A Short Meditation on Labor

In August of 2013, the radical anthropologist David Graeber wrote of the "profound psychological violence" inherent in our capitalist economy. Graeber's article went viral, giving him some measure of fame and introducing the phrase "bullshit jobs" into our lexicon. What it did not do, however, is tell us what type of system can or should come next. This is not to slight either Graeber himself or his work. But it is part of a pattern.

I myself have worked bullshit jobs. I've served as a rubber stamp for projects I didn't believe in. I've put in late nights building software features that were immediately recalled because it turned out the users never wanted them. I've sat in office cubicles, alone and baffled and drifting somewhere between terror and resentment, and watched other people play video games on YouTube all day because the people who paid me were too inept to give me anything to do. Those experiences made me part of the so-called anti-work movement, alongside nearly three million Redditors and a slew of popular artists.

By 2018, I could have quoted Fight Club to you chapter and verse. I'd read Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven and Ling Ma's Severance (no relation to the equally good anti-work streaming series of the same name). When Paul Simon sang about "all of these extra moves I make/And all this herky-jerky motion and the bag of tricks it takes/To get me through my working day," I knew exactly what he meant. The only thing I don't know was what to do about it, because none of those stories gave me a realistic, useful way forward.

There's a saying, likely originating with Frederic Jameson, that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Politically and historically, that may very well be true. After all, the modern usage of the word "capitalism" dates back to 1872, but capitalism itself started to emerge roughly three hundred years before that. In other words, the people who created capitalism didn't know what the were doing and couldn't possibly have imagined where their efforts would end up. They didn't even have a word for it; the very concept didn't even exist. In all likelihood, then, we find ourselves facing a similar reality. Whatever we want the future to look like, we may have to start building it before we have a blueprint.

Maybe that sounds impossible or insane. If so, allow me to come at it from a different angle. By definition, being anti-work or anti-capitalism only tells you what you're against. It only tells you what you want to get rid of or destroy, which may be part of the reason why stories like Fight Club, Station Eleven, and Severance associate the end of capitalism with mass destruction and social collapse. But if you're against the job or career you have, it has to be because there's something you're for.

Maybe you want to go full class-warfare, like the protagonists of the 2018 anti-capitalist movie Sorry to Bother You. Maybe you want to live off the grid. Or maybe, like the main character in Office Space, you just want a job that lets you see the sun. Whatever the future is going to look like, it's going to look that way because of the sum of the decisions we make for ourselves in our own lives--but only if we trust ourselves enough to actually make those choices.

Does anyone know for sure how society would turn out if a few million people suddenly just chose to do less bullshit and more of what they believed in? No. In all likelihood, we don't even have the right word for what that society would look like. But maybe it's okay for us to start finding out.

Eli Horowitz is a novelist and future mental health counselor who currently works in software to pay the bills. His anti-work fantasy novel, The Final Days of Kobold Kody's Frontier Exposition and Tonic Show, was published in 2023 and can be found at your favorite online retailer.