Because many only look at first order consequences and ignore anything beyond that. Despite history having a huge number of societally enhancing innovations to reference that also took jobs at the time.
Or. It's entirely possible that the currency inflation is caused by something completely unrelated (central banks and government spending/lending) and you're confusing correlating events (the development of new technologies and decrease in buying power) with causation.
> The technology being developed today is consolidating wealth at the top. No one is getting from the gig economy.
The top level Tax Rate has declined from 91% tax rate to 37% tax rate from 1950s through 2020s, and you blame technology for the failure of our society to redistribute wealth?
So? I don't claim otherwise. The fact that a life ground to dust is an effective lubricant for the engine of progress or whatever is not comforting or righteous. Maybe you could stand to consider the first order consequences a little more.
Feeding the poor via technological advances lowering cost of food production is not righteous in your opinion?
Despite those agricultural workers who lost their jobs.
Innovation in aggregate benefits most people in the long run via lessening real costs of goods. Producing goods in an inefficient manner raises the real cost of living for society.
Was life better when the average person spent 80% of their income on food?
Will life be worse for the average person when goods and services become 50% cheaper through AI driven automation?
What's ironic is the sci-fi future we dreamt was one where robots took over the back breaking work, letting humanity focus on arts, sciences and philosophy, but the reality we got is one where humans are still responsible for a lot of the back breaking work, while AI robots are now writing movie scripts, composing music and painting paintings.
One of Graeber's points not included in OP's article is that these jobs partially exist as a signal of power: the big manager needs to show status by having three EAs, not just one, even though three EAs do not much. LLMs can't replace power-signaling and politics!
In reality when you really think long and hard many jobs are kind of useless.
I could argue that in the grand scheme of things our existence might be completely useless and irrelevant. Yet we spend our short existence doing things which have almost no meaning, some of us try to impress our friends and neighbors. Put up some accomplishments on our useless CV before we turn into dust. Others will raise their offspring to continue this until our planet can no longer sustain life.
It's so weird. I think that sometimes, but I don't usually think about it. Most of the time it's just a short moment "awake" and aware that all of this is batshit absurd, then recognizing that there's nothing for me here up here except the view, then continue on with my life without remorse towards the next hill top or valley or whatever lies in wait for me. I think it used to give me vertigo, now I'm used to it. I feel tentatively okay about all this.
I just had a conversation with an LLM trying to find a word to describe your feeling. Life is indeed weird. Here you go:
The concept of "thrownness" (Geworfenheit in German) was an important existentialist term coined by philosopher Martin Heidegger
. Here's a quick explanation of what it means:
- Thrownness refers to the idea that human beings are "thrown" into existence without getting a choice or having any control over the fact of their being.
- It suggests humans find themselves born and existing suddenly, through no will or decision of their own. There's an abrupt, arbitrary aspect to being thrown into the world.
- This thrownness highlights the inevitable given facts and limitations of one's particular life, time period, environment, language, culture, etc. that define the situation into which one was thrown.
- Humans do not get to choose the circumstances of their thrownness, which can seem alien, foreign, strange, or absurd. This can provoke anxiety, angst, or existential crisis.
In short, thrownness describes the jarring, arbitrary way humans find themselves existing in a world not of their choosing, highlighting the strangeness and uncertainty of the human condition.
> Yet we spend our short existence doing things which have almost no meaning
Well, for many of us that’s not a choice. In America, your healthcare is tied to your employer for example leaving you almost no choice but to remain employed. On top of that many of us racked up student loans that need to be paid off, so there is limited window of time for finding a rather meaningful job before you choose whatever comes your way and offers you the best salary even if it means you are going to be working on yet another social or crypto or delivery app. And not to say employers relentlessly pursuing an upper hand over employees and any choices they might have; just look at the whole reversing WFH fiasco.
80000 hours [1] have been pretty interesting for me to change my outlook however. I found out for me anyway, the best path of a satisfying relationship with my purpose and deal with existential crisis is through contributing to scientific research just for pure fun of learning and exploring the endless onion shell nature of the knowledge of the universe.
I can guarantee you being a "useless" code monkey making 2-5x the average wage of your country is better than being a "useless" min wage factory/warehouse/service worker
Much easier to find a meaning in the former than the later
The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
3 What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
4 Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
and it ends with:
Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the duty of all mankind.
14 For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.
So if God is just a adaption to a endless cycle of strife, the answer is worship a gut instinct to continue the cycle? As in never question your program? Never strife for more?accept the unacceptable.. That is the whole answer..
Isn’t life (regardless of species), by nature, simply an endless cycle of strife?
The universe as a whole is completely pointless. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth experiencing. I say this a collection of particles from which that pointless universe is made, so what do I know.
Agreed. We are what we give our time to, and to those that would "brag" about how many hours a week they work, I ask "so, you are just your job, and nothing more?"
When I meet a new person, one of my first questions is what hobbies they have. It throws people off more often than it should that my first question is not about work, and in fact, I specifically avoid talking about work at all. In many of those cases, the conversation dies very quickly, which always makes me a bit sad.
It's not like I hate my job, either. I enjoy it, to the degree that I can, and do wish I had a better tech job, but for the most part it is tolerable and I am left to my own devices. I can talk about work, if someone asks, but mentally, when I am clocked out, my job doesn't exist. I suppose there are lots of people who always think about work, for lack of anything better, I guess.
> When I meet a new person, one of my first questions is what hobbies they have
Same here(!), as a chronic collector of hobbies.
With that being said, within the past year I've added body maintenance (i.e., diet/exercise/enough-sleep) into my daily schedule and I've yet to recover from the loss in time. It's starting to make me feel like Mr. Rat Race.
Granted, I have three children (9/6/4) and work full-time, but in the recent past I had more time to devote to doing the things I love.
I don't realy have any suggestions other than constantly examine how you spend your time, and make adjustments wherd needed. Some examples I can think of are:
1. Try to find ways to combine your exercise time and spending time with your kids. Lots of activities such as sports, martial arts, hiking, etc, might work here.
2. Classify your hobbies and interests into "passive" and "productive." For example, I love reading old science fiction. I also love tinkering with electronics. Reading books is fun, but does produce lasting results in me the way that learning new stuff by building gadgets does. So, I make more time for my workbench, and my reading is reserved for times when I want a bit of entertainment, but can't be at the workbench (such as on lunch at work).
3. Check your screentime. It's disturbingly easy for us to lie about how much time we actually waste on our smartphones, computers and televisions. Every few months I have to start jotting down times I sit down to my computer, or get an app to track my YouTube watching, just to keep things to a minimum. These days it's less, but it took awhile to build that mindfulness and set up some mental pivot points for when I've had enough Internet for the day.
I have no idea if any of this will help you. We all have different values and needs that factor in to how we spent our most precious resource; time. As a fellow dad (although my kid is an adult now), I'd say make most of that time about your kids. You might be surprised how much you grow as a person just by doing that, although with 3 kids, I imagine you already have a pretty good idea about that!
I quit my job as an EM 3 months ago, and during that time off, I realized my life was becoming far too career-focused at the expense of any other interests. My partner and I decided to make some big changes, and we are now living in an RV as we travel the country. I’m also taking this opportunity to remotely start my own engineering agency. I had been chasing startups and exits for the past 13 years, and it feels good to just focus on bootstrapping my own lifestyle business.
I can’t say that my work will be more meaningful, but my life will be more interesting, and I am not beholden to investors and landlords.
This is the problem I have with Graeber's "bullshit job" idea. It does "feel true". Yet we are generally so useless as individuals that there is no alternative but to play along. And, if the pantomime were to stop, then we'd all just starve, right? I think his purpose was noble: "Peoples' time is terribly misallocated, and we could do a lot better by setting everybody free." But this isn't some abundant Nature that surrounds us; it's a synthetic hellscape, where the trees on which food grows have been cut down to make way for parking lots, the buffalo have been slaughtered for the sole purpose of control, and it is illegal to build a house except from Home Depot materials. We are pathetically dependent and utterly owned. So the little guy also has to maintain the illusion of usefulness to the hand that feeds. Again, without it, then he, by which I mean we, would starve.
Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” ...
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations ...
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working
>It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working
Well yes. Full employment is considered a social good, so voters and governments encourage it, so the system finds ways to figure out jobs for people to do.
Parent understands that. They sare saying we shouldn't be considered a social good. The free time to enjoy the one life we all have should be the social good.
Why does everyone forget (for the US)- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Capitalism. The answer is and will always be - capitalism. Capitalism demands growing profits. Until we get rid of the Cold War Propaganda, we'll never try to figure out better economic policies and systems.
I don't know how people deal with this pyschology and politically. It's just not something I could accept for myself. I guess many don't have a choice though.
To a large extent, the economy consists of one vast swathe of the labor force digging holes and another vast swathe filling them up again. Anyone complaining about having to pay for "make-work" jobs is very very late to the party.
One of the wonders of the modern economy is that you don't need to know the purpose of your job, in fact it probably has 1000s of purposes. You can just do it. Anyone working in finance is basically making capital allocation more efficient and as a result steering millions of decisions in tiny ways. Do they understand it? No. But they don't need to...
No meaning, perhaps. There's plenty of purpose to be found in jobs, like collecting pay to survive or getting out and staying busy.
On the other side, Google can afford to hire a surplus of labor on the chance that even one person makes a contribution that yields significant value or can move up. Amazon and Walmart need voting blocs. There's purpose all around, even if it isn't ours.
This will in a way self correct though as Boomers retire and are not replaced. There is a giant demographic workforce crisis that is coming for the entire world. AI will help more than it hurts in this.
When you can't find help, it's the bullshit jobs that go and never come back.
B.S. jobs [1]: "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case."
I see people in the comments always try to existentialize this phenomenon (i.e. draw on meandering philosophical platitudes like "what is the meaning of life"), that is a distraction. Working people are obviously unfulfilled, as the article describes. Fulfilling work does exist, these folks just aren't doing fulfilling work. We all want to do fulfilling work; working people feel like they have no control. To call it another name: labor alienation. [2]
51 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 97.4 ms ] threadSomewhere I saw a great quote about "AIs having meetings with AIs" and essentially doing nothing... But doing nothing very efficiently.
And if this makes leaders uncomfortable by undermining the original human busywork, good.
I'm not buy this shit anymore.
Most technological advances are economic enhancing innovations, society be damned!
The technology being developed today is consolidating wealth at the top. No one is getting from the gig economy.
Stock holders on the other hand? Doing amazing!
The top level Tax Rate has declined from 91% tax rate to 37% tax rate from 1950s through 2020s, and you blame technology for the failure of our society to redistribute wealth?
Despite those agricultural workers who lost their jobs.
Innovation in aggregate benefits most people in the long run via lessening real costs of goods. Producing goods in an inefficient manner raises the real cost of living for society.
Was life better when the average person spent 80% of their income on food?
Will life be worse for the average person when goods and services become 50% cheaper through AI driven automation?
Forcing people into second order thinking is forcing submission.
Making some fantasy up about improving the lives of foreigners (and tech companies cash flow) at the expense of your neighbour is peak humanism.
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Golgafrinchan_Ark_Fleet_...
I could argue that in the grand scheme of things our existence might be completely useless and irrelevant. Yet we spend our short existence doing things which have almost no meaning, some of us try to impress our friends and neighbors. Put up some accomplishments on our useless CV before we turn into dust. Others will raise their offspring to continue this until our planet can no longer sustain life.
Humans are weird man.
The concept of "thrownness" (Geworfenheit in German) was an important existentialist term coined by philosopher Martin Heidegger
. Here's a quick explanation of what it means:
- Thrownness refers to the idea that human beings are "thrown" into existence without getting a choice or having any control over the fact of their being.
- It suggests humans find themselves born and existing suddenly, through no will or decision of their own. There's an abrupt, arbitrary aspect to being thrown into the world.
- This thrownness highlights the inevitable given facts and limitations of one's particular life, time period, environment, language, culture, etc. that define the situation into which one was thrown.
- Humans do not get to choose the circumstances of their thrownness, which can seem alien, foreign, strange, or absurd. This can provoke anxiety, angst, or existential crisis.
In short, thrownness describes the jarring, arbitrary way humans find themselves existing in a world not of their choosing, highlighting the strangeness and uncertainty of the human condition.
Well, for many of us that’s not a choice. In America, your healthcare is tied to your employer for example leaving you almost no choice but to remain employed. On top of that many of us racked up student loans that need to be paid off, so there is limited window of time for finding a rather meaningful job before you choose whatever comes your way and offers you the best salary even if it means you are going to be working on yet another social or crypto or delivery app. And not to say employers relentlessly pursuing an upper hand over employees and any choices they might have; just look at the whole reversing WFH fiasco.
80000 hours [1] have been pretty interesting for me to change my outlook however. I found out for me anyway, the best path of a satisfying relationship with my purpose and deal with existential crisis is through contributing to scientific research just for pure fun of learning and exploring the endless onion shell nature of the knowledge of the universe.
[1] https://80000hours.org/
I love his take on this topic. Hope you have time to listen and enjoy.
Much easier to find a meaning in the former than the later
Granted, it's a movie, but given its following, I reckon its existence is sufficient to undermine your guarantee.
The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
3 What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? 4 Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.
and it ends with:
Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind. 14 For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.
I guess that helped some people sleep at night as they laboured away as slaves.
The universe as a whole is completely pointless. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth experiencing. I say this a collection of particles from which that pointless universe is made, so what do I know.
When I meet a new person, one of my first questions is what hobbies they have. It throws people off more often than it should that my first question is not about work, and in fact, I specifically avoid talking about work at all. In many of those cases, the conversation dies very quickly, which always makes me a bit sad.
It's not like I hate my job, either. I enjoy it, to the degree that I can, and do wish I had a better tech job, but for the most part it is tolerable and I am left to my own devices. I can talk about work, if someone asks, but mentally, when I am clocked out, my job doesn't exist. I suppose there are lots of people who always think about work, for lack of anything better, I guess.
Same here(!), as a chronic collector of hobbies.
With that being said, within the past year I've added body maintenance (i.e., diet/exercise/enough-sleep) into my daily schedule and I've yet to recover from the loss in time. It's starting to make me feel like Mr. Rat Race.
Granted, I have three children (9/6/4) and work full-time, but in the recent past I had more time to devote to doing the things I love.
Do you have any suggestions?
1. Try to find ways to combine your exercise time and spending time with your kids. Lots of activities such as sports, martial arts, hiking, etc, might work here.
2. Classify your hobbies and interests into "passive" and "productive." For example, I love reading old science fiction. I also love tinkering with electronics. Reading books is fun, but does produce lasting results in me the way that learning new stuff by building gadgets does. So, I make more time for my workbench, and my reading is reserved for times when I want a bit of entertainment, but can't be at the workbench (such as on lunch at work).
3. Check your screentime. It's disturbingly easy for us to lie about how much time we actually waste on our smartphones, computers and televisions. Every few months I have to start jotting down times I sit down to my computer, or get an app to track my YouTube watching, just to keep things to a minimum. These days it's less, but it took awhile to build that mindfulness and set up some mental pivot points for when I've had enough Internet for the day.
I have no idea if any of this will help you. We all have different values and needs that factor in to how we spent our most precious resource; time. As a fellow dad (although my kid is an adult now), I'd say make most of that time about your kids. You might be surprised how much you grow as a person just by doing that, although with 3 kids, I imagine you already have a pretty good idea about that!
I can’t say that my work will be more meaningful, but my life will be more interesting, and I am not beholden to investors and landlords.
Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” ...
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations ...
These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh...
Well yes. Full employment is considered a social good, so voters and governments encourage it, so the system finds ways to figure out jobs for people to do.
Why does everyone forget (for the US)- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Truly, we have lost our way.
People have a need to feel the feedback from their actions
On the other side, Google can afford to hire a surplus of labor on the chance that even one person makes a contribution that yields significant value or can move up. Amazon and Walmart need voting blocs. There's purpose all around, even if it isn't ours.
This will in a way self correct though as Boomers retire and are not replaced. There is a giant demographic workforce crisis that is coming for the entire world. AI will help more than it hurts in this.
When you can't find help, it's the bullshit jobs that go and never come back.
I see people in the comments always try to existentialize this phenomenon (i.e. draw on meandering philosophical platitudes like "what is the meaning of life"), that is a distraction. Working people are obviously unfulfilled, as the article describes. Fulfilling work does exist, these folks just aren't doing fulfilling work. We all want to do fulfilling work; working people feel like they have no control. To call it another name: labor alienation. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation