Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to examine why work has come to carry so much of the burden of personal worth. Taking cues from David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs and Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, I argue that employment has come to do more than organise labour or provide an income. It also gives people status, recognition, a place within an institution, and a socially accepted account of why their time matters. Graeber’s bullshit job exposes the contradiction because the worker may retain all of these signs of importance while privately believing that much of what he does need not be done at all. Meanwhile, Becker allows us to see why such a situation can nevertheless remain compelling: work can become one of the ways in which a finite person seeks evidence that his life has consequence beyond itself.

Career Heroism and Occupational Identity

For Ernest Becker, heroism belongs as much to ordinary life as to exceptional achievement. Every culture provides forms through which people can experience themselves as significant within something that appears to outlast them. Family, religion, political allegiance, artistic achievement, and public service can all place a mortal life within a continuity extending beyond the individual. Modern employment can do the same. Becker includes “business and career heroism” among the forms available to modern people, especially where advancement through an established system becomes a recognised measure of success (DD, pp. 5–6). Promotion marks progress, increased responsibility enlarges one’s apparent consequence, and recognition from superiors confirms that one has acquired a more important place within the institution.

A career can therefore become more than the means by which someone earns a living. Becker’s account of character as a “vital lie” describes the identities through which dependence, vulnerability, and mortality are kept at a manageable distance. The structure need not be explicitly religious. Money, competition, absorbing activity, and the “success ladder in the corporation” can provide an ordered world in which a person knows what counts as success and where he stands within it. Titles and responsibilities then begin to carry more weight than the duties they describe. To be a director or to run a department means not only performing certain tasks but occupying a place from which other people make demands and await decisions. Even an overflowing diary can become reassuring when every interruption confirms that the institution still regards one’s presence as necessary.

Graeber’s bullshit job begins to expose the weakness of this arrangement when those signs of importance remain intact but confidence in the work itself does not. His definition depends upon the worker recognising that the job is pointless or unnecessary. The employee may still receive a salary, exercise authority, and advance through the organisation while becoming increasingly unable to explain why much of what occupies his day needs to exist. What begins to fail is not the professional identity itself but the activity from which that identity supposedly derives its justification.

Graeber describes the resulting experience as the “misery of ambiguity and forced pretense” (BJ, p. 158). An employee cannot ordinarily admit that little of consequence is happening and continue inhabiting the role expected of him. Meetings must yield something, strategies must appear necessary, and procedures must be presented as evidence of progress. Once an activity becomes difficult to defend by reference to what it achieves, further activity can be generated to supply the missing evidence. The worker becomes proficient not only at performing the job but at sustaining a public account of why the job deserves the time and attention given to it.

The contradiction becomes harder to dismiss because the rewards attached to the role remain genuine. Becker writes that “man needs to infuse his life with value” (DD, p. 60), and salary, promotion, responsibility, and recognition continue to provide socially intelligible signs of that value. The worker can therefore find himself becoming more important within the institution while becoming less certain that the work conferring that importance has any consequence beyond it. Institutional recognition does not disappear when belief in the work weakens. In some cases, it becomes the principal thing left to believe in.

Graeber’s “misery of not being a cause” identifies what has been lost (BJ, p. 168), as useful activity ordinarily offers some intelligible relation between effort and result. Something needs doing, the worker acts, and the relevant condition changes. The result may be temporary and unremarkable, but it explains why the activity was undertaken. Nothing about this makes the worker more heroic or more valuable as a person. It simply means that the expenditure of time answers to something other than the continuation of the work itself.

Where the work no longer answers clearly to something outside itself, activity can begin to generate the reasons for its own continuation. A problem produces a report, the report is discussed in a meeting, and the meeting produces recommendations whose implementation then has to be monitored and reviewed. Each stage can be competently performed and consume considerable time while leaving the original condition largely unchanged. The process nevertheless creates its own succession of tasks, documents, responsibilities, and measures of progress, so that the evidence of activity increasingly comes from the administrative sequence itself rather than from any change it has brought about. More time is then required to record, assess, and justify what the previous expenditure of time was supposed to achieve.

The absence of any clear external consequence does not make the rewards attached to the work disappear. Salary, rank, responsibility, and professional standing can continue to increase even as the worker becomes less certain what the activity itself achieves. Career heroism survives on increasingly institutional terms: importance is confirmed by the organisation because the person occupies a recognised place within it, while the value of that place is measured largely by the responsibilities the same organisation has created. The gold on the chains remains real. What becomes harder to establish is whether the life surrendered for it answers to anything beyond the system that awards it.

When Employment Claims Mortal Time

Modern employment often purchases time rather than the completion of a particular task. Once eight hours have been bought, finishing the necessary work after six does not usually return the remaining two to the employee. They are still treated as belonging to the employer, even when there is nothing useful left to do. Graeber traces this arrangement through the history of time discipline, contrasting it with forms of work that follow the demands of the task itself and therefore move between periods of intense effort and quieter intervals. What clock discipline removes is not effort but control over when effort is required.

For example, someone who finishes quickly may be given more work, while someone who stretches the same task across the day appears properly occupied. Tasks acquire additional stages, meetings consume the available space, and records grow more elaborate because paid time must continue to look like working time. Busyness becomes detached from necessity without ceasing to function as evidence that the employer is receiving what it has purchased.

On a timesheet, one hour can be exchanged for another; in a life, it cannot. Tuesday afternoon at forty-two happens once. Money can be replaced, budgets replenished, and organisations restructured, but the interval taken from the person who lived through it is gone. A report nobody needs therefore costs more than the salary paid to produce it, just as a weekly meeting continued for years consumes more than a line in an operating budget. Both are made from portions of lives that cannot be restored when the process is eventually abandoned.

Institutions endure precisely because the people passing through them do not. Employees arrive, acquire responsibilities, age, retire, and are replaced, while titles, procedures, committees, and departments continue under new names and new occupants. Such continuity is often necessary. A hospital or university cannot depend upon the lifespan of its current staff. The difficulty arises when maintaining the structure begins to displace the purpose for which its continuity was valuable in the first place.

Administrative processes make that displacement difficult to see because failure can itself generate further work. A problem that remains unresolved requires another review, whose recommendations require implementation, monitoring, and later assessment. If the original condition persists, its persistence can justify still more supervision. Activity accumulates around the failure without necessarily bringing it closer to resolution, while the growing apparatus becomes evidence of how seriously the institution takes the problem. Graeber’s accounts of expanding managerial structures repeatedly show this movement, in which the machinery created to support an activity begins consuming the time and attention that activity requires.

None of this requires imagining that an institution literally fears death. Becker’s psychology belongs to persons, and the people inside organisations have ordinary reasons to resist redundancy, abolished departments, reduced budgets, and lost status. Those motives enter structures that already reward demonstrations of continued necessity. A function survives partly because people depend upon it, while the evidence that people depend upon it increasingly comes from the work required to keep the function in place.

Finite lives are therefore converted into institutional continuity in a particularly strange way. Human time produces activity, the activity becomes evidence that the organisation remains necessary, and that necessity authorises another claim upon human time. The institution can survive successive generations of workers because each generation supplies the hours through which its continued importance is demonstrated.

What begins as a promise that the individual can participate in something that outlasts him can therefore reverse direction. The institution still outlasts the worker, but its endurance may now depend less upon the value of what it does than upon the repeated expenditure of lives required to prove that it should continue. This is the administration of mortality: not the conquest of death through work, but the conversion of mortal time into a resource for institutions that need never experience mortality themselves.

Hierarchy, Status, and Significance

Within Graeber’s managerial feudalism, apparently unnecessary structures can still serve the people who occupy them. A manager with a larger team, a wider remit, and a bigger budget appears to command more important work than one responsible for less. Cutting redundant staff or abolishing a pointless process may improve the organisation while reducing the visible scale of the manager’s authority. Graeber’s flunky jobs make this especially clear. One employee is paid to make calls that a broker could easily make himself, largely so that clients and colleagues will see the broker as important enough to require an assistant. The worker describes himself as a “totem figure” whose presence raises his superior’s standing (BJ, p. 65).

Becker’s account of transference helps explain why this arrangement can work in both directions, as institutional hierarchies provide recognised authorities whose judgements matter to the people beneath them. Promotion, praise, and increased responsibility do more than alter someone’s formal position. They confirm that the organisation has judged him worthy of a more important one. The manager receives a corresponding form of confirmation from the existence of the people, budgets, and functions placed under his control. Authority becomes visible through the structure surrounding it.

The result is a hierarchy in which significance is continually passed between levels. The subordinate looks upward for recognition, while the manager looks downward and finds evidence of his own importance in the responsibilities and staff attached to his position. The same pattern can repeat higher up the organisation, so that rank is sustained partly by the amount of activity gathered beneath it. The work itself need not be wholly useless for this to happen. Necessary administrative functions can still acquire extra procedures, posts, and responsibilities because those additions enlarge the importance of the people who control them.

This is why attempts to simplify an organisation can provoke resistance even when the efficiency gain is obvious. Removing a process can also remove a responsibility. Combining two teams can leave someone with fewer people to manage. Abolishing a committee can strip away a chairmanship and the recognition attached to it. What appears irrational from the standpoint of the organisation may be perfectly intelligible to someone whose position is partly measured by how much activity passes through his hands.

The same logic sits behind the boast about being perpetually overworked, as continuous demands upon a person’s time can function as evidence that the position itself matters. To be constantly consulted, interrupted, and required is to receive repeated confirmation that the organisation cannot easily do without you. The burden and the status become difficult to separate, which is why reducing the burden can also feel like reducing the person.

Useful Work and Human Worth

Graeber distinguishes bullshit jobs from work that may be exhausting, unpleasant, or badly paid but still has an evident reason to be done. Cleaning is necessary because buildings become dirty and nursing is vital because people become ill and require care. The justification belongs to the work itself, not to the moral character of the person performing it. A necessary task can warrant somebody’s time without making the person who undertakes it more worthy than someone else.

Modern attitudes to work repeatedly blur those two judgements. Graeber notes that occupations whose benefits are easiest to identify are often poorly rewarded, while positions of doubtful social value can carry considerably more income and prestige. The imbalance is then moralised. The carer or teacher is expected to accept poor conditions because the work is supposedly rewarding in itself, as though obvious usefulness could substitute for proper recognition or pay. Sacrifice becomes part of the compensation.

Becker’s account of heroism makes the danger in that response clearer. Work concerned with illness, maintenance, or care remains close to forms of dependence that fantasies of mastery tend to push aside. Bodies become sick, buildings deteriorate, and people require one another. The importance of such work comes from answering to those conditions, not from granting the worker some privileged access to authenticity. A nurse can make professional indispensability the centre of an identity just as readily as an executive can build one from rank. A teacher can turn vocation into a measure of personal worth. Obvious usefulness does not prevent work from becoming another hero-system.

The distinction Graeber needs is narrower than a moral ranking of occupations. A task has a claim upon someone’s time when there is a reason for it to be done beyond preserving the process that assigns it; where that reason fades and the process begins generating its own necessity, the failure belongs to the organisation rather than to the people caught inside it. Usefulness can tell us whether the work warrants the life spent upon it. It cannot tell us what that life is worth.

Otherwise, the criticism of bullshit jobs merely reproduces the work ethic in a more flattering form. Instead of saying that employment proves a person’s worth, it says that useful employment does. The administrator loses his halo and the carer receives it, but work remains the place where human value is supposedly earned. The hierarchy changes while the underlying demand survives.

Work as Sacrifice and Moral Discipline

In our brave new world of the twentieth century, Graeber argues, work is increasingly valued not only for what it produces but for the discipline required to endure it. The unpleasantness of a job can become part of its moral defence, allowing people to “gain feelings of dignity and self-worth because they hate their jobs” (BJ, p. 337). Long hours, exhaustion, and the surrender of private time then acquire a significance of their own. They demonstrate perseverance, seriousness, and the willingness to submit oneself to obligations that respectable adulthood is supposed to require.

Such a judgement becomes harder to question when much of a life has already been organised around it. Someone who has spent decades commuting, working late, and arranging family life around professional demands cannot recover those years if the demands later appear excessive or unnecessary. The possibility that the same work might have been done with fewer hours therefore touches more than present convenience. It changes the meaning assigned to sacrifices that have already been made and cannot now be undone.

The habits formed under one generation of workers are often passed on as standards for the next: hardship is remembered as formative, long hours as evidence of commitment, and endurance as part of what work properly demands. A younger worker who escapes those conditions does not simply enjoy an easier arrangement. His experience suggests that some of what an earlier generation accepted as necessary may never have been necessary at all.

Take the examples of Japan and China. In the former, long working hours became sufficiently entrenched that karoshi (death associated with overwork) has been treated as a national labour problem for decades. Meanwhile, China’s notorious 996 culture (working from nine in the morning until nine at night, six days a week) became a recognised model in parts of the technology sector. In both cases, endurance can become entangled with professional seriousness. A younger worker who leaves on time, refuses routine overtime, or rejects 996 is therefore doing more than choosing an easier life. His behaviour raises the possibility that what an older generation had accepted as evidence of commitment was, at least in part, an avoidable demand rather than an unavoidable condition of work.

Graeber’s balance of resentments develops from this collision between different forms of sacrifice. Workers doing badly paid but obviously useful jobs can resent professionals whose work appears comfortable and difficult to justify. Those professionals may in turn envy people who can point directly to what their labour accomplishes. Both can be encouraged to resent someone outside employment altogether, whose apparent freedom from work discipline seems to violate the terms under which everyone else has been required to live. Dissatisfaction that might have been directed towards the organisation of work is instead distributed among people occupying different positions within it.

Technological improvement does not necessarily loosen the moral hold of work, because reducing the hours required can also remove one of the ways commitment has traditionally been displayed. If seriousness has been measured by staying late, remaining available, and enduring long weeks, then doing the same work in half the time can look less like efficiency than a refusal of the discipline through which professional worth has been recognised. The technology saves labour, but the culture may continue to value the sacrifice it was supposed to remove.

Graeber’s Basic Income proposal tries to sever that connection by aiming to “unlatch work from livelihood entirely” (BJ, p. 384). A person who can survive without accepting whatever employment is offered has some real power to refuse demands that cannot justify the time they consume. That freedom is easily compromised, however, if the hours recovered from work must immediately be defended by showing that they will be used creatively, socially, politically, or otherwise well. The old demand simply reappears in another form, with every part of life still expected to prove its usefulness. Rather, the burden of justification should run the other way. Where an institution claims an irrecoverable portion of someone’s life, it should be able to say why that claim is worth making.

Why Work Cannot Measure a Life

Useful work does not escape the problem Becker identifies simply because its purpose is easier to defend. A person can attach the same need for significance to being needed, competent, productive, or indispensable that another attaches to rank and professional status. The nurse whose work plainly matters and the executive whose work does not may inhabit very different moral situations, but either can allow an occupation to carry more of the self than the occupation can bear. Once usefulness becomes evidence of personal worth, the criticism of bullshit work has only replaced one form of career heroism with another.

Once usefulness itself becomes part of the identity, the distinction between doing something valuable and being valuable begins to blur. In The Sickness Unto Death, the depressive Dane Søren Kierkegaard, writing through Anti-Climacus, insists that “the more consciousness, the more self” (SUD, p. 29). Occupation, reputation, ability, temperament, and achievement all belong to a life, but none exhausts the person living it. The attempt to make them do so appears more starkly in defiant despair, where “the self in despair wants to be master of itself or to create itself” (SUD, p. 68). Career provides unusually convenient materials for such a project. Years of promotion, expertise, responsibility, and recognition can be assembled into an increasingly complete account of who somebody is, until losing the role threatens more than income or routine because the person has come to depend upon it as an account of himself.

As usefulness hardens into identity, vocation can perform much the same psychological work as ambition. A person may come to know himself through being indispensable to patients, pupils, colleagues, or a community just as another knows himself through rank and professional standing. The distinction between useful and pointless labour remains important because some activities can justify the time they require while others cannot. What does not follow is that the person performing useful work acquires his worth from being useful.

A career also supplies a ready-made order in which advancement can be recognised, certain judgements matter more than others, and a successful life takes on a familiar shape. When that order weakens, the loss is not confined to income or routine. The person also loses part of the structure through which he has learned to interpret himself. Kierkegaard describes anxiety as “the anxious possibility of being able” (CA, pp. 44–45), where possibility opens before the individual knows what he will make of it. Another occupation can quickly close that uncertainty by supplying a new set of expectations and recognitions, but nothing essential has changed if the new role is again required to settle what the person is.

In The Sickness Unto Death, Anti-Climacus carries the argument beyond the search for a better worldly identity, as the self that escapes despair does not secure itself through a more successful arrangement of achievements, relationships, or social roles, but in willing to be itself rests “transparently in the power that established it” (SUD, p. 14). Work may occupy an important part of a life without becoming the source from which that life derives its worth. A profession can be necessary, absorbing, admirable, or satisfying, yet none of these qualities creates the self whose value the profession is being asked to confirm.

Bullshit employment makes the confusion unusually visible because professional recognition can survive after the worker has lost confidence in what the work accomplishes. Salary, responsibility, and status remain, even when the employee can no longer explain why much of the activity should exist. The job continues to confer a recognised place after its practical justification has weakened, showing how easily employment can move from organising work to certifying the person who performs it. The institution claims large portions of somebody’s life and then returns the importance of that claim as evidence that the life has been consequential.

Replacing pointless work with meaningful work therefore leaves the deeper problem untouched if usefulness is simply given the role once occupied by status. Useful work has a stronger claim upon human time because something outside the institution depends upon its being done. That is already enough to distinguish it from activity sustained chiefly by the processes that administer it. No further conclusion about the worth of the worker follows from the usefulness of the task.

The administration of mortality extends beyond the waste produced by bullshit jobs because the same confusion can survive in perfectly necessary occupations. Institutions may have good reasons to ask for time, effort, expertise, and even sacrifice. What they cannot derive from those demands is a judgement upon the value of the person meeting them. Work can warrant the expenditure of part of a life without becoming the standard by which that life is judged.

Sources and References

~ (BJ) Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Simon & Schuster, 2018) by David Graeber.

~ (DD) The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973) by Ernest Becker.

~ (SUD) The Sickness Unto Death (Princeton University Press, 1980) by Søren Kierkegaard.

~ (CA) The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton University Press, 1980) by Søren Kierkegaard.