On Bullsh*t Jobs
Being, Doing and Good Friday
“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.
— David Graeber, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant
The outward work can never be small if the inward one is great, and the outward work can never be great or good if the inward is small or of little worth. The inward work always includes in itself all size, all breadth and all length.
— Meister Eckhart, 14th Century Christian mystic
I just wrote my customary opening “I hope you are having a good Friday” and then realized it is in fact Good Friday, recognized by many Christians as the day Christ was crucified.
I’m a little embarrassed that I missed it.
I was raised Catholic, although not so devout. Still, I used to feel some significance to Good Friday and Easter, even if it was not the full-on creed of resurrection and redemption. Midnight mass on Holy Saturday felt mysterious and sacred.
My personal spiritual path took me from a Catholic upbringing, through an adolescent flirtation with atheism, to an exploratory venture into Eastern wisdom traditions that brought me to Zen Buddhism.
That course unfolded for me over the decade between my 16th and 26th years, when I took lay Buddhist Vows with Taizan Maezumi Roshi, founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Zen has been my spiritual home ever since.
The two things about Buddhism, and Zen in particular, that most resonated for me were: 1) there was no idea of a God or Goddess, a being that existed as a kind of amplified and hyper-virtuous version of a human being. The term Buddha actually means “awakeness” and refers to a dimension of consciousness that permeates and underlies all beings.
And 2) it is a practice far more than a belief system, the priority placed on personally experiencing the spiritual truths of the tradition, and not accepting anyone else’s account. The historical Buddha’s final words according to legend are “be a lamp unto yourself.” I wanted the experience!
Tradition aside, it is essential that we honor our spiritual essence as a ground for all other considerations about our life. For me, if Easter, Good Friday, Passover, Beltane or any other “religious holiday” (what a weird term) simply calls you to recognize, experience and appreciate your intrinsic quality of Being with a true spirit of humility and wonder, it is Good.
OK, now let’s talk about bullsh*t jobs.
The late David Graeber, a brilliant anthropologist and activist, composed a famous screed in which he identified the predominance in western society of what he called “bullsh*t jobs.” These include a vast “administrative and service sector” that provide institutional and structural support for the large majority of our population not involved in the hands-on work of existential health, emotional wellbeing and spiritual thriving.
Graeber wrote: “between 1910 and 2000… professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers tripled, growing from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment… We have seen the ballooning of … the administrative [and services] sectors, 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.”
To this list we must add most jobs in the technological-industrial complex, racing to create more sophisticated software systems to do all of the above more “efficiently.”
Graeber’s critique comes from the political left, seeing this as “a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital.” (I tend to agree.)
But the critique is not limited to the left. It strikes me that one strain of the current MAGA/DOGE assault on government institutions actually feels similarly about this “work regime.” The difference is that they see it instead “perfectly suited to maintaining the [cultural] power” of a woke/neoliberal/Deep State ideology.
(It is fairly obvious, I think, that this populist right version of this belief is actually in service to/being weaponized by “the power of finance capital.” Billionaires are so inclined.)
Now, it’s possible that there is truth to both critiques. The “bullsh*t job regime” is ultimately maintaining a number of quasi-discrete entrenched power systems.
The important thing for me is to recognize the core truth: that so many modern jobs and even entire professions can feel so soulless.
This is a terrible state of affairs. Not only does the “bullsh*t job regime” have profoundly deleterious effects on individuals, it infects our society as a whole. Graeber writes: “Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don't like and are not especially good at.”
In Buddhism, we talk about “hell realms.” And I think this is an accurate assessment of a collective hell realm. But hell realms are ultimately psychological and sourced in the individual consciousness.
It can be a challenge to face the truth of this critique of the modern workforce. Does it resonate for you?
You may wonder if you are in a bullsh*t job. Or if you have dedicated your life to a bullsh*t career.
I am not one to tell anyone that their job is bullsh*t. But I do wonder if Graeber is right when he writes: “Most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it.”
For me, at this time, I am drawn to the mystic teaching of Meister Eckhart, which echoes the deepest teachings I have received from the Zen Masters I’ve been privileged to study with: “The outward work can never be small if the inward one is great, and the outward work can never be great or good if the inward is small or of little worth.”
We need to do the inner work. We need to start with the inner work.
The “inner work” I am referring to is quite simply what I said above: to recognize, experience and appreciate your intrinsic quality of Being with a true spirit of humility and wonder. This is the essence of all spirituality, and the point of all spiritual paths.
All spiritual technologies — meditation, retreat, ritual, ceremony, plant medicine, sacred circles — are designed to bring our inherent quality of Being alive.
When this becomes our guiding intention and our priority, then it animates all our relationships and our work. (The Being dimension animates the dimension of Relating and of Doing.) The Sacred Contract with Self is established as the basis for the Sacred Contract with Others and with Work.
What’s more, it becomes a compass. Not only will it animate your Work, it will inform the type of work you choose to do. With deeper penetration into your own dimension of Being, you are likely to become unsatisfied with a bullsh*t job, and you’ll be moved to change. Or you might subconsciously sabotage yourself and flame out!
In my experience, most people do not honor the importance of their own quality of Being, in their work, and in their lives as a whole. They don’t see themselves as sacred.
Consequently, they have pursued work that is motivated by more superficial or transient concerns. Or they are just unconscious of their motivations, i.e. they are honoring a contract/script they received from their parents about financial security, professional accomplishment or raising a family.
When you explore your own dimension of Being, you can animate all of these things, including material wealth, with a quality of sacredness. As Eckhart said: “The outward work can never be small if the inward one is great.”
In my coaching work, I help people recognize how their relationship to Being is always conditioning their relationship to their Work. By turning in to their dimension of Being, through the practices and technologies of attention, they re-animate and potentially re-path their Work.
Move from Being to Doing. When you do this with discernment and sincerity, you will never work in a bullsh*t job again, even if it meets something else’s description of one.
If you would like to explore this type of work, to re-animate and potentially re-path your career, I invite you to sign up for a free Discovery call with me. I have spots open next week.
Have a Good Friday, and a great weekend.