The Bullshit Economy
Why 33 Million Americans Are Paid to Pretend They’re Working
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My right eye twitched after staring at the numbers for so long, trying to rationalize an explanation—any explanation. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
It was 5 PM.
I closed the laptop in my home office, but I didn’t get up. Hours limped along like a dog that had been hit by a car. I stared at the wall, unable to think, move, cry, scream, or process what I had just discovered.
This fancy “Email Marketing Specialist” position—my first big boi job out of college—was actually an email spamming job.
That afternoon, I saw the 300,000 emails we had just sent only had two people actually open the email. Two. Fucking. People.
And the ass-kicker? All past campaigns had similar stats.
fuck me.
It was as if I was a high school student in a play. But instead of performing in front of that meager assortment of family and faculty, it was capital itself that showed its support, paying me the best money I’d ever made in my life for pretending to be useful.
It just didn’t make sense: after two college degrees and twenty years in the education pipeline, this is the most useful thing capitalism can find for me to do?
Sadly, yes. And apparently, I’m not the only one.
Welcome to the Bullshit Economy
In 2018, anthropologist David Graeber kinda lit the world on fire with his book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. He explored the shockingly common phenomenon where people are compelled to work jobs that serve no actual purpose.
He defined a bullshit job as:
“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.”
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
If you’ve ever floated through a calendar week of Slack messages, vague OKRs, and meetings that could’ve been emails—and emails that shouldn’t have existed in the first place—you know the vibe.
Graeber’s book became an international best seller. It resonates. Wherever people discuss it online, you’ll find hundreds of anonymous confessions in the comment sections.
But it begs the question: just how common is this?
Over the years, numerous studies have been done—some estimating bullshit jobs at 50%, others as low as 5%. But notably: none at zero.
In 2023, sociologist Simon Walo published Bullshit After All and confirmed our worst fears: roughly 20% of Americans are trapped in a bullshit job. Some napkin math reveals this comes out to something like 33 million jobs.
what in the actual fuck.
With all the problems, the unmet needs, the violent depravity that characterizes ordinary life for most Americans, 33 million people are playing make believe Slack goblin all day—dancing in the circus of performative productivity.
But numbers don’t capture the full absurdity. For that, we have the Covid pandemic, which validated a key component of Graeber’s theory:
“The more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it.”
When society shut down during the pandemic, it was a real mask off moment1 when we had to determine who was essential. These essential workers kept the lights on and the pulses beating. Teachers, nurses, delivery drivers, janitors—jobs that actually did something.
If these people stopped going to work, society would literally collapse.
And how did we thank them for their sacrifice? Well, not with money. Essential workers are paid about 20% less than average. So, the pandemic validated another pillar Graeber’s hypothesis:
“Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. Those who work shit jobs tend to be the object of indignities; they not only work hard but also are held in low esteem for that very reason.”
Essential workers have shit jobs.
Period.
Meanwhile, the rest of us non-essential workers—the laptop class—just kept Zooming from the kitchen table.
Remote work turned out to be pretty dope.
No more commute. No more office small talk. No more pretending to look busy.
Remote work exposed the black hole that was in person office work. Turns out we really were LARPING a less funny version of The Office all along. Many of us began doing our entire jobs with just a few hours of work a day, now binge-watching Squid Game as we moved our mouse every few minutes to continue appearing online.
With this newfound time, some workers opted to chill with their families. Others pursued those passion projects they’d been neglecting year after heartbreaking year.
But interestingly enough, some people decided to beat capitalism at its own game: they got a second job.
Enter: over-employment.
Over-employment: the fine art of juggling two (or more) remote jobs at once.
Two jobs means two paychecks.
In times of economic uncertainty, the gutting of social safety nets, and widespread automation, over-employment became a rational response to an irrational system.
It sounds like satire but the subreddit has nearly half a million members, with some people claiming as many as 7 different jobs!
SEVEN FUCKING PAYCHECKS.
A Fortune article claimed half of remote workers were over-employed. ResumeBuilder reported 80%.2
As you might imagine, there was skepticism.
Is over-employment just an overblown internet fad?
One writer argued, “if an organization’s demands are so lax that workers can easily hold down a second full-time role, that probably says more about the employer than the employee.”
And all I’m saying is…
YES. THIS IS EXACTLY IT.
THESE JOBS ARE BULLSHIT.
If you can double your employment without doubling your labor, your job was never real to begin with.
No, DOGE Won’t Save Us
Remember “vote with your dollars”? That tidy little phrase capitalism uses to pretend it’s democratic?
Well, the bailouts ballots are in—we’re completely and utterly fucked.
In theory, the free market is supposed to allocate resources efficiently.
In reality, it functions more like a cringey popularity contest run by a drunk frat bro.
Case in point: Dogecoin.
What started as a joke—a literal meme coin with a dog mascot—became a multi-billion-dollar asset, fueled by Reddit posts, tech broligarch hype, and pure, naked speculation. At one point, DOGE was worth more than Ford.
Not because of earnings. Not because of innovation. Because of vibes.
If markets were rational, Dogecoin would be worthless. But markets aren’t rational—they’re just big, dumb reflections of collective desire. Which means they don’t reward value. They reward attention. And attention is cheap to sell, but expensive to sustain.
Hence: the rise of bullshit.
Bullshit jobs aren’t just tolerated—they’re structurally necessary.
They absorb surplus labor the way Orwell’s Ministry of War absorbed surplus production: not to win, not to build, but to waste. To ensure nothing accumulates—no wealth, no meaning, no idle hands with time to question the system that binds them. They keep the hamster wheel spinning. Not to get us anywhere, but so we don’t ask why we’re spinning in the first place.
“I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.” —George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London.
In that light, Dogecoin isn’t an anomaly. It’s a mirror.
In a world where magic internet coins pass as innovation, you’d think we’d have some humility about how value is actually created. But no—the same market evangelists who throw billions at unicorn startups with no revenue are the first to sneer at government workers.
Under the Trump regime, they established the Department of Government Efficiency—a crusade to root out government “waste,” slash the so-called fat, and eliminate anyone who can’t produce quarterly results or pivot to video.
But here’s the kicker: bullshit jobs are overwhelmingly private. In fact, the people most likely to say their jobs are actually not bullshit… are government workers. The bureaucrats. The librarians, the case managers, court clerks, and county health reps quietly holding the fabric of society together.
Because when the state employs someone, there’s at least some obligation to serve a public good. When capital employs someone, the obligation is to shareholders only. And shareholders can be easily fooled into thinking that 3 layers of middle managers is a good thing, akshually.
But instead of empowering public service workers—giving them resources, trust, and better tools—we’re gutting their departments and laying them off.
And where do those people go?
They don’t vanish into cold, thin air.
They become exactly like the rest of us.
They join the ranks of the Zoom ghosts.
They show up in Slack with that thousand-pixel digital stare. They start tracking email open rates, scheduling brand synergy brainstorms, and attending daily standups for products that shouldn’t exist, solving problems no one has, on behalf of companies that generate nothing but churn.
And we wonder why we feel bullshit.
Final Thoughts
It’s tempting to end with a silver bullet. A policy fix. A grand vision to kill the beast and save the village.
And yeah—universal basic income has its place. Graeber believed in it. A social safety net thick enough to catch human dignity before it shatters like an egg on the pavement. Hard to argue with that.
But let’s not pretend something that forward thinking can happen so quickly.
Because underneath the performative nonsense and the Zoom fatigue, what we’re really starving for is meaningful work. Not just employment. But Engagement. Autonomy. Purpose. The chance to do something real with the short time we have.
This is where Self-Determination Theory (SDT) comes in.
Developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, STD3 says we thrive when three core needs are met:
Autonomy: the freedom to choose how we work
Competence: the ability to get better at something that matters
Relatedness: the sense of belonging to a shared purpose or community
That’s it. No cryptocurrency. No lean startup cults. No corporate vision statements that sound like they were spit out by a bot that ate too many TED Talks.
Just three basic but timeless needs.
And almost no one’s job meets them today.
Imagine a work culture that didn’t punish curiosity. That rewarded craft. That let people unplug without guilt. That asked “What are you good at?” instead of “What can we extract from you today?”
That’s not utopian. That’s just basic psychology.
If we want to fix work—not just patch it, but transform it—this is where we start. With the question every bullshit job suppresses:
What would you do if you didn’t have to pretend?
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Being over-employed carries great risk of being exposed and fired, so anonymous surveys are the best stats we’ll ever get.
Yes, this was a typo. No, I’m not fixing it.
Great essay and plenty of food for thought. I will witness to holding some bullshit jobs myself. They are, in effect, a jobs creation program for the PMC.