In his latest book, anthropologist Professor David Graeber explains how to make your meaningless job more meaningful.

A recent YouGov poll found that only half of British workers in full-time employment thought that their job made any meaningful contribution to the world, and 37 per cent were sure that it did not. This mirrors stats that suggest as much as 40 per cent of the global workforce consider their positions to be futile. London School of Economics anthropologist Professor David Graeber has a term for these vocations: “bullshit jobs”.

If this resonates, don’t take it personally. According to his new book, Prof Graeber thinks it is the jobs themselves that are the real issue, not the people performing them. His list of less-than-useful professions includes “HR consultants, communications co-ordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers [lawyers don’t fare particularly well] or the sort of people who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees” (although he accepts that anthropology professors are probably on other people’s lists).

The crux of his argument: at the dawn of the consumer age, we were promised that technology would allow for 15-hour working weeks. Instead, we’re working longer hours, often filled with tasks we deem pointless, and living in fear that said technology will steal our livelihoods. And even if your job isn’t entirely meaningless, chances are elements of it are. Prof Graeber believes we can do better than this.

If you read his book looking for a definitive answer, however, you might be disappointed. “This is not a book about a particular solution,” he writes. “It’s a book about a problem.” But in identifying that there is a problem, in a roundabout way, he points to a few things we can all do to make our jobs – and lives – more meaningful.

As a general rule, the more you earn, the less your job matters. If all the teachers, nurses, cleaners and medical researchers (the most socially valuable occupation, according to a 2017 study – by economists, not medical researchers) didn’t turn up to work one day, the world might grind to a halt. But as Prof Graeber notes, for 541 days from June 2010 to September 2011, Belgium had no government “without there being any observable negative impact on health, transport or education”. Meanwhile, in Ireland, a six-month bank strike in 1970 had very little impact on the economy. It was a different story in 1968 in New York, however, when refuse collectors took industrial action. The city was forced to meet all the strikers’ demands after just 10 days. With a few exceptions – doctors being the most obvious one – Prof Graeber concludes that “the more one’s work benefits others, the less one tends to be paid for it”. If you really want to make a difference, grab a broom and start sweeping.

Even if your job doesn’t fall directly under the bullshit umbrella, there’s every chance that “bullshitisation”, as Prof Graeber calls it, is creeping into your job description. He quotes a 2016 survey that actual work accounted for only 39 per cent of the average American’s time during office hours. At this rate, “in less than a decade, no US office worker will be doing any real work at all”. The positive to take from this is that many of the tasks you perform every day – emails, admin, meetings – “could be eliminated without making any real difference”. If you failed to answer any of the 1,056 unread emails cluttering up your inbox, would anyone even notice? So, maybe just don’t.

If we assume that the world is on the brink of an AI-exacerbated employment crisis, the answer must be urgent government policy, right? Maybe not. “Calling for a new government bureaucracy to assess the usefulness of jobs would inevitably itself turn into a vast generator of bullshit,” says Prof Graeber. In his view, there is only one course of action “that would reduce rather than increase the size and intrusiveness of government. That’s Universal Basic Income.” This is the scheme whereby everyone receives the same livable income from the state, regardless of their circumstances. Recently trialled in Finland, it is touted by Messrs Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as our way out of this mess. “What Basic Income ultimately proposes is to detach livelihood from work,” says Prof Graeber. You wouldn’t need to work, but you could if you wanted to. Equally, you could spend your time doing whatever else you fancied ­– finding a cure for cancer, watching Netflix, juggling. If that sounds like a scary – and expensive – prospect, remember that almost half the world’s workforce already feel their jobs are pointless. “If we let everyone decide for themselves how they were best fit to benefit humanity, with no restrictions at all,” says Prof Graeber, “how could they possibly end up with a distribution of labour more inefficient than the one we already have?”

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (Penguin) by Professor David Graeber is out now