leo burghaus

Maybe it is just my personal experience, but I have seen an increase of people being open about how little they do at work. A lot of the corporate world seems to be full of people who are doing little more than having pointless meetings and sending pointless emails, without much to show for it except a Maybe it is just my personal experience, but I have seen an increase of people being open about how little they do at work. A lot of the corporate world seems to be full of people who are doing little more than having pointless meetings and sending pointless emails, without much to show for it except a salary. Often, that salary is higher than you would think. It comes, as I see it, on two levels. You can either have very little to do, or be occupied by work that makes you feel busy but is pointless. The latter is more characteristic of a lot of middle-management.

Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing for society. Of course, there is a deeper question about meaningful work, fulfillment and dignity, and around who deserves what type of job. There is also a question about who in society is getting these opportunities of corporate jobs. But, as a general idea, the fact that corporations chose to overpay people and have them doing very little real work is not something annoying to me. Many workers get the chance to work less for more money, and can focus on things that matter more. But especially, because these people are consumers, and the whole system we have set up relies on people consuming.

But even if it doesn’t annoy me, it does, however, worry me. It worries me, mainly, because there is a job-bubble, and bubbles eventually burst. We have started to see cracks of it with massive layoffs in big corporation. A lot of companies justify this with AI decreasing the need for human work. But AI is not the problem, it is just an accelerator for something that was bound to happen. Maybe the final drop. Companies that overhired might have tolerated bullshit-jobs during or since covid, especially because it is hard to publically fire massive amounts of people without backlash. But now they have found their way out.

Because AI is for many of us an abstract concept, I want to clarify one thing. Until AI transforms work in a deep, strategic, never-before seen way, some time will have to pass. Changes in corporations take much more time than you’d think, but smarter people have spoken about this before, like Maurizio Cuna who I have linked. But it does transform how many minimum-impact (or Bullshit-Job) roles work. Because so much of these jobs are basically writing or processing of surface-level information, and packaging it, the ChatGPT’s are massively decreasing the amount of human interaction needed for these positions. And if these positions were already overfilled by more workers than necessary, plus a number of overheads, for many companies it’s just easy math to replace these workers.

When I refer to Bullshit-Job, by no means do I mean everyone working in modern corporations. There are tons of companies doing real good work, and filled by good and valuable workers. And there are also a lot of good workers in suboptimal companies who help make things easier for everyone. But in many big corporations, you find middle management layered between the decision-makers and the people doing the work which is, in the end, just a playground for people who want to get paid for pretending. Or you find positions that were once thought to be needed, but where the reality is that they have little valuable work to do.

The paradox is that these jobs might be economically inefficient, but are a systematic necessity. As I hinted before, the problem is that these people make a lot of the money that then gets spend in other companies. I’m not describing anything ground-breaking here, this is how it’s work for a long time. Company sells, company pays employee, employee spends at another company, that company pays employee, that employee spends at another company, etc… If you leave tens of thousands of consumers out of jobs, the consumer market shrinks, so more jobs will be lost.

Bullshit-job are one of the little ways normal people have to participate in the economic growth companies have been having in the past decade. Of course, normal jobs to that too, but in a way in which way more work is needed to get to the same level of income. And with salaries that are somehow less flexible than those of their bullshit counterparts.

And here’s where a good friend of mine asked recently: what’s the end-game here? Where are we going with this?

Maybe, after all the firing, companies realize they need to re-hire people to bring consumption. This can’t be one company deciding it, because the cost for them would not outweigh their benefits. It would have to be an agreement between all of them. Like and agreement to keep bullshit jobs around, for the sake of the consumer market. Maybe this is a bit what has happened lately, and why there are still so many of these jobs and positions around. But I don’t think this is sustainable long-term, and eventually we will have to face the reality that an economy that drives on efficiency will need less and less workers overtime to sustain itself.

And if we think the private sector will have difficulties creating meaningful jobs in the coming years, don’t think the public sector will come saving it. It’s difficult to imagine a world where the state creates necessary work for all the people that are being left out of the job market. It’s also not ideal to have the state employing the majority of workers.

We might be coming closer to what Yuval Noah Harari predicted years ago: the necessity of a Basic Universal Income. There are still a lot of things that would need to happen to get to that point, and we might never need it. But I feel like the job-bubble we’ve seen in the last years, and which is slowly showing it’s deficencies, might be coming to an end and leaving us in a scenario where something like BUI is not so unimaginable as it was in the past.

The question I have in my head is: if the job market no longer provides security, what will?

On an individual level, potentially one of the ways to increase chances of being safe is the stock market. It is what we have converted as our north star as an economy. On any practical and theoretical level, it has to keep going forward, because it is how the rich make more money. And these are, in the end, the people driving change the most. Their security is tied to the markets’ security. And I don’t mean this in a way that we have to protect the ultrawealthy. But that it is the only practical way normal people have to tie their own monetary interest to the ones of the ultra-wealthy.

And if even that fails? I mean, if the stock market fails, and I mean really fails, not just a years-long crash, we’ll be in front of such a unimaginable and terrifying scenario that I don’t think we want, or can, imagine.

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”

Fredric Jameson

Apart from ideals of changing the system, currently, we’re left having to hope, that whatever imperfections the system has, will correct themself. Which might hurt, on a global level, but will hopefully be for the better long-term.

How would it unfold? How many people are going to be affected? Who is going to be affected? Am I going to be one of them? How can I save myself, and my family? Is there a way out?

The future is uncertain, the present confusing.