Bullshit Jobs and Chickenshit Jobs
When I retired from my day job in 2015, the late David Graeber kindly sent a video message to my retirement party. “Congratulations, George, on leaving your bullshit job so you can get on with your real work.” David had recently written a bestselling book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. (He was a compulsive theorist.) Bullshit jobs were “jobs that are primarily or entirely made up of tasks that the person doing that job considers to be pointless, unnecessary, or even pernicious.” Graeber offered a rich taxonomy: “flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters,” illustrated with copious examples from his research. The jobs were various, but their essential characteristics were that no one would do them voluntarily; that they yielded very little or even negative feelings of accomplishment or service; that they entailed submission to arbitrary—ie, unearned—authority; and that they made spontaneous and genuine social relations impossible. The book sharply detailed the plight of millions of our fellow citizens; it was a brilliant and urgent piece of contemporary cultural anthropology. But David was mistaken about my job.
I worked six hours a day, five days a week, for thirty years, scheduling events in a large and busy academic building at Harvard. It wasn’t particularly meaningful work, but it wasn’t meaningless; somebody had to make sure that two groups didn’t show up in the same room at the same time. It wasn’t interesting, but it wasn’t unbearably dull. Some people were bossy, but most were friendly, whether exalted professors or lowly staff. And it didn’t drain me: at the end of the day I could go home to read and write. It was, I would say, a chickenshit job.
Admittedly, I was lucky. My boss didn’t mind my reading during slack time, as long as it was onscreen and not in a book (lest someone come in and see—horrors!). I worked fairly close to home—no long, exhausting commute. The University was a pretty good employer then, benefit-wise; and a union drive succeeded (but just barely—what were my fellow employees thinking?) midway through my time, and the union’s protection made a great difference when I needed to take time off for a serious illness. Even the eminent were willing to chat briefly: Jeffrey Sachs, Robert Putnam, Samuel Huntington, Stanley Hoffmann, Benigno Aquino. And several of the graduate students became fast friends.
But all these factors were incidental. The essential thing was the job didn’t wear me out. Graeber writes: “Utilizing a bullshit job to pursue other projects isn’t easy. It requires judgment and determination to take time that’s been first flattened and homogenized … then broken randomly into unpredictably large fragments.” Jobs in four- or six-hour spells with even a modicum of variation and attendant socializing, however perfunctory, can avoid being “flattened and homogenized.” Mine did, at any rate.
I had another piece of good luck, which was essential to the job being viable for me. In 1980, just before Cambridge real estate went ballistic, I moved into my tiny apartment, in a building shortly afterward converted to condominiums. For probably the last time, I could afford to buy it; the apartment’s value soon increased by multiples, far beyond my range. And that’s how someone with a chickenshit job could afford to live in one of the country’s hottest real estate markets. Few other freelancers have been so lucky. As Russell Jacoby wrote in The Last Intellectuals, it was, as much as anything, the “disappearance of cheap, comfortable urban space” that doomed successor generations of the New York Intellectuals. Whether there’s any remedy short of Henry George’s “single tax” is beyond me. Rent control is extinct virtually everywhere; clearly, making cool urban hubs available to affluent professionals is more important than fostering communities of less affluent artists and writers.
Actually, many of my artist and writer friends do live in the city, thanks to teaching or editing jobs or (more rarely) freelance income. For me, this wasn’t a possibility. Earlier I mentioned a “serious illness.” I’ve had a lifelong mood disorder: recurrent acute clinical depression. It’s pretty much unpredictable, except that it’s usually triggered by stress, so even applying for more demanding jobs could be intolerable. I needed to have my main income coming from something I could do in my sleep. The occasional fees from freelance writing were a nice little premium.
I think, though, that even if healthy, I wouldn’t have gotten one of those teaching or editing jobs; I just don’t have the publication record. And here’s the thing: there are hundreds of thousands—millions—of people who don’t have the talent to make a living at writing, art, or music, but who would love to do it seriously and are willing to live modestly, if necessary. These people deserve chickenshit jobs – modestly paying, undemanding, part-time jobs with benefits. The alternative is bullshit jobs, which would pay more but kill the creative spark and leave them exhausted and miserable.
Why even chickenshit jobs? Why not utopia? Didn’t Marx promise that after the revolution we would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and criticize in the evening? Yes, the young Marx promised that. The mature Marx had second thoughts:
Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production…Freedom in this field can only consist in the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature;…But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.
The shortening of the working day – exactly! Not all work can be made meaningful, but all meaningless work can be limited to four or six hours a day. It’s not utopian. Total labor productivity in the US has roughly doubled in the last fifty years, and roughly 90 percent of the gains have gone to the richest 10 percent. If those gains had been distributed equally, and gone to shorten the working day, we’d all be working four to six hours rather than eight.
“How,” Lewis Hyde asks in concluding The Gift, “if art is essentially a gift, is the artist to survive in a society dominated by the market?” The lucky few will find a patron or sell their art at a high price. But most will take a chickenshit job:
a secondary job, some work more or less unrelated to his art – night watchman, merchant seaman, Berlitz teacher, doctor or insurance executive … The second job frees his art from the burden of financial responsibility so that when he is creating the work he may turn away from questions of market value and labor in the protected gift sphere. He earns a wage in the marketplace and gives it to his art.
Chickenshit jobs, like affordable urban living space, small publishers, independent bookstores, and Sunday book review sections, have been among the structural prerequisites of a lively literary life. Like these, chickenshit jobs are being squeezed by neoliberalism’s relentless quest for profits. Gig employers and temporary agencies have vacuumed up millions of part-time jobs and turned them into full-time, low-pay, no-benefits, no-security bullshit jobs.
Will the creative spirit survive neoliberalism and the tyranny of the market? As I approach eighty, the question becomes less personally urgent, while at the same time I am acutely aware that my and my generation’s political failures—too many to list, but perhaps most regrettably, allowing the Democratic Party leadership to sabotage the presidential campaigns of Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders—have left this mortal challenge for the young to face. In the depths of Trump 2, can anyone feel that the survival of a genuine, non-ersatz culture is assured? I can only wish the coming generations more wit, more heart, and more luck than my own.
George Scialabba’s most recent books are Only a Voice (Verso) and The Sealed Envelope (Yale).
