A Systems-Level Diagnostic for the Modern Worker

There’s a quiet question many adults carry:

“Does my job actually need me —
or am I just part of a theater the system requires?”

It’s not a childish question.
It’s not laziness.
It’s not entitlement.
It is a systems question.

And the answer, for too many, is not flattering to the structure they work inside.

Bullshit jobs aren’t born from worker failure.
They’re born from systemic incentives designed to stabilize fragile environments, satisfy subsidies, maintain optics, or protect an economy terrified of idle citizens.

Here is a human-scaled, non-shaming diagnostic.
Not motivational.
Not judgmental.
Just the truth.

A · What a Bullshit Job Actually Is (Demir Definition*)

Not boring.
Not beneath you.
Not low-paying.
Not beneath your degree.

*For the original anthropological framing, see David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, which remains the foundational text on the phenomenon.

A job crosses into bullshit territory when five structural conditions appear:

1. Your output has no visible consequence.

Nothing you do affects a customer, a process, a product, a decision, or a metric that matters.

2. Your absence changes nothing.

If you vanished for a week and the only system that would notice is the timekeeping software,
that’s not a job — it’s employment theater.

3. Your job exists to preserve optics, not outcomes.

This is the essence of UBI dressed like work:
your role exists to support a hidden economy of subsidies,
to satisfy local work-requirement mandates,
or to bolster organizational optics more than produce actual outcomes.

4. The system punishes your efficiency.

When doing your job well reveals that the job itself is structurally unnecessary,
you become a threat to the system’s fiction.

A common tell:
another employee quietly hints that your speed or thoroughness “makes things difficult for everyone else.”

That isn’t laziness.
It’s an admission:
the system needs the performance to stay intact.

So efficiency gets smothered.

5. You must perform enthusiasm to mask structural emptiness.

Fake positivity becomes required Gratitude Theater.
Your emotional labor props up a hollow system.

These five together form the bullseye.

Bullshit jobs are not about the task.
They are about the system the task is embedded in.

B · Structural Signals (How to Tell Without Emotion)

Your feelings are valid.
But systems diagnosis is clearest when you look at architecture.

Here are the indicators:

1. The ladder is missing.

No mobility.
No training.
No skills accumulating.
Just performed stability.

2. The gatekeeping is arbitrary.

Evaluation criteria shift like weather.
Your performance review could be replaced with a coin flip.

3. Meetings perform more than they decide.

If the real decisions happen elsewhere,
your meeting is stagecraft.

4. Redundancy is designed in.

Three people with your exact title.
Four with similar tasks.
No one can articulate the unique value of any single role.

5. Cheerfulness is mandatory.

Not optimism.
Performance.

When honesty becomes dangerous,
you’re not in a workplace —
you’re in a theater.

C · The Real Risks (Career, Identity, Moral)

If you feel the job is draining the life out of you, it is.
And it’s not because you're weak —
it's because the system is.

Career Risk · Skill Atrophy

You stop compounding.
Years pass in quiet intellectual decay.
The outside world moves.
You remain still.

Identity Risk · Shrinking

You begin to confuse performance with worth.
You play a role for so long that you fear you have no substance beneath it.

Moral Risk · Quiet Despair

Humans need to matter.
We need to belong to something that would notice our absence.

A bullshit job corrodes that truth from the inside out.

Economic Risk · Late Realization

The most dangerous moment is the one in which you suddenly see,
at forty-eight or fifty-three:
“I have no transferable skills.
I have only tenure in nothing.”

D · Why Bullshit Jobs Happen (The Systems Explanation)

You didn’t fail.
The system did.

Bullshit jobs arise because the larger ecosystem requires:

• payroll theater to maintain employment numbers
• subsidized stability to avoid unrest; public money routed through employment systems to keep people occupied.

As grandmothers used to say: “Keep ’em busy.”

• local content mandates to protect regional economies
• optics of busyness to reassure stakeholders
• bureaucratic buffering to hide inefficiencies
• fear of idle adults in an economy built on moralizing labor

These jobs aren’t accidents.
They are pressure valves in an economy terrified of silence, downtime, or unstructured agency.

You didn’t build this.
You’re just sitting in the room where it happens.

See Systems Flow Diagram UBI Hidden in Plain Sight.

E · Escape Routes (Structural, Not Heroic)

Escaping a bullshit job isn’t about willpower.
It’s about architecture.

Step 1 · Map what the system actually values

Ignore announcements.
Watch behavior.
Find the real levers.

Metrics are mirrors; they reflect what a system values most.

Step 2 · Extract the transferable skills hidden under the theater

Even hollow jobs contain fragments of value —
pattern recognition, stakeholder communication, system literacy.

Isolate them.
Name them. Capture them.

Step 3 · Build your own narrow door

Small movements.
Not reinventions.
A single alteration in direction compounds faster than burnout fantasies or dramatic leaps.

Step 4 · Create a portfolio of value

Bullshit tasks don’t travel across systems.
Value does. So make your contribution portable.

Translate your real contribution into artifacts that move with you.

Most exits happen quietly,
through a sequence of micro-steps,
not a declaration.

Closing · A Quiet Truth

If your job feels empty,
it’s not because you’re unproductive.
It’s because the system is dishonest.

Bullshit jobs don’t reveal something about you.
They reveal something about the economy:

It would rather keep you contained than give you meaningful work.

The first step isn’t quitting.
It’s naming the system with clarity,
so your next move is made with truth beneath it
instead of shame.

See more field tests → Systems in Action

— part of the Future of Work Series by Madonna Demir, author of Systems & Soul

The Future of Work Series is a continuing investigation into the systems architecture of modern labor. We look beyond job titles and org charts to reveal the mechanisms that keep employment running: income-distribution scaffolding, emotional labor economies, make-work roles, managerial theater, and the incentives that quietly shape entire industries. These essays map where work is drifting, why it feels increasingly hollow or performative, and how the hidden structures of today’s labor systems define the work of tomorrow.