Mind-Boggling Ideas About Modern Work

7 contradictions from our work lives

Hello,

A few weeks ago, we analyzed the phenomenon bullshit jobs and the psychological insight that makes them so painful for us. It was taken from David Graeber’s immensely influential book that I mentioned in my recent recommendations list, and I feel it’s important to expand on his work.

I have therefore decided to make a list of some of the most intriguing contradictions and paradoxes in modern work culture.

Every idea is quite deep and I’d encourage readers to take a pause and reflect on each one of them. If you have observed or experienced these phenomena in your own career at some point, I’d love to know more.

Here we go:

1. Inverted pay: The great tragedy of our economy is that those doing work which actually benefits society (like cleaners, train drivers, nurses) are paid excruciatingly low wages. It’s almost like there’s an unofficial rule here: the more important your work is to society, the lesser you’ll be paid. Want a litmus test to judge which jobs are truly critical to society? Watch what happens when they go on strike. Cities get crippled when metro staff strikes for multiple days. We’d be doomed if all sweepers decided to not turn up for an extended period. But barely any of those effects would happen if consultants or marketers (yes, I’m taking a dig at my own vocation here) fail to show up at 10 AM on a Monday morning.
   

   

   
   

2. The Prosperity Paradox: Those who get paid really well (lobbyists, hedge fund managers, weapons manufacturers, etc), on the other hand, arguably cause a lot of damage to society with their work. How can the ones whose work wreaks havoc be paid lavishly while poets and handicrafts workers struggle with unemployment or low income? It’s because the former directly serves the interests of the top 1%. Speaks a lot about the kind of world we’ve built for ourselves.
   

3. Pleasure at being the cause: We’ve explored this immensely deep insight in a previous post. Humans derive their sense of identity from their agency- their ability to do things and bring about a change in the world. Denied this ability, we succumb to rage, withdrawal, and depression. This is why we hate bullshit jobs- where we’re forced to pretend that we’re doing something when, in fact, we’re literally counting the number of hair strands on our left toe. This is a total denial of agency, a denial of the feeling that one exists and can create things- which is why bullshit jobs are so damaging and leave a collective scar across our souls.
   

4. Changing the meaning of time- Traditional societies didn’t measure activities by the amount of time they’d take. It was the other way around. The time required to do something (like walking to a nearby village) was measured by 2 boilings of a pot of rice. It took a major moral and technological leap for us to start seeing time the way we see it today- divided into neat little slots that can be wasted, used, and most shockingly- sold for a price. This idea of renting out time where someone else becomes its owner would have been shocking to people throughout history. Moreover, time management really began when churches started preaching it as an important value during the Industrial Revolution and started suggesting that the poor were in that state because they wouldn’t manage their time well. At the same time, clocks became common and this led to the “You’re on my time” morality which was essential to making people guilty and getting them to work their asses off.
   

5. Toxic bosses and BDSM- Do you know why BDSM is pleasurable for many? Because they can control the experience-because they can always use a safe word if the activity gets too painful (like “ORANGE!”) and transform their partner from a nasty aggressor to a loving, caring partner. (This radical transformation happens to be the plot-line for many romance novels too). The important point here is that the existence of a safe word allows them to wade through the waters of a BDSM experience at their own pace. A similar parallel can be drawn between BS Jobs and toxic bosses- they’re similar to one’s BDSM experience with one crucial difference- the employee can’t use the safe word and opt out. This makes the experience sickening for people as they can’t handle the pure projection of power. This power play turns pathological and the boss makes it increasingly harder for the lower one to impress him- thereby worsening the impact. Graeber also proposes a solution to this, which we’ll cover soon.
   

6. Modern feudalism: Modern managerialism is nothing but rebranded feudalism. The vast retinue of corporate hierarchies doesn’t really serve an economic function (because so many of the folks in the middle aren’t really producing anything of value) but is simply a process of creating a coterie of loyalists to hoard political power. Any system which has doers and managers will see the latter organize itself into a massive hierarchy with rents extracted at every level.
   

7. Self-worth by ordeal: We’ve convinced ourselves that the only way to feel worthy is to work ourselves to death- which has left a collective scar on our souls. So why do we persist? Well, not everyone is worse off. By encouraging us to morph into worker bees who have to work themselves to exhaustion, at least a few people do benefit from the fattening bottom lines. Was this, then, an ingenious trick: to turn the ordeal of overwork into an ideal so the modern economic machine can never stop growing? It does seem so. It does seem like we’ve acquiesced to our own enslavement.
   

Some of these ideas may make you question the very point of getting up at 7 AM every day and spending our entire lives chasing some ephemeral, impermanent ideal that ultimately doesn’t matter.

If it does, don’t stop that thought in its tracks. Reflect deeply, and ask yourself if the things we chase are things we truly want or the products of deep cultural conditioning.

We’ll be back with 8 more paradoxes soon.

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