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"[Economic equations] are founded on one simple assumption: that everyone, left to his own devices, will choose the course of action that provides the most of what he wants for the least expenditure and effort."

Accepting these principles means that bullshit jobs DO serve a purpose; just not their stated one.

"A successful student has to learn self-discipline, but this is not the same as learning how to operate under orders."

"I would have to keep the corner of my eye open at all times in order to make sure they would always see me acting busy. I have no idea why the job description couldn't just acknowledge that I wouldn't have much to do—if I didn't have to spend so much time and energy looking busy, I could get my reading and the table cleaning done quicker and more efficiently."

"Being on shift on a Sunday afternoon when nobody frequented the SU was just appalling. They had this thing about us not being able to just do nothing, even if the shop was empty. So we couldn't just sit at the till and read a magazine. Instead, the manager made up utterly meaningless work for us to do."

"I applied for [the job] out of some warped sense of obligation to get experience in work to prepare me for whatever lay ahead beyond university. In reality the job just took away time and energy from other activities I had been doing, like campaigning and activism, or reading for pleasure, which made me resent it even more."

"Nowadays it is considered important that they should work. However, it is not considered important they should work at anything useful. In fact, like rufus they're barely expected to work at all, just to show up and pretend to do so."

(missed one!)

"A confidence artist could easily take delight in what she's doing. But being forced to scam someone is altogether different... it's hard not to feel you're ultimately in the same situation as the person you're scamming: you're both being pressured and manipulated by your employer, only in your case, with the added indignity that you're also betraying the trust of someone whose side you should be on."

"It was considered a good thing that there might be a few years in a young man's or woman's life where money was not the primary motivation."

"He tried to rub their faces in it, to make himself a parody of what they seemed to think he was. It didn't make the slightest bit of difference."

"By the end, I was being paid a stupid sum for a job that, at most, involved me answering the phone twice a day. I eventually broke down on the platform of Bristol Temple Meads train station one late summer's afternoon... the dissociative comedown made me realize how profoundly upsetting it was to live in a state of utter purposelessness."

"He was a box ticker: one partner had insisted on the project, and, rather than argue with him, the others pretended to agree. Then they did everything in their power to make sure it didn't work... 'They needed me precisely because I didn't have the skills to implement something that they didn't want to implement, and they were willing to pay to keep me.'"

"Why does having a pointless job so regularly cause people to be miserable?"

"Apparently, if you are suing a doctor for malpractice, part of the show involves assembling an impressive pile of scientific papers to plunk down on the table at an appropriately theatrical moment and then enter into evidence."

"I am using the term 'box tickers' to refer to employees who exist only or primarily to allow an organization to be able to claim it is doing something that, in fact, it is not doing."

"It's as if a homeowner, upon discovering a leak in the roof, decided it was too much bother to hire a roofer to reshingle it, and instead stuck a bucket underneath and hired someone whose full-time job was to periodically dump the water."

"Throughout history, prominent men have wandered about oblivious to half of what's going on around them, treading on a thousand toes; it was typically their wives, sisters, mothers, or daughters who were left with the responsibility of performing the emotional labor of soothing egos, calming nerves, and negotiating solutions to the problems they created."

"There is, it seems, a whole genre of jobs that involve correcting the damage done by a superior who holds his position for reasons unrelated to ability to do the work."

"Supply has far outpaced demand in most industries, so now it is demand that is manufactured. My job is a combination of manufacturing demand and then exaggerating the usefulness of the products sold to fix it. In fact, you could argue that that is the job of every single person who works in or for the entire advertising industry." (from 'Tom')

"the same period that saw the most ruthless application of speed-ups and downsizing in the blue-collar sector also brought a rapid multiplication of meaningless managerial and administrative posts in almost all large firms. It's as if businesses were endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the resulting savings to acquire even more unnecessary workers in the offices upstairs."

"Those who work bullshit jobs are often surrounded by honor and prestige; they are respected as professionals, well paid, and treated as high achievers—the sort of people who can be justly proud of what they do. Yet secretly they are aware that they have achieved nothing; they feel they have done nothing to earn the consumer toys with which they fill their lives; they feel it's all based on a lie—as, indeed, it is."

"Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they not only work hard but are also held in low esteem for that very reason. But at least they know they're doing something useful."

"Bullshit jobs often pay quite well and tend to offer excellent working conditions. they're just pointless. Shit jobs are usually not at all bullshit; they typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society; it's just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly."

Sound familiar?

"One frequent theme I encountered in my research was of underlings wondering in effect, "Does my supervisor actually know that I spend eighty percent of my time designing cat memes? Are they just pretending not to notice, or are they actually unaware?"

"a bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."

"most people who do a great deal of harm in the world are protected against the knowledge that they do so. Or they allow themselves to believe the endless accretion of paid flunkies and yes-men that inevitably assemble around them to come up with reasons why they are really doing good."

And they get rid of anyone who says otherwise. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

xxvii - "This is a disastrous state of affairs."

xxvii - "The main political reaction to our awareness that half the time we are engaged in utterly meaningless or even counterproductive activities—usually under the orders of a person we dislike—is to rankle with resentment over the fact that there might be others out there who are not in the same trap. As a result, hatred, resentment, and suspicion have become the glue that holds society together."

xxvi - "It is as if we have collectively acquiesced to our own enslavement."

xxvi - "We have come to believe that men and women who do not work harder than they wish at jobs they do not particularly enjoy are bad people unworthy of love, care, or assistance from their communities."

xxv - "whenever you find someone doing something in the name of economic efficiency that seems completely economically irrational (like, say, paying people good money to do nothing all day), one had best start by asking, as the ancient Romans did, "Qui bono?"—"Who benefits?"—and how."