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Comment by swasheck | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

the theory is not without flaws but it seems relevant to the topic and conversation

The glaring flaw in the theory is that it hypothesizes that jobs are pointless, but in fact they do have a point: Companionship. There are always exceptions, but overwhelmingly those with resources don't like being alone and without social standing and so they use their resources to buy friends, so to speak.

A company I used to work at has a CEO/Founder just like that. He's a sad sack of shit. Got up on stage at the company christmas party drunk to sing karaoke and noticed not enough people were paying attention to him, so he "joked" about firing people. Same dude some years later would bribe employees to work over the christmas holidays with him and was bragging about it on LinkedIn. He's rich. Could do any number of things. But its obvious he's got no friends and clings to the company as his identity; likely having been self-sabotaging the IPO that was always right around the corner he was working on.

Graeber's test of a bullshit job was it could be eliminated without harm to society. Jobs to make people above feel important was 1 type he identified.

We're talking about the link. It refers to pointless work.

- "over half of societal work is pointless"

- "workers are required to pretend their role is not as pointless or harmful as they know it to be"

Companionship isn't pointless. Nobody in a companionship role is pretending that they are at work for any other reason unless they are so out to lunch as to not notice what the job is. And if one is that far out to lunch, why would they see their job as being pointless rather than believing it useful in some other way?

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