-- Download Is Your Job Bullshit? as PDF --

It’s Saturday so it’s the weekend so you’re not working.

But that’s just an incorrect hypothesis. Lots of people are working this weekend. In fact, weekends don’t mean much to billions of people. They are a luxury, relatively speaking.

But your job may be bullshit, in the context of how our society could/should be operating. We should have way more leisure time if we managed human economic activity more intelligently.

Instead, “we” [well, the 1%] are busy maximizing shareholder wealth instead. This is why we don’t have a sustainable 15 or 20 hour work week.

David Graeber, below, has gone into great detail examining why we’re all working too hard.

And this magnificent image above is the kind of paradigm shaking event we all need once in a while.

The Occupy Movement is all about equality. Economic, political and social equality. It’s hard to have that when we’re all working for the man instead of, as a society, working more efficiently so we all have employment, we’re all getting society’s needs met, and we all have the free time to self-actualize.

Instead, we’re helping the 1% maximize their shareholder wealth.

This is what I call a failure of society.

So, read Graeber, and if you feel him, click the link and read the rest. It’s good “work” for a “Saturday.”

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

– from On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs | STRIKE! Magazine.

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun

Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

Latest posts by Stephen Elliott-Buckley (see all)

• Goodbye, Politics, Re-Spun! Hello, WePivot.net! - October 21, 2016
• Fixing the Cleveland I*****s Racist Team Name - October 19, 2016
• What the BC Premier’s Reconciliation Smells Like - October 18, 2016