Finding Purpose in Pointless, Dehumanizing Work
A philosophical exploration involving the ideas of Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Graeber, and Camus.
The pivotal moment in G.W. Friedrich Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic occurs when a slave, engaged in the work of making things for the master’s consumption, sees himself1 in those things and there finds meaning. These objects serve as a mirror in which he can see that his life has value. While the masters descend further into consumption and dependence on the slave’s labor to fulfill an increasing litany of desires and needs, the worker realizes himself as independent consciousness. His labor and the products of his work provide him with a sense of identity and meaning that the master, lost in the ever-widening chasm of his consumption, does not have access to.
But what happens when an economic system, fixated on maximizing efficiency and scalability, de-structures2 labor to such an extent that it minimizes the possibility for people who have to work for money to develop self-worth around what they make and do? In other words, when work becomes an endless series of repetitive actions, disconnected from any final product, end goal, or even human need, rendering work meaningless to the worker, what then?
This all reminds me of a passing comment that Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) makes in his account of the Siberian prison work camp to which he was sent in The House of the Dead:
“Hard labour, as it is now carried on, presents no interest to the convict; but it has its utility. The convict makes bricks, digs the earth, builds; and all his occupations have a meaning and an end. Sometimes, even the prisoner takes an interest in what he is doing. He then wishes to work more skilfully, more advantageously. But let him be constrained to pour water from one vessel into another, or to transport a quantity of earth from one place to another, in order to perform the contrary operation immediately afterwards, then I am persuaded that at the end of a few days the prisoner would strangle himself or commit a thousand crimes, punishable with death, rather than live in such an abject condition and endure such torments. It is evident that such punishment would be rather a torture, an atrocious vengeance, than a correction. It would be absurd, for it would have no natural end.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead
Doesn’t this sound a lot like so many of our jobs today? No matter how hard or unpleasant the task, we humans will make it meaningful to us because it is us doing it, and so it matters to us in some way, shape, or form. The only thing that is quite intolerable is being forced to do something senseless, over and over again. This lack of meaning or value is what is dehumanizing.
Story time. An academic philosopher turned web developer, I have been scratching my teaching itch by teaching at coding bootcamps. I saw the industry go from the in-person cohort system, where a group of students came in together and were taught by an instructor, or even an instructional team, for the months it would take them to get through the program; to the de-structuring of course materials into a cafeteria style system, where students start at any time, and go through the curriculum online at their own pace, with minimal guidance. The trend was part of a push to “crack the nut” of online education (spoiler alert: hasn’t been done) in order to massively scale these courses to hundreds, if not thousands of students. It is sold under the banner of schedule “flexibility” and “self-paced”, but it leads to terrible outcomes.
They wrung the humanity out of every interaction, making the work dehumanizing.
I taught in one program that was purposefully built so that students did not form attachments to any particular instructor because the cult of personality that tends to form around really great teachers posed too high a threat — for one, it made instructors less replaceable. Students got attached to their instructors and didn’t want to be forced to switch to another instructor a few weeks later. Thinking about it now, I bet someone got butt-sore about someone’s popularity and decided to nix that in the bud!
Instructors and students are forbidden from interacting outside of the scheduled sessions, the content for which is predetermined (by upper-handlers) and monitored through video recordings — everything is recorded. I dutifully performed the lessons they wrote, with the slides they created, and it was the same 2 sets of 10 slides for the majority of my time there. I worked there for almost two years and did not get to know a single student (or fellow instructor) in any personal capacity, and could not tell you if any of the students I saw in my sessions went on to graduate and get jobs in tech. I believe that this was all by design.
They wrung the humanity out of every interaction, dehumanizing the work and making the work dehumanizing. But what really amazes me now is how well I got used to the meaningless, repetitive task of performing the role. I’m calling bullshit on myself for having wasted nearly two years of my life doing what amounts to a shit job, albeit for a good wage.
In “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory,” David Graeber (1961–2020) explores the phenomenon of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs that, according to Graeber, permeate the modern workforce. Graeber argues that a significant portion of societal work is pointless, not necessarily because the tasks themselves are useless, but because they serve to perpetuate bureaucratic systems or corporate inefficiencies without contributing to the well-being of society. Graeber suggests that the existence of bullshit jobs is a result of cultural and economic systems that prioritize employment for its own sake, rather than for the production of valuable goods or services. He contends that this situation is not only demoralizing for individuals stuck in these roles but also detrimental to the economy and society at large.
Yes, and I think that the point is to keep people engaged in work that is as meaningless as possible. In other words, it’s not just “employment for its own sake,” but jobs that have been de-structured and as divorced from the social good they promote as is possible. This is not just the gig economy, although yes it certainly includes those jobs, but all jobs seem to be moving in this direction, Increasingly, our interactions dehumanized and technologically micro-managed. The low-grade torture of it, the outright cruelty, is the point now as much as efficiency.
But there is one thing that capitalism and the sociopathic billionaire class did not count on, and that is the indomitable spirit of the human being. We have this uncanny ability to find meaning even in the most desolate places, in the most grim of circumstances. Being nothing if not adaptable, we get used to it and still mostly survive. To not care is an aberration and a perversion of the human spirit, and it is harder that you would think to not care at all. We care, even when, really, we shouldn’t. That is the one thing that makes being human still heartening.
Our tools and technologies do not care, computers don’t care, algorithms don’t care, but in our hands these tools become an expression of what we care about, and therein lies meaning. Think about what this means for the kinds of technologies that “we” are creating….
Fact is, we humans already exist in the throes of absurdity, so adding a little more meaningless on top of existential absurdity is like… meh. Somehow, we still manage to care.
Imagine dedicating your entire life to collecting rare, seemingly insignificant objects — say, pebbles of a specific shade of blue — believing that amassing enough of these will reveal to you the universe’s deepest secrets or somehow validate your existence. This quest consumes every moment, every resource, displacing relationships, careers, and more traditional life achievements.
Yet, the universe, in its vastness and silence, offers no acknowledgment of this quest. The pursuit, deeply meaningful to the collector, appears entirely arbitrary from an external viewpoint. The absurdity lies in the profound disconnect between the individual’s search for meaning and the universe’s mute indifference. What would you say about the blue pebble collector? Are they deluded, or have they found the key to their happiness?
If our existence is absurd, inherently devoid of prescribed meaning, we must confront the possibility that our quests, our struggles, and even our suffering might be, in the grand scheme of things, without objective purpose or value. Albert Camus (1913–1960), French existentialist writer best known for his exploration of absurdism, uses gravity to land the full weight of our existence’s absurdity. Sisyphus, so goes the Greek myth, is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to roll down each time he reaches the top. The myth is a metaphor for the human quest for meaning in an indifferent universe.
Many people find all this a bit depressing, a bit of a downer, but the myth is supposed to free us up to do whatever the heck we want because if nothing matters, the we minus well find a way to do what we really want to do. Despite the apparent futility of the task, Camus finds a resilient defiance in Sisyphus’s situation, suggesting that the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart, and one must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The is no right or prescribed way our lives are meant to unfold, and no one particularly cares what you do. Who is going to tell our blue pebble collector that what she is doing is pointless, if it serves to make her happy and harms no one? Her happiness spreads easily to others, and in that there is already some good. So find a way to do what you want to do, and don’t accept meaningless work for too long.
As of last Friday, I have gone independent with my teaching efforts. I am really enjoying actually teaching again and I need more students. If any of you know someone who wants to learn to code, I’m now available as an independent JavaScript tutor. 😉
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Footnotes
1 Rather than correct the assumption of a male subject by using more gender neutral language, I have chosen to leave the presumption as is.
2 Most people here would colloquially use the term deconstruction instead of de-structuring, but deconstruction has a technical, philosophical meaning that I will likely write about in a future post, so I am avoiding it here.
