PHILIP CRUMP: Work, Meaning and the Long Road Home

'What did you get done this week?'

In April 2022 Elon Musk was a major shareholder in Twitter and had become engaged in an increasingly fraught public exchange with Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal.

Twitter had just offered him a board seat.

Then Musk publicly questioned whether Twitter was dying. Agrawal pushed back, telling Musk that the criticism wasn’t helping. Musk’s reply arrived less than a minute later.

“What did you get done this week?”

He then told Agrawal he wasn’t joining the board. That the whole thing was a waste of his time. And that he would make an offer to take the company private.

Months later he did. He walked into Twitter’s headquarters carrying a kitchen sink, fired Agrawal, and cut 80 % of the company’s 7,500-strong workforce.

The deeper question beneath Musk’s dramatic action is one anthropologist David Graeber became famous for asking: not what do you do but does it actually need doing at all?

Graeber popularised the term “bullshit jobs”, and the label stuck because many people immediately recognised what he meant.

Graeber identified five types of bullshit job.

Flunkies, who exist to make their superiors feel important.

Goons, hired to work against the interests of others.

Duct tapers, who spend their working lives temporarily fixing problems that could be permanently solved but aren’t, because a permanent fix would eliminate the need for duct tapers.

Box tickers, who generate the appearance of useful activity such as the compliance report nobody reads, the survey which changes nothing, or the working group which reviews the recommendations of the previous working group.

And finally taskmasters, who create work for people who don’t need it, manage people who don’t need managing, and spend most of their working day in generously catered meetings organising further meetings.

Graeber’s explanation for why these roles proliferate is worth considering. He called it managerial feudalism: the tendency of organisations to accumulate layers of management not because the work requires it, but because headcount confers status. Managers need underlings to feel important. Underlings need their own underlings in turn. The pyramid grows not because it is efficient or necessary but because hierarchy, in large organisations, becomes an end in itself.

The public sector is often criticised for this type of managerial feudalism but it is just as much a feature of private sector organisations.

The Twitter experiment was, in a sense, the largest real-world test of Graeber’s thesis. When Musk cut 80 % of the workforce, the near-universal prediction was that the platform would collapse. Critical systems would fail, misinformation would proliferate and the product would deteriorate beyond recovery.

But despite the dire predictions, the platform did not collapse in the way many expected.

Whatever one thinks of Musk’s blunt methods, the core result is difficult to dismiss. It suggested that large organisations probably contain far more roles than are strictly necessary. No doubt when Musk walked into Twitter headquarters carrying his kitchen sink he saw many flunkies, box tickers and taskmasters consuming more productive energy than they generated.

Graeber was not, however, simply making an efficiency argument. He recognised that the bullshit job often serves a social function we have never quite been willing to name openly. A job, even a largely pointless one, provides income. And it also provides structure, identity, routine and the right to say that you work. In a culture that has tied self-worth to employment for generations, the bullshit job is, in some sense, disguised welfare. It is society’s way of keeping people connected, purposeful and dignified without admitting that is what it is doing.

That is not nothing. The psychological research is consistent that unemployment damages mental and physical health in ways that go well beyond income loss. The structure and social connection that even a relatively meaningless job provides turn out to matter enormously to human wellbeing. Nevertheless, people in these roles usually know that their work is pointless.

So the question raised by the Twitter experiment is not simply how much organisational fat can be removed. It is the harder underlying question: as we increasingly strip out the roles that exist primarily to keep people occupied and feeling useful or which become redundant because of artificial intelligence and automation, what do those people do?

Unemployment is not the answer. Neither, for most people, is a leisurely early retirement.

In a country undergoing the demographic transformation New Zealand now faces, this will quickly become one of the central economic and social challenges of the next 20 years.

Professor Paul Spoonley, one of the country’s leading sociologists, has documented this trajectory. In the 1960s there were seven working-age New Zealanders for every person over 65. Today that ratio, known as the old-age dependency ratio, is 4:1. By 2065 it is projected to hit 2:1.

Two workers supporting every retiree.

New Zealand superannuation, as currently structured, was designed for a demographic that no longer exists, one where people worked, retired briefly, and died. The average New Zealander now lives nearly 20 years beyond the age of eligibility. The fiscal consequences of that shift, compounded by a shrinking ratio of contributors to recipients, are simply not sustainable.

But the answer is not simply to raise the retirement age and leave people to manage the consequences. That treats a profound social and cultural transition as merely a fiscal problem.

Although many jobs in New Zealand still involve physical labour, for most people work today is no longer primarily physical in nature. Structure, usefulness and connection matter just as much to people as income. That is why the hard-stop retirement model is not only fiscally unsustainable, but increasingly out of step with longer lives, healthier ageing and how many people now want to participate in society.

What the current debate misses is that a person’s working life need not consist solely of full-time employment followed by complete retirement. In an economy shaped increasingly by knowledge, judgement and relationships rather than physical endurance alone, there is far greater scope for a gradual transition.

The shift required is as much cultural as it is administrative.

We have inherited a model designed for shorter lives, physical labour and a demographic structure that no longer exists. Adjusting the retirement age may prove to be necessary. But the larger question is how we build a society that remains serious about the value of contribution at every stage of life that is, for most of us, considerably longer than the model was ever designed for.

Philip Crump writes at Cranmer's substack