Ikiru, Busy Work and Bullshit Jobs

I’ve been thinking a lot about “busy work” lately…

I just watched Kurosawa’s 1952 film, Ikiru. Kanji Wantanabe, the film’s protagonist and a Japanese public affairs section chief whose main responsibility seems to be (literally) rubber-stamping proposals, learns that he is dying of stomach cancer. The man, who had never taken a vacation or a sick day in his 25 years of service, does not know how much longer he has, and overhears his son and daughter–in-law planning to spend his retirement money and pension on a new house. Kenji leaves his home and his job, withdraws his retirement bonus, and befriends a novelist who takes him on an improvised tour of the city’s pachinko parlors and speakeasies. Later, he encounters Toyo, a vibrant and spirited young former employee who leaves her paper-pushing desk job to take a job assembling animated stuffed toy bunnies. She may be a lowly factory worker, but she can at least see the value in her work: bringing happiness to kids.

Ikiru, which translates into English as “to live,” is less about a man dying than about a man’s desire  for a sense of purpose in his remaining days. He becomes a champion of a group of local mothers who have been petitioning, to no avail, to turn a hazardous liquid waste site into a park for their kids. Until Kenji gets involved, this gaggle of mild-mannered women (who serve as the embodiment of failed not-my-job bureaucracy), dutifully go from office to office to plead their case until they reach a breaking point, unleashing a tirade on the clerk who had taken their initial complaint and sent them in circles.

Without giving any further spoilers, the film’s work-worn archetypal hero’s plight can be seen in fiction: Bartleby the Scrivener and The Death of Ivan Illych, and in modern films: Office Space, Up in the Air, and Zootopia (Remember that DMV sloth?). TV is riddled with them: The Office (obviously), Workaholics, The IT Crowd, and Silicon Valley.

Why are these sad working stiffs so relatable?  They seem to have what David Graeber, anthropologist from the London School of Economics, would call “bullshit” jobs. Graeber received such an overwhelming response to his  essay on this topic that he wrote an entire book about it. Just what constitutes a bullshit job? On the September 3 podcast of The Hidden Brain, Graeber tells host Shankar Vadantham that “between 37 and 40% of all people who had jobs were convinced that if their job didn’t exist, it would make no difference at all.”  These jobs are not usually menial, as you might expect—they’re “clerical, managerial, administrative sort of positions… or marketing [or] human resources…[workers who would] really rather be doing something useful with their lives.”

Graeber explained how he was first introduced to “bullshit” at work: as a teenager, he was a dishwasher. Eager to get the dishes done so he could relax, he and his friend worked quickly and efficiently and then took a break. The boss, finding the two boys loafing, protested, yelling, “You’re on MY time, and you can’t loaf around!” This idea, of someone purchasing or renting our time, is one that didn’t always exist until the Industrial Era. Heidegger and Marx saw it coming. When we’re so removed from actually making decorative or utilitarian objects, as artisans and craftsmen once did, it becomes harder to see the value in the work we are doing.

Graeber divides classifies bullshit jobs as follows:

1. Flunkies who make their boss feel important
2. Goons who act aggressively on behalf of their bosses or clients (this includes lawyers)
3. Duct tapers hide a problem rather than fixing it (he gives the example of an administrator who takes messages for a single repair person who is overburdened. This guy’s whole job is to apologize for his boss. Wouldn’t it be more efficient, Graeber asks, to just hire another technician?
4. Box-Tickers create paperwork rather than take action
5. Taskmasters create meaningless work for their subordinates in order to have a mechanism to evaluate them:
   1. Supervisors of people who don’t need supervision
   2. People who create paperwork and other unnecessary tasks (he sees this as a huge problem in universities, where administrative staff outnumber faculty, and where high-level administrators are assigned multiple assistants).

Are there any jobs that are bullshit-proof?  I think I’m creating one —I’ll keep you posted.