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Bullshit Jobs
A book arguing that many jobs feel pointless to the people doing them, and asking why
Why it’s worth your time
David Graeber's book names a quiet, corrosive feeling, that your job doesn't need to exist, and that alone can help you tell a hollow role apart from a hard stretch. An anthropologist, he built it from accounts workers sent him after a viral 2013 essay. It reads best alongside the research that pushed back on it.
Telling pointless tasks from a pointless job
The book · About 6 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Start with the 2013 essay, then the book.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs is free on Graeber's site and takes about ten minutes. In the book, start with his working definition, which comes early, and his five types of bullshit job.
- Sort one week's tasks by who they help.
List what you did last week. Next to each task, write who would notice, and how soon, if you stopped doing it. Pick one task nobody would miss and ask your manager whether it can stop.
Good moments for this: after a week of busyworkbefore deciding to quitat the start of a job search
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
He holds that there's no objective measure of a job's social value, so the book takes the worker's own judgment as the test. That makes it worth asking a colleague how they see your work before you settle on a label.
What might make this harder
Graeber's book reads more as diagnosis than exit plan. Start with tasks: shrink one pointless thing, and add one piece of work that clearly helps someone.
Questions people ask
What is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber about?
A 2018 book by the anthropologist David Graeber, grown from his 2013 essay, arguing that many jobs are so pointless that even the people doing them can't justify them. It draws on accounts workers sent him and offers a political explanation for why such jobs multiply.
What are the five types of bullshit jobs?
Graeber names flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers and taskmasters, and says real jobs can combine several.
How can you tell if a job is pointless?
Graeber's own test is whether you can justify the job's existence to yourself. If only some of your tasks fail it, the fix may be smaller than a new job.
Is the bullshit jobs theory true?
One study using representative EU survey data (Soffia, Wood and Burchell, 2022) found far fewer people calling their jobs useless than Graeber's theory predicts, and the share falling, though those who did had poorer wellbeing.
What it says, and how it holds up
When three researchers tested Graeber's theory against representative European survey data, they found the share of employees describing their jobs as useless was low and falling, which cuts against his central claims. They also found that people who did see their work as useless had poorer wellbeing, so the feeling he describes is real even if it's rarer. Magdalena Soffia, Alex Wood and Brendan Burchell proposed an alternative account that points to poor management and toxic workplaces.
The book grew from a 2013 essay in Strike! magazine, still free on Graeber's site, in which he asked why technology hadn't delivered the short working week Keynes predicted, and suggested administrative and managerial work had expanded to fill the time. In the book he defines a bullshit job as paid work so pointless that even the person doing it can't justify it, though they feel they have to pretend otherwise, and sorts such jobs into five types. His evidence is mostly testimony from people who wrote to him, and his explanation is openly political, blaming managerial ideology and a culture that treats work as a virtue in itself.
Two reviews add more. Paul Thompson and Frederick Harry Pitts argue that self-selected testimony is a weak base for general claims, and that Graeber largely fails to separate bullshit within a job from a job that is bullshit; form-filling and pointless meetings can sit inside work that clearly matters. Clare Solomon, reviewing it sympathetically for Counterfire, found that it doesn't really explain how managerialism produces such waste or why capitalism allows it, and doubted universal basic income as the answer.
If your work feels empty because of a particular manager or a toxic team, Soffia and her co-authors' account suggests looking there before deciding the whole line of work is the problem.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.