If you’re asking yourself this question, you probably do. And if you’ve never asked yourself the question, you either have a great job or you don’t deserve better than a bullshit job because you’re too dazed by your work.
Do a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life. Confucius
Work comes first when it comes to finding a way to fit into society. The negative side to this is that you sometimes have to do something you don’t like because it has lost its meaning.
The search for meaning
If what you are doing has no meaning for you then you are doing a bullshit job, it’s as simple as that. Spending long hours at work without seeing any tangible purpose is a bit frustrating. This doesn’t mean that you are necessarily doing a bullshit job, but if you do it for too long, you will have the unpleasant feeling of being useless. And money won’t get you out of that feeling, even if you’re making a lot of money.
Are you the culprit?
Did you choose your job for the wrong reasons? Was it necessity, the quest for prestige, huge earnings or conformity that pushed you down the path you are on today? If so, you have only yourself to blame. Intention is the seed of your happiness and unhappiness. If you embark on a career for purely monetary reasons, it is normal that you will not be fulfilled in the end.
To have your cake and eat it too
If you want to find meaning in your work, you have to look for what you really like in general, regardless of the pay. If you want to be rich, then don’t try to be happy at the same time in your job, it will be possible but it is not for sure. It is easier to be rich if you follow your natural talents. Here again, you are not sure to get rich but you put an important ingredient on your side.
We all dream of a bullshit job
Without knowing it, we all dreamed one day of a bullshit job. Just the fact that you don’t understand the description was enough to make it enigmatic and powerful. Wanting to be above the rest is done in the blink of an eye if the simple title of your job makes what you do incomprehensible. Director of transversal and digital change management, what a great job. Happiness manager, another job that says a lot about the vacuums of the working world. Of course, this job is doomed to disappear because it implies that the company that employs it is incapable of making its employees happy. Your job is so meaningless that you are obliged to have someone who will organize table soccer and pizza parties in order to make your fate less miserable and make you forget for a moment the absurdity of your professional existence.
Voluntary servitude
Reduced to voluntary slavery, such is the irony of our time. We are free, but chained by our conformism and our disappointed illusions. To run after a gain of junk by monetizing our soul, it is really that we do not give great value to our time and our most beautiful years.
Pretending to be happy is the game everyone plays. Success is that game of Monopoly that you were forced to play when you just wanted to go kick the ball around with your friends.
Chimera
It is a ridiculous moment when we find ourselves forced to please people we despise by doing what we hate.
The greatest misery is to live without goal or horizon, like a raft adrift under a shadowy and dreary sky. That’s why a stupid job has its place. It gives us the comfort of conformity and the snobbery of its supposed prestige.
The world is changing faster than we are
Technology is an inescapable part of our generation. It evolves at full speed without us being able to catch up with it. It changes everything in its path, even our way of working. To live by technology is to expose oneself to live for technology and finally to suffer its dictatorship. BS jobs are born from the meeting of the industrialization of work and the apparent complexity raised by technology. As soon as we are no longer able to keep up with the pace, we expose ourselves to traps such as being a fuse in a company. We occupy a place that will soon no longer exist because of the transformation of work itself. We perform tasks of little value because we have lost sight of the big picture. We are replaceable parts of an ever more complicated gear. We cannot emancipate ourselves because we have built our strategy on elements that will overtake us sooner or later. It is like feeding the baby bear that will soon devour us alive. If we do not have an emancipation and independence strategy in place, we will soon find ourselves in the lion’s den with no hope of getting out.
The way out is to get out of this fool’s game
Wanting to serve technology at all costs will make us servants of computer servers. Making the decision to go for a skill that does not depend on a changing context is the best way to escape a Bullshit job and buy back your freedom. Building a winning strategy takes time because acquiring hard skills takes time. That said, it is the only way to avoid getting into a spiral that forces us to repeat the cycles of adaptation to this world in full creative destruction.
