whether or not there is a reason to be doing it, one does not deserve to live.

they are faced with the choice between doing useful and important work like taking care of children but being effectively told that the gratification of helping others should be its own reward, and it's up to them to figure out how to pay their bills, or accepting pointless and degrading work that destroys their mind and body for no particular reason, (continued)

Bullshit jobs proliferate today in large part because of the peculiar nature of managerial feudalism that has come to dominate wealthy economies

there is an endless drumbeat of vilification of the poor, the unemployed, and especially those on public relief

quoting Gini and Sullivan: "work plays a crucial and perhaps unparalleled psychological role in the formation of human character... it is also one of the most significant contributing factors to an inner life."

In death, the essence of a soul's being on earth is seen as marked by the love they felt for, and received from, their husbands, wives, and children, or sometimes also by what military unit they served with in time of war.

love for others... regularly requires the maintenance of institutional structures one might otherwise despise.

psychological studies regularly find that people of working-class background are more accurate at reading other people's feelings, and more empathetic and caring, than those of middle-class, let alone wealthy, backgrounds.

They key to caring labor as a commodity is not that some people care but that others don't; that those paying for "services" (not how the old feudal term is still retained) feel no need to engage in interpretive labor (empathy) themselves.