Bullshit Jobs & Performative Busyness: All about Low Busyness

This is one of three posts on the busy spectrum. You can see the companion posts here:

The Busy Spectrum (High Busyness): What You Need to Know about Workism & Hustle Porn
Total Work: When Humans are Transformed into Workers and Nothing Else (Were we Born only to Work?)

I’ve previously gone deep into the root causes of busyness. You can check out those posts here:

A Quick Introduction to Low Busyness:

The idea for this post was prompted by a thread I saw on Reddit a couple months ago titled Redditors with a 9-5 job in a cubicle, how do you pretend to stay busy at work? The post has over 65,000 upvotes and is approaching 15,000 comments. Despite the apparent laziness*, humanity is quite creative. (*Note: Not everyone on the low busyness end of the spectrum is lazy; many just have “bullshit jobs” as we’ll see.)

The top Reddit recommendations for “pretending to stay busy at work” are:

“The George Costanza method: ‘I always look annoyed. Yeah, when you look annoyed all the time, people think that you’re busy. Think about it.'”
“I click and scroll my mouse periodically so it sounds like I’m reading through a document. Sometimes I’ll open a word document and type gibberish to get the typing sounds out there. When I hear someone about to walk past sometimes I’ll rub my forehead or look frustrated.”
“From where my boss sits, He can’t see the bottom left 1/4 of my 2nd monitor if I sit with good posture. I live for this corner. Online games, Reddit, youtube etc. all exist in my corner. But all my boss sees is work around it. Also makes me sit with good posture so that’s cool too.”

And, especially this one:

“I don’t pretend anymore – everyone knows we’re stretching 3 hours of work into an 8 hour day, but no one is going to kill the golden goose.”

Whether the commenter knows it or not, there’s actually research that proves this point—one study claims we only have an average of 2 hours and 53 minutes of actual productivity per work day¹.

There are countless ways minutes and hours disappear during a typical day of work: checking social media, reading the news, talking about non-work stuff with colleagues, eating/drinking, instant messaging, you name it. Another study by RescueTime analyzed 225 million hours of work and confirmed the distractions and multi-tasking².

Let’s dig into this non-busy phenomenon. As always, I’ve added emphasis to quotes throughout in bold.

What are Bullshit Jobs?

Believe it or not, the concept of “bullshit jobs” has been around for years now. It started with a 2013 viral article in STRIKE! Magazine by David Graeber titled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant. Graeber would go on to write a book called Bullshit Jobs: A Theory.

Bullshit Jobs Defined:

“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 of 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. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs‘.”

Here’s David Graeber describing five types of bullshit jobs:

We have a really, really twisted idea of the value of work. There was a time that people thought that work produces something; all value comes from labor. The labor theory of value is almost universally accepted in the 19th century, but they had a very silly focus on factory work, craftsman, production. But, most work isn’t production. Most work is caregiving, most work is maintaining things. As I always say, ‘You make a cup once; you wash it like a thousand times.’ Most work is keeping things the same, it’s not recreating things. — David Graeber

Bullshit Jobs Highlights (from the Original Article):

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
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.’ In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away.
It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen…According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.
The number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves…working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.
The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger…And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way…to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.
If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3–4 hour days.

Bullshit Jobs Summary (paraphrased): Most production jobs have been automated. But, instead of technology giving us shorter workweeks, it’s been marshaled to make us all work more by creating pointless, non-production, bullshit jobs. Most work isn’t production. Most work is caregiving, maintaining things, keeping things the same—it’s not recreating things. We have a twisted idea of the value of work. The moral and spiritual damage is a scar across our collective soul.

What is Performative Busyness?

This is probably the least well known of all the concepts presented. Google “pretend to work” or “look busy at work.” Just try it. You may (or may not) be surprised to find countless articles outlining ways that people can act like they’re working while they are at work. I mean, there’s even this “fake work screen” video on YouTube that’s over an hour of someone recording their screen, moving different windows around, and pretending to work:

Enter “performative busyness.”

Performative Busyness Defined:

“‘Something that looked like work’ is a perfect summation, isn’t it? Because productivity, like so many other aspects of modern life (eating, exercise, buying a small, perfect succulent), has become as much about outward projection as personal satisfaction. ‘Performative busyness’, as we’re beginning to call it. If you don’t start every message with ‘Sorrysorrysorry this week has been CRAZY!’ then what kind of time-rich gadabout lazybones even are you?”⁴

I first heard of performative busyness from this tweet by David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of Basecamp and co-author of It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work:

“We should be able to get work done at work”, and other topics of work environments, venture capital, performative busyness, and just doing the work. A tightly edited 6 minutes of discussion with PBS ❤️ https://t.co/zm6wEIpaoN
— DHH (@dhh) February 14, 2019

Here’s the video he links to:

Performative Busyness Highlights:

“I moved on from a company that prized what I liked to call ‘performative busyness’. Whether people actually were busy was impossible to tell, but everyone had to be seen to be busy — which was represented by always being a couple of minutes late to meetings, always walking around with an open laptop, and always splitting attention between the person/meeting they should be engaging with to send another ‘urgent’ email. We were all so busy looking busy, nothing actually got done.“³
“When all of us, in addition to the economic forces at play, buy into performative busyness, stretching ourselves thinner almost becomes an indicator of status — especially in a service-driven workplace as opposed to an industrial one, where productivity can be harder to measure.”⁵

Performative Busyness Summary (paraphrased): Outward things workers do that look like work but aren’t actually a productive use of time. Being so busy looking busy or pretending to work that nothing actually gets done.

Continue Reading:

Or, check out the busyness post series to understand the root causes of busyness:

Sources: