Watching friends who are great human beings get swallowed by devoting their time to soulless big corporations.

 Something really sad happening right now:

I'm watching friends who are great human beings full of life, ideas, skills, and passions, get absolutely swallowed by devoting their time to soulless big corporations where their uniqueness is not valued.

My friend, you are a whole ass human being.

Do you really want to spend your 23rd year of life supposedly optimising the culture or a bank that would run exactly the same way if you weren't there?

If I wanna fry my brain, I can think of at least a dozen better ways to do it than to stare at shitty internal communication tools for 80% of my awake time.

Reading "Bullshit jobs" a few years ago was excellent because I swore that I'd never put myself or others in that position.

If my life is to continue down this path, I'll be a CEO for along time because I love to get people together and build stuff.

If any of the people I look out for ever feel like their brains are rotting away because of what they are paid to do, then I am doing something wrong.

"Some things just need to get done" - true, but there are often better ways to do them.

"Not everyone can love what they do" - true, but I don't care about everyone. I care about my ever-expanding circle of influence. (taking specifically about this issue)

School crushed a lot of my friends' souls, but I'm only now starting to understand how much more people get crushed when they have the financial incentive to do so.

That's why these jobs are often well paid.

They trade your soul for money and bullshit work.

We need to stop pretending like these jobs are cool because "you don't do much and earn well" when the people boasting about them are utterly depressed and coping extremely hard to stay sane.

I don't mean "never, ever get one of these jobs"

Sometimes life throws rocks at you and you gotta do what you gotta do. 0 shame in that.

But the people taking them are usually not the ones who desperately need it.

Bullshit jobs are to work what TikTok is to  social media.

A system designed to (1) put you in zombie mode (2) consuming ever-increasing amounts of content while (3) the algorithm gets to know you better (4) until you are helplessly addicted and (5) depressed.

1. They are the default choice;

2. Giving you a taste of how good your status and finances might one day be

3. The experience gets personalised. You "change teams and scopes";

4. You up your lifestyle;

5. Can't corporate hedonic treadmill. Tie your worth to it.

Maybe I shouldn't say "corporate".

There are definitely bullshit jobs at startups too and this critic applies to all industries (even universities).

The problem are not the industries themselves but specific situations within them.

You also need to be careful when talking to people about bullshit jobs because they will most likely become defensive.

It takes a communication wizard to address topics like this one in productive ways.

Relevant thread:

https://twitter.com/jose_goncalves_/status/1572623086104768513