Meetings, status updates, Excel sheets, presentations, Slack messages, and strategy calls fill the day, yet more and more people go home with the feeling that they have created nothing of substance. Anthropologist David Graeber called these “bullshit jobs”: roles whose existence even the people doing them cannot really justify. The concept quickly became a cultural phenomenon because it described the hidden crisis of white-collar work with painful accuracy.
According to Graeber, the problem is not that people are lazy or unwilling to work. Quite the opposite: most people have a deep desire to feel useful. Modern office culture, however, has become increasingly detached from tangible outcomes. A factory worker, a nurse, or a chef can see the consequence of their work directly. A corporate middle manager or “brand synergy coordinator,” by contrast, often struggles to explain why their own role exists at all. This psychological emptiness is especially characteristic of the digital economy, where much of work is immaterial, abstract, and endlessly layered.
The culture of bullshit jobs partly emerged because modern companies are not only economic machines, but also status structures. Office hierarchies often reproduce themselves: managers hire more managers, who create more processes, reports, and meetings to justify their own necessity. This is how the strange corporate universe is born, where people spend entire days making presentations about other presentations. Productivity becomes performance. What matters is not whether the work is truly valuable, but whether you appear busy.
In this system, burnout has also taken on a new form. In place of classic physical fatigue, existential exhaustion has appeared: the feeling of being mentally drained by work in which one does not truly believe. This may be why quiet quitting, bare minimum culture, and Gen Z’s ironic corporate humor on TikTok have become so popular. Younger generations often do not even try to romanticize the career anymore; they treat it more like absurd theater. Open offices, motivational quotes, and “we’re family” corporate cultures now feel dystopian to many people rather than inspiring.
Meanwhile, the paradox has become increasingly visible: socially important work, such as teaching, nursing, caregiving, and social work, is often underpaid and overloaded, while certain corporate roles offer extreme salaries despite minimal social usefulness. It is as if late capitalism has lost contact with what real value means. The modern workplace has therefore become more than an economic space; it has become an identity crisis. People today no longer ask only, “How much do I earn?” They also ask, “Does anything I do all day have any meaning?”
Bullshit jobs are therefore much more than an internet meme or a left-wing critique. They are a symptom of an era in which work is no longer necessarily about survival or creation, but about the continuous simulation of activity. And perhaps this is the most unsettling idea in the modern corporate world: technology has not freed people from meaningless work; it has perfected its aesthetics.