From bestselling writer David Graeber comes a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, and their consequences.
Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer.
There are millions of people—HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers—whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs.
Graeber explores one of society’s most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.
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"Buoyed by a sense of recognition, the reader happily follows Graeber in his fun attempts to categorize bulls--- jobs into Goons, Flunkies, Box Tickers, Duct Tapers, and Taskmasters, which inevitably bleed together into Complex Multiform Bulls--- Jobs. It’s funny, albeit painful, that we’ve gotten work so wrong and spend so much time at it."
— Bloomberg News
"A thought-provoking examination of our working lives."
— Financial Times (London)Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
David Graeber (1961-2020) was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything, as well as Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. He was a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, the London Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement.
Christopher Ragland is a voice and film actor who is known for his roles in the films I Shouldn't Be Alive, Driver: San Francisco, and WorldShift.