Pretending to Work

摘要

BENEDICT CLOUETTE In 2013, you wrote an essay entitled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Dobs: A Work Rant," which was widely circulated on social media when it was published. It seemed to give credence to an intuition that many people had— that their jobs were, to use your term, "bullshit jobs." You recently adapted the essay into a book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). What is a bullshit job? DAVID GRAEBER A bullshit job is one where even the person doing the job can't justify its existence, where that person is fairly confident that, were their job to disappear, it would make no difference at all—or might even make the world slightly better. Really, it's not huge news that a lot of people think that their work is pointless. All I'm suggesting is that we take these intuitions seriously.