Introduction

The origin of this essay arose from a deeply cynical conversation at work as to why individuals within a workplace put such a high premium on the recognition of their status and roles to the point that it comes to consume and define their personality. I have refined and developed this conversation by synthesising Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death and David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs.

My proposition is that: pointless employment functions as a degraded system of secular heroism.

Becker explains that human beings require cultural forms through which they can experience their lives as significant, socially recognised, and connected to something more durable than their mortal bodies. Graeber, meanwhile, shows that employment has become one of the principal institutions expected to provide this recognition, even as a large part of employment has become administratively unnecessary, socially useless, or actively harmful.

The bullshit job is therefore not merely an inefficient occupation. It is a social role that promises significance while depriving the worker of the experience of producing anything significant; preserving sacrifice while abolishing its the credible purpose.

Employment as a Secular Hero-System

Becker begins his analysis by invoking William James’ description of the world as a “theatre for heroism” (DD, p1).

Heroism here does not mean exceptional military courage or public greatness. It means the ordinary human need to establish that one’s existence counts. Human beings know themselves to be vulnerable, dependent, and mortal, but they are also symbolic creatures who seek value, permanence, and recognition. Culture reconciles these opposed conditions by providing roles in which finite persons can participate in apparently enduring purposes.

A person may locate significance in family, religion, artistic creation, political service, craftsmanship, scientific discovery, or national belonging. Each role tells the individual that his life forms part of a larger order and that his actions possess consequences extending beyond immediate bodily survival. Becker therefore interprets culture not simply as a collection of customs but as an organised system of symbolic heroism.

Employment has increasingly absorbed this function. A job now certifies more than an economic position. It signifies adulthood, independence, discipline, social usefulness, and moral respectability. The employed person is recognised as a contributor; the unemployed person is liable to be treated as economically superfluous and morally suspect. Work becomes the institution through which society grants a person a recognised reason to occupy social space. Graeber identifies the resulting moral order when he writes that society has come to value “work as an end and meaning in itself” (BJ, p.xxiv).

Work is no longer justified principally by the good produced, the need satisfied, or the object created. The performance of work becomes intrinsically virtuous because it demonstrates submission to discipline. A person proves moral worth by surrendering time and energy to employment, even where the employment has no defensible social purpose.

The bullshit job becomes possible because the moral value of labour has been detached from its consequences. Once work is treated as an end in itself, it no longer matters decisively whether the work produces anything necessary. The employee’s submission becomes the product.

The radical implication is that contemporary employment has become a secular religion whose central sacrament is compulsory busyness. The worker offers time, obedience, and effort. In return, the institution confers identity, status, and provisional membership in the community of the deserving.

The Bullshit Job as Counterfeit Heroism

A conventional theory of economic motivation predicts that a person should welcome being highly paid to do very little. But Graeber’s evidence contradicts this assumption. Workers placed in such positions frequently report humiliation, depression, anxiety, self-contempt, and a sense that their lives are being fraudulently represented. Graeber describes the damage as a “scar across our collective soul” (BJ, p.xv).

A pointless job injures the worker at the level at which employment was supposed to provide moral identity. The worker receives the outward signs of contribution – a title, office, salary, professional vocabulary, and institutional position – but cannot identify a corresponding contribution to the world.

The contradiction is internal to the role as an employee must publicly act as though the work is necessary while privately recognising that it is not. Reports must be described as important, meetings as productive, strategies as transformative, and administrative procedures as indispensable. The worker’s official personality affirms what his practical intelligence denies.

Becker’s psychology explains why this contradiction is so destructive. Cultural identity normally protects the individual from insignificance. The person inhabits a role through which he can believe himself useful, valuable, and connected to a durable order. The bullshit job preserves the role but destroys belief in it.

It is therefore a degraded form of Becker’s cultural heroism. It demands sacrifice but cannot provide transcendence. It assigns the worker a place in an institutional order while allowing him to see that the place is unnecessary. It offers recognition without a credible object of recognition.

The ordinary cultural illusion can still generate purpose because its participant believes in the value of the role. The bullshit worker occupies a more corrosive position. He must maintain a cultural illusion after becoming conscious of its falsity. His employment becomes an organised form of disavowal: he knows the activity is pointless, knows the institution expects him to conceal that knowledge, and often suspects that everyone else knows the same thing.

The result is counterfeit heroism. The employee does not merely pretend to be busy. He must pretend that his finite existence is being spent upon something worthy of the expenditure.

Pointless Employment and the Destruction of Agency

Graeber identifies the precise psychological mechanism through which pointless work damages the self as “the misery of not being a cause” (BJ, p.112).

Human beings form a sense of themselves as agents by discovering that their actions have effects:

1. The child moves an object and experiences causal power.
2. The craftsperson changes raw material into a finished object.
3. The nurse provides treatment and relieves suffering.
4. The mechanic repairs a machine.
5. The teacher enables understanding.

In each case, the worker can trace a line between action and consequence.

This experience is not merely economically useful. It is constitutive of the self. To act is to encounter oneself as a being capable of altering a shared world. The bullshit job interrupts this relation as the employee performs activities, but those activities either produce no discernible result or produce a result that would not be missed:

1. The presentation is given, the report submitted;
2. the audit completed, and the strategic framework approved;
3. but the underlying reality remains unchanged.

The injury is intensified because the employee must represent this absence of consequence as achievement. He must generate the appearance of agency while being denied agency itself. The worker becomes responsible for staging the evidence that something has happened.

In stating that “man needs to infuse his life with value” (DD, p.60), Becker’s account of symbolic significance clarifies the seriousness of the deprivation. The individual needs more than biological survival to endure, not by bread alone.

The person requires a structure through which action can be judged good, worthwhile, or significant. Becker calls the power apparently conferred by such structures immortality-power: the sense that one’s conduct participates in a value exceeding the isolated organism.

Meaningful work can provide a limited form of this power. The individual produces, repairs, teaches, protects, cares, or creates. His action enters a world shared with others and survives, however modestly, in its consequences. But pointless employment reverses the process. It consumes action without preserving consequence. It takes the worker’s capacity to affect the world and confines it within procedures whose principal result is the reproduction of the procedures themselves.

This explains why a sinecure can feel worse than strenuous necessary labour. Difficult work can confirm agency. Effort expended upon nothing undermines agency because it demonstrates that the institution values the worker’s submission more than his capacities.

Time as a Commodity

The basic loss imposed by pointless employment is not merely lost productivity. It is lost life. Every hour transferred to an unnecessary task is an irrecoverable portion of a mortal existence.

Graeber’s history of employment shows how labour was progressively transformed from the completion of tasks into the sale of time. Under task-oriented arrangements, work ends when the necessary activity has been completed. Under time-disciplined employment, completing the task does not necessarily release the worker. The employer has purchased a period and claims authority over that period whether or not useful activity remains.

This explains the imperative to appear busy. The employee who finishes early is not regarded as having worked efficiently. He is liable to be assigned further activity because unoccupied time appears to be stolen from the employer. The institution measures obedience by continuous occupation rather than contribution.

Bullshit employment reveals the metaphysical content of this arrangement. The worker knows that the assigned activity does not need to be performed, but the institution nevertheless claims the right to determine how that portion of life will be spent. It also requires the worker to speak as though the expenditure were necessary.

Becker begins from the human awareness that life is finite. Cultural projects matter because they promise to transform passing time into durable significance. A person sacrifices present effort because he believes the sacrifice produces something that will survive the moment: a family, work, institution, memory, tradition, or common good.

The bullshit job retains the sacrifice but severs it from anything enduring. It is therefore a negative immortality project. Instead of allowing the worker to participate in something that outlasts him, it allows the institution to outlast the worker by consuming his time.

Employees enter and leave; departments continue. Individuals age, retire, become ill, and die; the reporting structures, compliance systems, and managerial offices persist. Institutional permanence is purchased through successive expenditures of finite lives.

The employee’s concealed anguish arises from the recognition that the organisation is converting life into nothing while describing the conversion as productivity. The report that no one reads is not merely a useless document. It represents hours that no one can return to the person who produced it.

Managerial Hierarchy and Distribution of Borrowed Significance

“Managerial feudalism” (BJ, p.174–75) is the term Graeber mobilises to explain why institutions preserve useless occupations even when technological or organisational reforms could eliminate them.

In his banking example, an employee developed systems capable of automating tedious manual procedures at a fraction of their existing cost. The reforms were resisted because eliminating the procedures would also eliminate the consultants and subordinates attached to senior executives. Those positions provided executives with evidence of their own power.

The example undermines the claim that corporations invariably eliminate inefficiency. An occupation may be economically unnecessary but hierarchically useful. Its existence demonstrates the importance of the superior who commands it.

The manager’s staff becomes a retinue. Department size, budget, reporting responsibilities, and the number of subordinates operate as visible measures of status. Personnel are not always recruited because a task exists; tasks may be invented because a hierarchy already exists and requires justification.

Becker’s theory of transference supplies the psychological mechanism, with individuals seeking persons and institutions capable of confirming their value. The subordinate directs his performance towards the superior, whose approval determines promotion, security, recognition, and belonging. The manager, meanwhile, derives evidence of consequence from the number of people whose conduct he can direct.

The relationship is reciprocal but unequal. The employee depends upon the institution to certify his social importance. The superior depends upon employees to materialise his authority.

The organisation becomes a chain of borrowed heroism. Each level seeks validation from above and proof of significance below. The executive is important because he commands a division; the middle manager is important because he implements executive strategy; the administrative worker is important because he supports the manager’s implementation. Each role receives its meaning from its position in the hierarchy rather than from a demonstrable consequence outside it.

This also explains the proliferation of titles, strategies, internal presentations, consultancy exercises, and oversight mechanisms. These activities continually represent the organisation to itself as active, consequential, and expanding. They are institutional monuments built out of salaried time.

Administration as Ritualised Death Denial

An institution can become obsolete, lose legitimacy, suffer failure, or be abolished. In this sense, institutions possess their own socially mediated form of mortality. Administrative proliferation provides a defence against this threat by generating continuous signs that the institution remains active and necessary.

Targets, audits, consultations, impact assessments, development strategies, review panels, and compliance documents do not always alter the conditions they ostensibly address. They may instead convert those conditions into representations that the organisation can manage:

1. A failure becomes an action plan.
2. A criticism becomes a review.
3. A risk becomes an entry on a register.
4. A social need becomes a performance indicator.

Once represented administratively, the uncontrolled reality appears to have been contained within an authorised process.

The document ceases to record action and begins to substitute for action. The organisation demonstrates responsibility by documenting that responsibility has been considered.

This is a secular ritual structure. But ritual does not necessarily change the material condition to which it responds. Rather, it produces a symbolic order in the presence of uncertainty, with managerial administration similarly reassuring the institution that events have been classified, assigned, monitored, and controlled, etc.

Its repetitive character follows from its practical weakness. Because the underlying problem remains, further monitoring is required. The failure of one administrative layer generates the need for another layer. Every additional level creates new coordination problems and therefore new administrative positions. The institution proves its vitality by increasing the volume of activity conducted in its name. Thus, administrative motion becomes evidence of institutional life.

Read through Becker, this is collective death denial. The institution fears exposure as ineffective or unnecessary and responds by producing elaborate demonstrations of its own necessity. It consumes human time to manufacture signs that it cannot die.

The Devaluation of Necessary Work

Graeber carefully distinguishes bullshit jobs from badly paid or degrading jobs. Cleaners, carers, nurses, builders, transport workers, teachers, refuse collectors, and maintenance workers may be exploited, but their work has evident consequences, with buildings require cleaning, people require care, machines require repair, children require education, and waste requires removal, and so on.

These occupations deal directly with dependence, deterioration, embodiment, and need. They confront the conditions Becker identifies as the source of human anxiety: creatureliness, vulnerability, helplessness, and mortality. For example:

1. Care work acknowledges that no one is self-sufficient.
2. Maintenance accepts that all things decay.
3. Medicine concedes that bodies fail.
4. Education recognises that we do not arrive fully formed.
5. Sanitation confronts the inevitable residue of living.

The dominant managerial hero-system prefers images of independence, command, growth, mastery, and accumulation. Work centred upon dependence and repair therefore occupies an ambiguous position. It is indispensable in practice but subordinate in symbolic prestige.

The managerial worker administers representations of organisational value. The care worker sustains actual vulnerable life. Yet the former may be rewarded more generously because his work occurs nearer to the institutional centres that distribute status and remuneration. This division produces two damaged classes:

1. Necessary workers receive usefulness without adequate recognition.
2. Bullshit workers receive recognition without credible usefulness.

The first group is materially exploited; the second is existentially compromised. Their antagonism prevents either from identifying the institutional structure responsible for the separation of dignity from usefulness.

Resentment and the Conversion of Wasted Life into a Universal Obligation

A person who has surrendered decades to unnecessary work faces a painful possibility: much of the sacrifice may have been avoidable. Admitting this would require the recognition that irreplaceable portions of life had been taken without adequate justification.

The work ethic defends against this recognition by transforming personal loss into a general moral rule. Because one person was compelled to submit, everyone else must also submit. Because one generation sacrificed time, later generations must prove their worth through equivalent sacrifice.

This is why technological liberation can provoke hostility. Automation could reduce necessary working time, but leisure is treated as undeserved unless acquired through prior suffering. Material abundance does not automatically produce freedom because the moral order remains organised around compulsory discipline.

Graeber’s balance of resentments redirects anger horizontally, with the overworked resenting those who appear to work less:

1. The employed resent the unemployed.
2. Pointless professionals resent workers whose occupations possess obvious meaning.
3. The underpaid necessary workers resent comfortable administrators.

Each group interprets the partial advantage of another group as the principal injustice.

Becker attributes this emotional intensity to the conviction that the sacrifice held meaning, a belief that serves to protect the individual’s interpretation of their own life, with anyone who escapes the sacrifice threatening that belief. The liberated person does not merely receive an advantage; his freedom exposes the possibility that previous submission was unnecessary.

Resentment therefore preserves the work system by making liberation appear immoral. The governing principle becomes an Orwellian assertion that: because my life was subordinated, yours must be subordinated as well!

Liberation and the Democratisation of Meaning

Graeber describes the unofficial projects through which workers resist pointless employment as “guerrilla purpose” (BJ, p.134). That is, workers use empty institutional time to write, make art, organise politically, edit public resources, sustain voluntary associations, or develop projects they consider genuinely useful. These practices restore a connection between action and consequence.

The revealing inversion is that the institution defines paid activity as legitimate work and meaningful activity as evasion. From the worker’s perspective, however, the official activity is empty and the unofficial activity possesses purpose.

A basic income, reduced working time, or unconditional access to material security could weaken the compulsion sustaining pointless employment. Such measures would allow people to refuse unnecessary work and would reduce the bureaucratic machinery devoted to determining who deserves assistance.

A Graeber solution, which I will call utopian, would argue that a liberated order must provide more than income without work. It must recognise forms of contribution that the employment system excludes or subordinates: care, friendship, study, worship, art, political participation, maintenance, neighbourhood activity, contemplation, craft, and play. This requires separating human worth from the quantity of time surrendered to an employer. Necessary work must be shared and properly rewarded. Unnecessary work must be allowed to disappear. Free time must cease to signify social uselessness and become the material basis of autonomous activity.

But Becker shows why economic reform alone remains insufficient; for human beings continue to require meaning, recognition, and forms of self-transcendence. When occupational heroism collapses, this need can attach itself to nationalism, authoritarian leadership, celebrity, consumption, conspiratorial communities, or political fanaticism.

Conclusion

To summarise:

1. Becker shows that human beings require cultural structures through which mortal lives can appear significant.
2. Graeber demonstrates that employment has become one of the dominant structures performing this function, even as managerial society increasingly fills employment with activities that workers themselves regard as unnecessary.

The bullshit job is therefore a failed immortality project. It asks the worker to sacrifice finite life to an institution but cannot demonstrate that the sacrifice produces anything worthy of survival. It grants a title without agency, status without usefulness, activity without consequence, and employment without vocation.

Managerial society does not merely waste labour but administers mortality. It controls access to income, recognition, and social identity by demanding the surrender of time. Its deepest command is not that every person produce something useful, but that every person submit to an institution capable of certifying that his existence is legitimate.

Bullshit jobs are the administrative rituals of a civilisation that still demands sacrifice but can no longer identify anything adequate to the sacrifice. Graeber reveals the institutional production of pointless work; Becker discloses the fear of insignificance that binds people to it.

Its abolition therefore requires more than efficiency or automation. It requires a social order in which people can care, create, think, worship, maintain, associate, and act politically without first proving their moral worth through compulsory institutional busyness.

The utopian option would be to call for a social order in which people can care, create, think, worship, maintain, associate, and act politically without first proving their moral worth through compulsory institutional busyness. But in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, we find an individual who is not merely oppressed by a defective social order but actively converts freedom into spite, retreating into a loathsome, stinking underground and immersing himself in venomous and everlasting spite.

His revolt against the utopian palace of crystal establishes that even an order organised around security, leisure, and rationally recognised contribution could be sabotaged by those who experience its promise of completed happiness as the extinction of their singular freedom; the palace of cystal as an idealised society that the Underground Man must tear down through his own divided and compulsive consciousness. As he rants:

You believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed – a palace at which one will not be able to put out one’s tongue or make a long nose on the sly. And perhaps that is just why I am afraid of this edifice, that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed and that one cannot put one’s tongue out at it even on the sly. (NU, p24)

The abolition of bullshit jobs would remove one failed immortality project, but it would not remove the needs that produced it, since “the desire to affirm oneself and to yield oneself are, after all, very neutral: we can choose any path for them, any object, any level of heroics” (DD, p.96). Those needs would simply migrate into other institutions, identities, causes, and relations, including the apparently emancipated spheres of care, creativity, worship, and politics.

There is therefore, no Graeber solution to this problem in any meaningful and transformative sense: no arrangement of work and leisure can reconcile the human being to mortality or prevent freedom from generating new forms of dependence, rivalry, resentment, and self-destruction. Becker concludes that “all living organisms are condemned to perversity,” politics cannot abolish heroism but can only ask “what kind of perversity is fitting for man” (DD, p. 96). The task then, is not to solve the human condition, but to prevent its unavoidable heroics from wasting finite life and assuming their narrowest and most destructive forms.

Sources and References

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

~ (BJ) Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2018) by David Graeber.

~ (NU) Notes from the Underground (Dover Thrift, 1992) by Fyodor Dostovesky.