Sunday Letters Sunday Letters Journal

Welcome to this week’s edition of the podcast. If you like what we’re doing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you’d rather not, you can offer a one-off tip here, or get yourself some merch here. Many thanks for your support!
In this week’s episode, we’re discussing David Graeber, anthropologist and activist, who introduced the concept of "bullshit jobs" in a 2013 article in Strike Magazine titled “On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”. He hit a nerve and later expanded into a full book titled Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, published in 2018. Graeber defines a "bullshit job" as a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence. At the same time, they feel obliged to pretend that this is not the case. He argues that these jobs have proliferated due to societal and economic factors that prioritise employment for its own sake, rather than for the productive contributions it may offer people and society. He also discusses second-order bullshit jobs; the ones that are created to support the higher-order bullshit jobs. Think about the cleaners, security staff, electricians and plumbers needed to maintain a building filled with people administering speculative investments.
There are five categories of bullshit jobs according to Graeber;
Graeber argues that meaningless, soulless jobs not only cause severe psychological distress but also represent a misallocation of economic resources and human potential. His theory has implications for understanding organisational inefficiencies, worker dissatisfaction, and the societal value placed on work.
How do you feel about your work? Take the short survey.
Support Sunday Letters
Send us a Tip
Get some Sunday Letters merch
Subscribe on YouTube


Get full access to The Sunday Letters Journal at sundayletters.larrygmaguire.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week’s edition of the podcast. If you like what we’re doing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you’d rather not, you can offer a one-off tip here, or get yourself some merch here. Many thanks for your support!
In this week’s episode, and I discuss one of the fundamental dichotomies of human behaviour: cooperation versus competition. Are human beings inherently competitive, or are we more socially oriented and naturally cooperative? The question is important because the workplace seems primarily oriented towards competition. We compete for a limited number of clients and projects, departments within the same organisation may be adversaries, and workers are encouraged to compete for recognition, bonuses and promotions. In parallel, we also find workers in these same situations cooperate, albeit reluctantly at times, to achieve goals and get things done.
Ultimately, however, jobs require people to be agents of the profit-seeking organisation within a system of apparently limited resources. Making a profit is necessary, but the competition for it never stops, and it’s rarely shared equally among those who generate it (although that’s a topic for another day). Businesses, especially larger corporate ones, are never satisfied, and they demand that you and I, in our jobs, keep pushing for more. They squeeze as much as they can out of every human being, often until we are dry, broken husks of people. In this sense, we work in the metaphorical vice of competition for what are perceived as limited resources (again, a topic for another day).
The Capitalists argue that competition is good for society; it has given us all the technology, goods and services we take for granted. It has improved living conditions and made life better for all, or so the argument goes. Socialists offer a counterargument - competition has destroyed the fabric of life, raped and pillaged the planet, treated human beings and the natural world as objective means to material ends, and will kill us all. Cooperation and mutual aid, they say, are the keys to our survival. Read more
The Sunday Letters Journal is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
References


Get full access to The Sunday Letters Journal at sundayletters.larrygmaguire.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week’s edition of the podcast. If you like what we’re doing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you’d rather not, you can offer a one-off tip here. Many thanks for your support!
On Tuesday, I wrote about the false promise of the future of work. I highlighted, amongst other things, that education helps school us towards direct paid employment or waged slavery, according to some, and not towards the freedom of self-employment, for example. Self-employment is too risky, it seems. If we take the chance and fail, we’ll lose everything we’ve earned. In this, we accept the prison of our employment over the freedom of the unknown.
The structure of the workplace provides us with a degree of certainty. But what if this apparent ground of our belief was not factual but something the system taught us? Maybe it is the pursuit of hedonic pleasure and the avoidance of pain that keeps us there. wrote this week that the philosopher Karl Marx believed work was a natural thing human beings seek to do, and in this need to express ourselves, we are manipulated by capital. In contrast, Plato and Aristotle believed manual work was of the lower order and not for sophisticated men. They also believed that slavery was right and proper, so perhaps not the best judges on these matters.
The question remains: Do we work to attain the means to live or merely survive, or do we seek fulfilment of a deeper, more innate human need? What would we do if we didn’t need to work to meet those basic needs? What would we do with our time? Is contemporary work designed to line the pockets of the capitalists, and do we comply through blind habit? That’s several questions, yes, but you get the picture.
Read more



Get full access to The Sunday Letters Journal at sundayletters.larrygmaguire.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week’s edition of the podcast. If you like what we’re doing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you’d rather not, you can offer a one-off tip here. Many thanks for your support!
I mentioned on Monday that change was afoot; well, here’s the story…
Welcome to the relaunch of the Sunday Letters Podcast. It has been some time since the last episode, and recently, I felt the urge to get this thing operational again. In doing so, I’ve managed to convince my learned friend and philosopher, to join me here and help build this thing out. Over the years, we have conversed privately on many topics we cover here on Sunday Letters, so the partnership seemed like a natural choice. Sunday Letters reflects how we both feel about and see the modern workplace - a fake plastic environment that, despite its best efforts to the contrary, seems incompatible with human welfare. This forms the basis of our forthcoming discussions on work.
I will publish new written content on Tuesdays on the Future of Work. Dmitri will publish the general topic of the week on Thursdays. New podcast episodes will be published weekly on Fridays with a full (but raw) conversation transcript. We will cover the issues affecting people's working lives and the role work plays in global politics, economics, and broader social issues. Work, after all, is so intertwined with all human affairs; it’s hard not to connect it with what’s happening in the world. From pollution and the global climate crisis to the conflict in the Middle East to the mistreatment of the vulnerable in society and the abuse of workers in the Global South, our jobs and our daily work play no small part.
In case you missed the hint, The Sunday Letters Journal is firmly on the Left—we are for people first, organisations second… at best. One of the most challenging problems in society today is that the interests of organisations often come before those of the people and the environment. A misalignment of values and motivations is at its core, and we think there’s something we can do about that.
Alright, thanks for being here. We’re looking forward to engaging with you in the comments, and if you’d like to support this work, become a subscriber today and get 20% off forever.



Get full access to The Sunday Letters Journal at sundayletters.larrygmaguire.com/subscribe

Welcome to this week’s edition of the podcast. If you like what we’re doing, consider becoming a paid subscriber. If you’d rather not, you can offer a one-off tip here. Many thanks for your support!
You might be wondering where the several hundred older episodes of Sunday Letters have disappeared. Well, I have drafted them all. I did so primarily because most of them were pure shite and also because things like intros, titles, and formatting were quite inconsistent. The best move available was to take them down and republish the best of them under new titles. I’ll be going through those over the next few weeks and months.
In the meantime, check out episode 001 for more on what to expect from the new Sunday Letters.



Get full access to The Sunday Letters Journal at sundayletters.larrygmaguire.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sundayletters.larrygmaguire.com

This is a bonus episode of Sunday Letters. If you’d like access to it, become a supporter of The Sunday Letters Journal.
This episode is a reading from a speech by Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American, to students at Tilburg University in 1997 titled Beyond An Economy of Work & Spend. In this essay, Schor offers a detailed breakdown of why th…