Recently I came across a book by David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs - A Theory. Graeber published an essay entitled "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs" in Strike!, a radical online magazine, in 2013. Graeber asked the provocative question: "Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world?" and requested people to send him email about their work situation. Graeber was referring to jobs like HR consultants, financial consultants, corporate lawyers, and lobbyists, the kind of jobs which Douglas Adams, the science fiction writer, characterized as "telephone sanitizers". These jobs contribute very little to people's overall well being, in contrast with kindergarten teachers, waiters, road workers and nurses where the actual work is connected with a product or service that people genuinely need. Graeber's inbox was flooded with email from people responding to the essay about how unsatisfying the nature of their jobs were. The response was overwhelming. Some people reacted angrily to the question, based on a specific political view (typically libertarian) that jobs which didn't contribute simply wouldn't exist in a capitalist economy. So Graeber decided to write the book.
While Graeber does devote part of the book to discussing bullshit jobs as "spiritual violence", in this post, I'd like to discuss another point that he brings up, which fundamentally underlies his premise but is rather peripheral to his basic argument. This point nevertheless seems to go to the heart of how desire results in the creation of an illusory self-view, and even, ultimately, why a person perceives a job as being bullshit rather than not. From the Buddhist standpoint, karma is cause and effect, the fact that actions have consequences (or more specifically intentional actions have consequences). The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination are based on karma, each link being connected to the following one through a cause and effect relationship. Experience is created through the twelve links.
An important characteristic of a bullshit job is that it has no effect on the world. Graeber sites research by the German psychologist Karl Groos from 1901 in Chapter 3. Groos looked at the response of infants that were allowed to make some predictable effect on the world, versus infants that were prevented from having such an effect. The effect didn't need to have any benefit to them. An example is an infant that discovers it can move a pencil by randomly moving its arms. The infant discovers that they can have the same effect by moving their arms again. The result is expressions of total joy, which Groos coined "the pleasure of being the cause". Groos suggested this reaction was the basis of play, exercising causality simply for the pure joy of exercising it. Subsequent work has confirmed Groos' initial observation and expanded on it. In the footnotes, Graeber cites work by Francis Broucek from 1977 in which Broucek maintains that the sense of causal efficiency is the core of sense of self, and not a property of a predefined self. In other words, the pleasure derived from experiencing one's physical presence as a cause is the fundamental basis upon which the illusion of a sense of self is created.
Now one could argue that a baby accidentally knocking over a pencil once and deriving an obvious sense of pleasure from the action isn't intentional action. Intentional action means action formulated with some aim or plan to accomplish some effect. Because the action is accidental, there is no intention behind it. However, the next step, the baby knocking over the pencil again, in order to experience that same sense of joy or happiness does involve intention. In fact, it is an example of the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination at work, specifically the link between feeling (pleasure at being the cause) and craving (wanting to have that effect happen again), then doing something about it to make the effect happen. The next step in the Twelve Links is clinging, thinking about getting more of the pleasant sensation, planning how to get it, etc. A baby might be too young to do much planning, and its capacity to move around is not well developed enough to do much about fulfilling such a plan even if it could make one, but ultimately, when the baby gets old enough to crawl, it can find other stuff and knock it over to watch it fall. And when it grows up to be an adult, it will feel a sense of unsatisfactoriness to its life if its put into a job where the actions it has have no consequences at all, basically a bullshit job.
Therefore, undermining the connection between experiencing one's physical presence as a source of causal efficiency seems like a fruitful place to look for practice opportunities.
Image source: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v10/86
