Bullshit Jobs--and Bullshit Consumption?

I have already written here about the idea of degrowth, and not in a positive fashion. While the idea is unrealistic, and its proponents are generally supporting it for intellectually and morally questionable reasons, it is a far different thing to say that, at least for substantial portions of the citizenries of the higher-income, more developed countries (and to differing degrees, well beyond these strata), people could easily be living better while consuming less. The reason is not because consumption levels make no contribution to human happiness, or consumer comforts are somehow pernicious, but because our lives are organized--indeed, organized for us--so that we are forced to consume a great deal in ways that, on balance, do not make us happier, and make many of us less happy.

I do not deny that the "manufacture of wants" by marketers, shopping-as-entertainment, and the rest, contain much that is unhealthy and hollow--and compel people to make choices they otherwise would not have, whether due to their manipulation by business, or the social pressure to fit in. However, that seems to me secondary. More significant is the fact that, to refer back to John K. Galbraith, public squalor forces people to pursue private affluence; that, partly because of that squalor (the costs of auto ownership, child care, etc.), two-income families are prone to fall into the two-income trap of which Elizabeth Warren wrote; and the design of consumer goods of all kinds for short lives and disposal rather than repair.

Considering those matters it seems to me that, as David Graeber observed, we are working bullshit jobs--to pay for what I will call "bullshit consumption," consumption that brings us no pleasure or benefit (consumption that, like many a bullshit job, amounts to "duct-taping"), and this, largely for the sake of keeping ourselves in bullshit jobs, while our expenditures keep other people in bullshit jobs in an economy that, in the end, has bullshit for an organizing principle.