Bullshit Jobs av David Graeber

Denne boken var virkelig strålende. Jeg vil gjerne fastholde et tankevekkende sitat vedr. 15 timers arbeidsuke (som spådd av Keynes).

| In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanisms wrong. We’re not working harder because we’re spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving one another sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at around 20 percent of overall employment. Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of […] “a life”, and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford. Sitting around in cafés all day arguing about politics or gossiping about our friends’ polyamorous love affairs takes time (all day, in fact); in contrast pumping iron or attending a yoga class at the local gym, ordering out for Deliveroo, watching an episode of Game of Thrones or shopping for hand creams or consumer electronics can all be placed in the kind of self-contained predictable time-slots one is likely to have left over between spates of wor, or else while recovering from it. All these are examples of what I like to call “compensatory consumerism”. They are the sorts of things you can do to make up for the fact that you don’t have a life, or not very much of one.

Litt tidligere i boken nevner han at noen jobber, som hundepassere eller natt-pizzabud, er *second order bullshit jobs", altså at de kun eksisterer fordi vi tilbringer for mye tid på jobben. Sitatet over gir denne tanken litt mer kjøtt på beina.

Det blir litt for mye å gjengi, men boken skinner virkelig også når han beskriver konspetet med moral envy og dynamikkene ulike samfunnsklasser føler motvilje mot hverandre etter (resentment).