There's a reason this job feels pointless

By most measures in today's economy, most people's jobs are eminently ignorable. Here's why accepting that reality can bring you wellbeing and even a kind of joy.

Hey there, friends, this week, let’s talk about the meaninglessness of your job.

Geez, Craig, despair much?

Hang on. There’s a paradox in a job’s pointlessness that, if we can an accept it, offers freedom and even a kind of joy.

So, lessee here: if I’m counting right, I’ve held four jobs in my life. A construction job. A radio job. And two teaching-and-research jobs.

In every position I’ve held, some smart person has pointed out specific ways that my job didn’t matter. I hated hearing that, and I would often push back. But most of what they had to say came down to the fact that we all do our jobs in an economy propelled by a scarcity of attention.

Even the most blue-collar business and the tiniest nonprofit will, at some point, say, “We gotta get us a social media manager.” Why? Because in today’s attention economy, doing your thing is not enough. You have to do your job and be noticed.

Today’s attention economy isn’t designed to fairly distribute attention. Monetizing eyeballs like the algorithms do means there’s never enough awareness to go around.

That’s the tough news. But I think there’s good news on the far side of this reality. Let’s go there with our usual steppingstones, hopping quickly from a trend to a study to a story and on to a shift.

A Trend

People are posting less on social media. You can read about the trend here and here and here. A couple of qualifiers. The trend’s maybe most notable among younger users. And people are still consuming lots of social media. But it seems like a true thing that people just aren’t posting as much content from their own lives as they used to.

My guru here is Anne Helen Peterson, who writes, “People seem to be grappling with a more fundamental question: Does posting add more to my life than it extracts? In this iteration of the internet, in this ideological climate, with these platform-specific incentives — is social media ‘worth’ it?” Peterson actually wonders if people are suffering a fatigue with being seen too much by strangers: “We’re exhausted with the labor of self-documentation — especially when it seems that our posts aren’t even surfacing for our close friends. But we’re also tired of being perceived.”

I wonder what this trend means for the future of marketing, advertising, and strategic communication. I also wonder about the freedom that comes from accepting the fact that you’re doing a job that’s just not that noticeable.

A Study

So, let’s think for a minute about why people do their jobs.

A recent piece of qualitative research in the Southern Journal of Communication essay describes ways that workers ages 22-40 have not quit their jobs when seemingly everybody else was doing exactly that. (From 2021 to 2023, just about 4 million Americans a month quit their jobs.)

How are these workers keeping on keeping on?

Just less than a third of the workers described their jobs as making the world better. Right or wrong, that’s a pretty motivating idea. Another third or so did their work in order to care for coworkers; they saw their work in therapeutic or even pastoral terms. A smaller percentage of folks (about 17%) kept up their work by more or less pretending to like it. They needed the job, so they did the emotional work to appear positive. Perhaps the most interesting group did their jobs and yet denied that those jobs held ultimate meaningfulness.

So, that’s strange. Is there a paradox of pointlessness at play here? Might embracing the inconspicuousness of your job in today’s attention economy be a path to freedom?

A Story

The funniest scene in the 2nd episode of Severance’s Season 2 happens between Dylan and a hiring manager at a company called Great Doors. Dylan had been fired from Lumen (where he’d been a “severed” employee), so he was looking for another way to pay for grocery-trip-runs for his wife and kid. He ends up in an interview with a manager who’s obsessed with—doors.

When Dylan asks if the job has benefits, the manager gets around to asking, “How old were you when you knew you loved doors?” The question briefly dumbfounds Dylan, and the manager asks, “If you could be any kind of door, what would it be?”

I love the absurd fixation here. The scene dramatizes the ways we attribute significance to insignificant things. The manager is admittedly a jerk and more than a little discriminatory. But, you know, he loves what he makes, and nobody’s gonna tell him not to. I kinda admire that. It strikes me as a mode of resistance to the attention economy.

screenshot from Apple TV

A Shift

I recently wrote in my journal’s flyleaf a line from Leif Enger’s novel, I Cheerfully Refuse. Describing small-town Midwestern wisdom, the protagonist says, “We understood the margins where we lived. Some still enjoyed resenting the far-flung coasts for their gleam and influence, but I think we accepted the grace of the overlooked” (75).

It’s an insight as old as the Book of Ecclesiastes that your job is a vanity of vanities. But if Ecclesiastes sees particular tasks as pointless, it doesn’t exactly feel that way about toil itself. The book suggests that whatever your hand finds to do can become a source of enjoyment. “There is nothing better for mortals,” writes the philosopher, “than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in their toil.”

The mode/switch I’m recommending is to cheerfully refuse to give allegiance to the attention economy. In a system that hands out prizes to jobs and job-doers that achieve conspicuous notice, you and I can push back by simply and smilingly conceding the unnoticeable nature of our jobs.

And now I find myself wondering, a little despairingly, what it would take for a post like this to go viral. Pretty sure there’d be some algorithmic pushback.

-craig