Perhaps not that easy. In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018), David Graeber offers an elegant approach to distinguishing "bullshit jobs." Does the person doing the job believe it has any social value? Graeber acknowledges this approach isn't perfect -- for instance, sometimes tasks are broken up and distributed in ways which disguise what they are really about. But it's probably good enough. The person doing the job probably is in the best position of anyone to know. Nobody has really worked out a convincing way to measure the social value of work (as opposed to the mere market value), so what else do we have to go on?
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe contains a sort of cautionary tale about bullshit jobs. Long ago, on a distant planet, a plan was devised to get rid of all the pointless jobs ... as well as the people who performed them. Oddly enough, this plan involved a poet, who told a tale of the coming apocalypse. The people with the pointless jobs -- mostly management types, although also some telephone-sanitizers etc. -- were packed off to colonize a backwater planet. "We'll be right behind you," everybody else shouted into space, and of course they weren't. Ha ha ha! There was no apocalypse coming after all! ... or was there?
Perhaps you can guess which planet was colonized? That's right, prehistoric Earth. And yes, we humans are the descendants of the pointless jobs people. This is demonstrated not so much by shared genetics, so much as by shared attitudes and agendas.
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe contains a sort of cautionary tale about bullshit jobs. Long ago, on a distant planet, a plan was devised to get rid of all the pointless jobs ... as well as the people who performed them. Oddly enough, this plan involved a poet, who told a tale of the coming apocalypse. The people with the pointless jobs -- mostly management types, although also some telephone-sanitizers etc. -- were packed off to colonize a backwater planet. "We'll be right behind you," everybody else shouted into space, and of course they weren't. Ha ha ha! There was no apocalypse coming after all! ... or was there?
Perhaps you can guess which planet was colonized? That's right, prehistoric Earth. And yes, we humans are the descendants of the pointless jobs people. This is demonstrated not so much by shared genetics, so much as by shared attitudes and agendas.
