Two summers ago, I started my first full-time job. This came after a series of internships with no return offers, an unfunded master’s degree, haphazard attempts at freelance writing, a self-studied LSAT, and long shifts behind the counter at bakeries and bars. The job I ultimately accepted—at a legal nonprofit in the city where I grew up—wasn’t particularly prestigious or high paying, but it was at a good organization, and at least obliquely aligned with my politics and long-term career interests. More importantly, it represented stability. An end to my meandering adolescence. A paycheck that was more than sufficient to cover rent.
My days fell into a pattern—phone calls caveated with “I’m not an attorney, but…” and learning to navigate ancient grant-reporting software; cold emails to pro bonos and waiting around for prospective clients to return paperwork needed for grant compliance, much of which was never returned. There was a lot of downtime. Those early months were a crash course in the roundabout bureaucracy of the nonprofit world. The funding for my position was cobbled together from multiple sources: both state and federal grant money, plus a small number of private donations for administrative, office-specific tasks. They’d told me this during the interview process, but I didn’t really understand then what it would mean for me day-to-day. I learned fast. The work I did each week was, at least in theory, already accounted for. Half my hours for one department, half my hours for another. We tracked this time in six-minute increments, “billing” blocks to clients (though all the actual legal work was pro bono) or else to the confusingly titled “Other Service” or “Supporting Activity” designations. Each case note had to be labeled with the funding stream the work fell under, denoted by selecting from a dropdown menu of hundreds of grants, plus a half dozen confusing acronyms (PAI, CSR, LSC, IOLA), each with their own “yes/no” to toggle.
This meant that, even as I began to feel comfortable with the rhythm of my work, each week, without fail, my timekeeping would be incorrect. Not even close to the fifty-fifty split between departments it was supposed to be. On paper, my responsibilities seemed significant and service-oriented: walking clients through procedural questions about their credit-card debts and bankruptcies, referring them to volunteer attorneys if needed, and reporting anonymized client demographics back to the state. In practice, though, I was spending a steadily growing portion of each day accounting for the time I was logging under each grant, then finding busy work to do for the department with less work so that my timekeeping would appear more correct. It’s a catch-22 that’s likely familiar to many government and nonprofit employees—should I do the work I was hired to do, at risk of getting penalized by our funders? Or, if only because of then-candidate Trump’s promise to target 501(c)(3)s with less-than-perfect books, should I slow my roll and hand in a perfectly allocated time card?
I spent my breaks in the city park across from my office, eating lunch on the wrought-iron benches dedicated to old machine politicians, people-watching. Pedestrians would trickle down the crunchy gravel path in front of me—young migrant families pushing strollers, old drunks on e-bikes, state workers talking loudly into their AirPods. It had only been a few months since I’d started, and yet I already felt alienated from the work I was, supposedly, doing. Here I was, out in the community my office served, surrounded by people whose lives would go on with or without me.
Feeling understimulated and vaguely guilty, I began to tear through books at a pace that wouldn’t have been imaginable during college. Both fiction and nonfiction suddenly engrossed me in a way that they hadn’t since I was a child, portals to a world (or worldview) wider than my own. These writers—or, at least, the versions of themselves that came across on the page—had a sense of direction; their anxieties had stakes. No one in the novels ever fretted over kind-of-falsified timekeeping entries, and journalists and critics had more pressing concerns than feeling cooped up in a windowless office. I envied the clarity, the sense of mission, these writers possessed. I wished I was allowed to work hard.
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I’m hardly the first person to feel anxious about spending my day doing seemingly arbitrary tasks. So much ink has been spilled on workplace angst that it’s become something of a cottage industry, from the countless pop psychologists hawking ways to Win Friends and Influence People to the nearly equal number of critics of such self-help gurus among thinkers and academics on the left. Even David Graeber, the north star of political intellectuals for so many of my peers, jumped into the fray. Expanded from a viral essay, his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs collects interviews with hundreds of people who describe what they do as pointless. From these conversations, Graeber realized that the few jobs today that are tangibly useful—say, social workers and science teachers—pay far less than the mass of uninspiring administrative and middle-management roles that prop them up. As a result, many opt for the paycheck, even if that means resigning oneself to working a job that doesn’t really need to be done. “This is a profound psychological violence here,” concluded Graeber: “if someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder … are basically paid to do nothing.”
In recent years, several prominent young thinkers on the left have echoed and amplified this sentiment, and so I turned to their books too, searching for a solution to my dissatisfaction. Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (2017) explores how the neoliberal emphasis on optimizing “human capital” has created a workforce of young people obsessed with min-maxing their ability to perform arbitrary tasks. According to Harris, his generation is not, as is popularly supposed, lazy and entitled, but the opposite: his early-career millennials stared down the same largely inconsequential pencil-pushing jobs that Graeber’s interviewees did, and yet in the interest of standing out enough to advance their careers, they threw themselves into the work to absurd (and largely unsustainable) degrees. The idea of making oneself indispensable also features prominently in the historian Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (2025). The book traces the changing conception of work ethic over three centuries of the U.S. economy, from yeoman farmers to New Thought preachers to the countercultural (but just as capitalist) strand of no-longer-upstart companies like Apple and Erewhon. In Baker’s account, the nineteenth century was a long transition between the early-modern notion of industriousness—which “downplays the salience of the quality of work being done, instead assigning most importance to the simple fact that a person is working hard, and thus insulated from the moral danger of parasitism”—and the entrepreneurialism that would come to define the 1900s. Baker defines the entrepreneurial mindset as a semi-delusional, employer-endorsed coping mechanism for the working class in the aftermath of industrialization, as the nation began to shift away from blue-collar work altogether.
Of all these accounts, the one that most stuck with me was Leigh Claire La Berge’s Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke (2025). While La Berge is a literature professor by trade, and shares Baker’s eye for political economy, her book is refreshingly personal rather than academic—a memoir of her stint in corporate America, working on a management-consulting firm’s Y2K-preparedness team. La Berge takes special care to sketch out the absurd personalities of her coworkers as well as their inexplicable assignments: “Instead of fixing things with the hope that they would function tomorrow … we would document anti-Y2K efforts that the Conglomerate had already undertaken. … Instead of promising things to come, we would certify that things that had already transpired had been appropriately recorded.” But La Berge’s writerly curiosity about the corporate world she crash-landed into eventually curdles into resentment for how its circular logic trumped what the work itself was worth. “At a certain point,” she writes, “The Process meant not questioning The Process, and I had trouble locating exactly where that point was located.” Fake Work ends with the calendar flipping to 2000 with little fanfare and La Berge fleeing as far from the world of late-nineties corporate excess as possible: a (not particularly cushy) career in academia.
The through line of these books is clear—between hustle culture, the gig economy, AI-proselytizing fraudsters and the deregulation-obsessed neoliberals eager to bankroll them, there’s a lot of bullshit in the contemporary American workplace. And yet besides the few remaining infographic warriors who think the point of democratic socialism should be to abolish work altogether, there’s an unspoken defeatist consensus about what options workers have: you can fight to organize your labor, or else give in to the system. Either way the workday is something to endure, a means to an end, not worth emotionally investing in.
Conceptually, I agree that labor organization and social spending are the path forward, that we should be striving for more equitable ways to allocate our money and our time. In that respect, Harris’s and Baker’s analyses are an essential corrective to the stench of DOGE-y bullshit in the air, as conservatives attempt to dismantle the civil service, financialize health care and turn higher ed into luxury real estate. Still, I’m frustrated by how these left thinkers seem implicitly to dismiss the possibility of fulfilling work altogether—at least until after we’ve gotten rid of capitalism. For those workers not already involved in politics, or for young people who are sympathetic to the cause while simultaneously trying to get a foothold in their economic lives, they offer little guidance about how to approach the bulk of the day, from nine to five. Because even if you spend your evenings trying to change the world, what do you tell yourself to make it through your shift?
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At some level, almost everybody wants a good job, one stimulating and rewarding enough to be worth organizing their identity around. The work could, even should, be difficult, though ultimately worthwhile. It would be free, ideally, of the administrative and political baggage that wears even the most driven people down. The goal is to have the sort of career where—if you’ll pardon my boomerism—you love what you do so much that it hardly feels like work at all.
But should such jobs be considered a right? A privilege? Or is this vision of work a total fantasy? Am I nostalgic for a Norman Rockwell world that never actually existed, buying into the narrative pushed by management consultants and CEOs: that lack of fulfillment in one’s career is simply a matter of not working hard enough?
Take the kind of mission-driven work I was doing at the legal-aid nonprofit, or of Graeber’s social workers and science teachers. It’s difficult to reconcile the existence of these jobs—and why people are still drawn to them—with the ideology of the thinkers who I’ve come to think of as the “bullshit-jobs left.” Some of them, like Graeber and La Berge, would likely sympathize with the glut of administrative nonsense such workers have to deal with, getting in the way of the impactful parts of the job they actually enjoy. The more cynical take (as might be argued by Harris) is that the people who take these jobs are suckers, bleeding-heart middle-class kids trying to do the right thing but whose participation in a flawed system—underfunded public schools, understaffed hospitals, nonprofits plugging holes that should be provided by government services—is futile, ultimately undermining the left’s bigger-picture cause.
And yet in my experience, things were rarely so simple. The attorneys I worked with didn’t fit the stereotype of the typical pro bono lawyer or public defender: overworked, chronically disheveled do-gooders who show up late to client meetings in a coffee-stained tie, unable to give any one case the time it deserves. In fact, my colleagues were anything but beaten down; they were optimistic but far from naïve. All were well versed in the broader context of the work we did, more than familiar with the never-ending uphill battle against the opioid and housing crises, and with the fact that for most clients, legal assistance was but a Band-Aid for something bigger. Some were not much older than me, grad school-radicalized recent alums of Syracuse and SUNY Buffalo. Others were retirees, or close to it, having left long careers in corporate law and state agencies, driven by a desire to give back. And while burnout and turnover were major problems, there were mid-career lawyers at every level between them, legal-aid lifers, all of whom recognized that they could be making twice as much money pretty much anywhere else but who chose to stay anyway.
Our attorneys worked in foreclosure prevention, hosted pop-up tax clinics, did benefits counseling and provided advice for both the most routine and dire divorces. They directly represented as many clients as they had the bandwidth for, then offered written and over-the-phone advice to the rest. The department I worked with the most was the housing team, by far the office’s largest, which since the pandemic had been in a state of perpetual backlog. Their work was grueling, both repetitive and emotionally draining. The housing attorneys would hear variations of the same story dozens of times a day, frequently by clients who had multiple cases open with our organization, either repeat eviction attempts or compounding consumer debt and family issues. There was so much demand for even the smallest amount of help that some weeks the intake staff would have to turn away a dozen prospective clients for each one they accepted, advising the others to call first thing on Monday, when the phones reopened. Even when the process worked—clients were advised and then represented in court, resulting in eviction proceedings being delayed, settled or dismissed—the atmosphere was far from victorious. There were literally hundreds more clients waiting.
Still, it was work. The attorneys clocked in, researched as much as they could, won some cases, lost others, then got ready for tomorrow. They grew frustrated with their bosses for good and bad reasons alike. They wished for less administrative responsibility so they could spend more time with clients, while understanding that demographic reporting and grant compliance were the reason their positions existed at all. They recognized they were underpaid, overworked and operating at the conflux of a swirl of compounding policy, labor and legal realities; that they were plugging holes rather than stopping the leak. But even if, politically speaking, they were thinking bigger, they honed that energy into the job at hand. The way they approached their work made me look at my own job—less skilled, more tedious, but part of the process nonetheless—differently. It didn’t magically make me feel fulfilled. But it helped me situate the monotony of my own workday within something bigger.
In contrast, the more didactic wing of the bullshit-jobs left seems to imply that even acknowledging the validity of the noneconomic reasons people want certain jobs—ambition, pride, genuine desire to do good—would risk ceding too much to the right’s “put your head down and work” mentality. Yet in this single-minded focus on contracts, hours and benefits, their analysis can become structural to the point of being stifling. When the thinkers of the bullshit-jobs left do grapple with questions of workplace discontent, they do so in a roundabout way, focusing on the absurd or the arbitrary. They paint the whole white-collar economy as a shared delusion we all buy into for the sake of keeping our schedules full and the economy running. Tellingly, I used the very same rhetorical trick in the opening of this essay. But writing off the average American worker as either a naïve dupe or an embattled burnout is reductive, an easy intellectual out. It skirts the messier question: Even if the contemporary economy is inherently exploitative, does the left have anything constructive to say about finding meaningful work within it anyway?
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One thinker who speaks to this question is the political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson. Though Anderson views today’s deeply unequal working world in much the same way as the bullshit-jobs left, she’s less dismissive of the persistence of the work ethic as a progressive value. Contemporary criticism of work ethic, she argues, is really a criticism of how the conversation has been co-opted by the right. But pride in one’s work—emotional and economic ownership—doesn’t have to be a vehicle of inequality.
In the lectures that became her 2017 book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), Anderson argues that when classical liberals like John Locke called for free markets, they meant freedom in the early-modern, egalitarian sense. A Lockean market economy dominated by yeoman farmers and enterprising artisans would be more equitable than the feudal system of idle rich landlords that prevailed before. Their business would be small, responsive to local needs, cheap to start, and actively train the future workforce with a pipeline of apprentices and journeymen. Work ethic, then, would be the meritocratic vehicle by which the workers claimed their place in the new economy. Free trade would be synonymous with the individual’s right to enterprise, resulting in the “liberal reward” of a flush middle class, the rising tide that raised all ships. But importantly, this wasn’t only an economic calculus. Anderson’s artisans would be drawn to higher-skilled work not just for the financial benefits but because of its subjective quality—the jobs were better. Instead of being written off as “an inferior class of people consigned to drudgery,” laborers could own their land, their businesses, their time and their futures. Economic betterment came hand in hand with quality of life, and not at the expense of the rest of the working class.
In Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back (2023), Anderson develops a name for this: the “progressive work ethic.” Such creative, productive work would feel good and—by doing business independent from aristocratic landlords and monopolistic guilds—be a vehicle for wealth redistribution. In a way, it’s Baker’s notion of entrepreneurialism recast in a positive register. Instead of hustling as corporate folly—for a promotion to some middle-management role, job security, and the chance to boss around employees of your own—these proto-entrepreneurs were able to reorder the economy, and their own lives, from the bottom up.
The problem, Anderson argues, was that this system crumbled as industrialization, financial systems and international trade scaled up. When machines did the work and workers managed the machine, there was little room for human pride in the product of their labor. Craftsmanship was de-emphasized in favor of sheer industrial volume and efficiency. At the same time, the meritocratic apprenticeship system was replaced by siloed labor and management tracks. In the manufacturing sector, “employers no longer did the same kind of work as employees, if they worked at all. Mental labor was separated from manual labor, which was radically deskilled.” The discourse around work shifted away from celebrating self-determination and toward having to justify why your boss was paying you at all.
But even as she traces the emergence of the “conservative work ethic” that results from this shift (and shows up so prominently in the books by millennial leftists), Anderson takes care to trace the persistence of its progressive counterpart, from the writings of Thomas Paine and Karl Marx to the platforms of twentieth-century social democrats and, she hopes, the populist progressive movements of tomorrow. One of my favorite aspects of Anderson’s approach is how she situates her own career within the critique she is making—acknowledging that, whatever her books say about the work ethic as ideology, her own work ethic remains central to her identity. “I must admit a deep irony,” she writes in the introduction to Hijacked:
I do not only work to live, but live to work. I confess that these dispositions impel me to a poor work/life balance. But they have also rewarded me with meaningful, interesting work, immense autonomy, and honored achievements as well as financial security. Yet I aim to criticize the work ethic for what it has become: an ideological rationalization for the stigmatization and deprivation of the poor, the precarity of the working classes, and the dominion of capital interests over all other interests of humanity.
Is Anderson a hypocrite for trying to exist simultaneously as a left critic and someone who takes pride in her academic work, approaching it with intentionality and rigor? Does the reward she’s earned for that work—a successful career as a philosopher, but at obvious personal cost—undermine her commitment to the left’s cause? Is the ownership she feels over her career a delusion, masking that she’s really an unwilling tool of the system? This is the sort of thinking pattern that, in a vacuum, the bullshit-jobs left and their books were leading me into. But envisioning the workplace only as somewhere you (begrudgingly) have to go undermines a truth that many on the left live every day—that many jobs are, despite the bullshit, worthwhile. The academic putting in late nights on her monograph, just like the legal-aid attorney digging a little deeper to flesh out a client’s unique defense, isn’t an unabashed careerist. But neither is she a sucker, unaware of how her labor is being taken advantage of. Rather, she’s something unglamorously in-between: a worker doing the best she can to not lose track of the positive potential—personally and collectively—in something as mundane as earning a wage.
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In hindsight, the Bernie-coded millennial thinkers I was reading emerged from a distinctive historical moment—Occupy and the Iraq War and Google paying teenagers $200k to code while perched on an exercise ball. From the perspective of Gen Z, that moment has passed. It’s difficult to imagine those in my generational cohort (high school during Soundcloud rap, college during COVID) wholeheartedly embracing Harris’s relentless critiques of higher ed or Baker’s innate distrust of entrepreneurialism. Today, their point of view seems almost anachronistic. Things are different now, more dire. Entry-level jobs are drying up. Everything is more expensive, even while online—forced down our throats by bad actors and black-box algorithms—wealth culture rules. Side hustles and get-rich-quick schemes are everywhere. Nihilism is the mood.
And so, for today’s 23-year-old college grad, Anderson’s notion of the progressive work ethic might just be more compellingly “countercultural” than yet another broadside against the absurdity of having a job under capitalism. Her ideas channel the structural frustration of the bullshit-jobs left while holding on to the notion that work can be more than a scam or a chore. It grants permission to groan about bad, unfulfilling work without conceding that all work is always bad.
My own work at the legal nonprofit didn’t last much longer. I stayed for just under a year before accepting a new position, working on grants for the local government. The new job would be less public-service-oriented than the first, though still (if more abstractly) for a good cause. After everything, my reasons for leaving were the usual: better pay, better benefits, a better title; more work, more responsibility, more room to grow. There’s nothing bullshit about that.
Art credit: Eda Gecikmez, Transformation, 2014. Oil on canvas. 160 × 130 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galeri Nev.
Two summers ago, I started my first full-time job. This came after a series of internships with no return offers, an unfunded master’s degree, haphazard attempts at freelance writing, a self-studied LSAT, and long shifts behind the counter at bakeries and bars. The job I ultimately accepted—at a legal nonprofit in the city where I grew up—wasn’t particularly prestigious or high paying, but it was at a good organization, and at least obliquely aligned with my politics and long-term career interests. More importantly, it represented stability. An end to my meandering adolescence. A paycheck that was more than sufficient to cover rent.
My days fell into a pattern—phone calls caveated with “I’m not an attorney, but…” and learning to navigate ancient grant-reporting software; cold emails to pro bonos and waiting around for prospective clients to return paperwork needed for grant compliance, much of which was never returned. There was a lot of downtime. Those early months were a crash course in the roundabout bureaucracy of the nonprofit world. The funding for my position was cobbled together from multiple sources: both state and federal grant money, plus a small number of private donations for administrative, office-specific tasks. They’d told me this during the interview process, but I didn’t really understand then what it would mean for me day-to-day. I learned fast. The work I did each week was, at least in theory, already accounted for. Half my hours for one department, half my hours for another. We tracked this time in six-minute increments, “billing” blocks to clients (though all the actual legal work was pro bono) or else to the confusingly titled “Other Service” or “Supporting Activity” designations. Each case note had to be labeled with the funding stream the work fell under, denoted by selecting from a dropdown menu of hundreds of grants, plus a half dozen confusing acronyms (PAI, CSR, LSC, IOLA), each with their own “yes/no” to toggle.
This meant that, even as I began to feel comfortable with the rhythm of my work, each week, without fail, my timekeeping would be incorrect. Not even close to the fifty-fifty split between departments it was supposed to be. On paper, my responsibilities seemed significant and service-oriented: walking clients through procedural questions about their credit-card debts and bankruptcies, referring them to volunteer attorneys if needed, and reporting anonymized client demographics back to the state. In practice, though, I was spending a steadily growing portion of each day accounting for the time I was logging under each grant, then finding busy work to do for the department with less work so that my timekeeping would appear more correct. It’s a catch-22 that’s likely familiar to many government and nonprofit employees—should I do the work I was hired to do, at risk of getting penalized by our funders? Or, if only because of then-candidate Trump’s promise to target 501(c)(3)s with less-than-perfect books, should I slow my roll and hand in a perfectly allocated time card?
I spent my breaks in the city park across from my office, eating lunch on the wrought-iron benches dedicated to old machine politicians, people-watching. Pedestrians would trickle down the crunchy gravel path in front of me—young migrant families pushing strollers, old drunks on e-bikes, state workers talking loudly into their AirPods. It had only been a few months since I’d started, and yet I already felt alienated from the work I was, supposedly, doing. Here I was, out in the community my office served, surrounded by people whose lives would go on with or without me.
Feeling understimulated and vaguely guilty, I began to tear through books at a pace that wouldn’t have been imaginable during college. Both fiction and nonfiction suddenly engrossed me in a way that they hadn’t since I was a child, portals to a world (or worldview) wider than my own. These writers—or, at least, the versions of themselves that came across on the page—had a sense of direction; their anxieties had stakes. No one in the novels ever fretted over kind-of-falsified timekeeping entries, and journalists and critics had more pressing concerns than feeling cooped up in a windowless office. I envied the clarity, the sense of mission, these writers possessed. I wished I was allowed to work hard.
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I’m hardly the first person to feel anxious about spending my day doing seemingly arbitrary tasks. So much ink has been spilled on workplace angst that it’s become something of a cottage industry, from the countless pop psychologists hawking ways to Win Friends and Influence People to the nearly equal number of critics of such self-help gurus among thinkers and academics on the left. Even David Graeber, the north star of political intellectuals for so many of my peers, jumped into the fray. Expanded from a viral essay, his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs collects interviews with hundreds of people who describe what they do as pointless. From these conversations, Graeber realized that the few jobs today that are tangibly useful—say, social workers and science teachers—pay far less than the mass of uninspiring administrative and middle-management roles that prop them up. As a result, many opt for the paycheck, even if that means resigning oneself to working a job that doesn’t really need to be done. “This is a profound psychological violence here,” concluded Graeber: “if someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it’s hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder … are basically paid to do nothing.”
In recent years, several prominent young thinkers on the left have echoed and amplified this sentiment, and so I turned to their books too, searching for a solution to my dissatisfaction. Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials (2017) explores how the neoliberal emphasis on optimizing “human capital” has created a workforce of young people obsessed with min-maxing their ability to perform arbitrary tasks. According to Harris, his generation is not, as is popularly supposed, lazy and entitled, but the opposite: his early-career millennials stared down the same largely inconsequential pencil-pushing jobs that Graeber’s interviewees did, and yet in the interest of standing out enough to advance their careers, they threw themselves into the work to absurd (and largely unsustainable) degrees. The idea of making oneself indispensable also features prominently in the historian Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America (2025). The book traces the changing conception of work ethic over three centuries of the U.S. economy, from yeoman farmers to New Thought preachers to the countercultural (but just as capitalist) strand of no-longer-upstart companies like Apple and Erewhon. In Baker’s account, the nineteenth century was a long transition between the early-modern notion of industriousness—which “downplays the salience of the quality of work being done, instead assigning most importance to the simple fact that a person is working hard, and thus insulated from the moral danger of parasitism”—and the entrepreneurialism that would come to define the 1900s. Baker defines the entrepreneurial mindset as a semi-delusional, employer-endorsed coping mechanism for the working class in the aftermath of industrialization, as the nation began to shift away from blue-collar work altogether.
Of all these accounts, the one that most stuck with me was Leigh Claire La Berge’s Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke (2025). While La Berge is a literature professor by trade, and shares Baker’s eye for political economy, her book is refreshingly personal rather than academic—a memoir of her stint in corporate America, working on a management-consulting firm’s Y2K-preparedness team. La Berge takes special care to sketch out the absurd personalities of her coworkers as well as their inexplicable assignments: “Instead of fixing things with the hope that they would function tomorrow … we would document anti-Y2K efforts that the Conglomerate had already undertaken. … Instead of promising things to come, we would certify that things that had already transpired had been appropriately recorded.” But La Berge’s writerly curiosity about the corporate world she crash-landed into eventually curdles into resentment for how its circular logic trumped what the work itself was worth. “At a certain point,” she writes, “The Process meant not questioning The Process, and I had trouble locating exactly where that point was located.” Fake Work ends with the calendar flipping to 2000 with little fanfare and La Berge fleeing as far from the world of late-nineties corporate excess as possible: a (not particularly cushy) career in academia.
The through line of these books is clear—between hustle culture, the gig economy, AI-proselytizing fraudsters and the deregulation-obsessed neoliberals eager to bankroll them, there’s a lot of bullshit in the contemporary American workplace. And yet besides the few remaining infographic warriors who think the point of democratic socialism should be to abolish work altogether, there’s an unspoken defeatist consensus about what options workers have: you can fight to organize your labor, or else give in to the system. Either way the workday is something to endure, a means to an end, not worth emotionally investing in.
Conceptually, I agree that labor organization and social spending are the path forward, that we should be striving for more equitable ways to allocate our money and our time. In that respect, Harris’s and Baker’s analyses are an essential corrective to the stench of DOGE-y bullshit in the air, as conservatives attempt to dismantle the civil service, financialize health care and turn higher ed into luxury real estate. Still, I’m frustrated by how these left thinkers seem implicitly to dismiss the possibility of fulfilling work altogether—at least until after we’ve gotten rid of capitalism. For those workers not already involved in politics, or for young people who are sympathetic to the cause while simultaneously trying to get a foothold in their economic lives, they offer little guidance about how to approach the bulk of the day, from nine to five. Because even if you spend your evenings trying to change the world, what do you tell yourself to make it through your shift?
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At some level, almost everybody wants a good job, one stimulating and rewarding enough to be worth organizing their identity around. The work could, even should, be difficult, though ultimately worthwhile. It would be free, ideally, of the administrative and political baggage that wears even the most driven people down. The goal is to have the sort of career where—if you’ll pardon my boomerism—you love what you do so much that it hardly feels like work at all.
But should such jobs be considered a right? A privilege? Or is this vision of work a total fantasy? Am I nostalgic for a Norman Rockwell world that never actually existed, buying into the narrative pushed by management consultants and CEOs: that lack of fulfillment in one’s career is simply a matter of not working hard enough?
Take the kind of mission-driven work I was doing at the legal-aid nonprofit, or of Graeber’s social workers and science teachers. It’s difficult to reconcile the existence of these jobs—and why people are still drawn to them—with the ideology of the thinkers who I’ve come to think of as the “bullshit-jobs left.” Some of them, like Graeber and La Berge, would likely sympathize with the glut of administrative nonsense such workers have to deal with, getting in the way of the impactful parts of the job they actually enjoy. The more cynical take (as might be argued by Harris) is that the people who take these jobs are suckers, bleeding-heart middle-class kids trying to do the right thing but whose participation in a flawed system—underfunded public schools, understaffed hospitals, nonprofits plugging holes that should be provided by government services—is futile, ultimately undermining the left’s bigger-picture cause.
And yet in my experience, things were rarely so simple. The attorneys I worked with didn’t fit the stereotype of the typical pro bono lawyer or public defender: overworked, chronically disheveled do-gooders who show up late to client meetings in a coffee-stained tie, unable to give any one case the time it deserves. In fact, my colleagues were anything but beaten down; they were optimistic but far from naïve. All were well versed in the broader context of the work we did, more than familiar with the never-ending uphill battle against the opioid and housing crises, and with the fact that for most clients, legal assistance was but a Band-Aid for something bigger. Some were not much older than me, grad school-radicalized recent alums of Syracuse and SUNY Buffalo. Others were retirees, or close to it, having left long careers in corporate law and state agencies, driven by a desire to give back. And while burnout and turnover were major problems, there were mid-career lawyers at every level between them, legal-aid lifers, all of whom recognized that they could be making twice as much money pretty much anywhere else but who chose to stay anyway.
Our attorneys worked in foreclosure prevention, hosted pop-up tax clinics, did benefits counseling and provided advice for both the most routine and dire divorces. They directly represented as many clients as they had the bandwidth for, then offered written and over-the-phone advice to the rest. The department I worked with the most was the housing team, by far the office’s largest, which since the pandemic had been in a state of perpetual backlog. Their work was grueling, both repetitive and emotionally draining. The housing attorneys would hear variations of the same story dozens of times a day, frequently by clients who had multiple cases open with our organization, either repeat eviction attempts or compounding consumer debt and family issues. There was so much demand for even the smallest amount of help that some weeks the intake staff would have to turn away a dozen prospective clients for each one they accepted, advising the others to call first thing on Monday, when the phones reopened. Even when the process worked—clients were advised and then represented in court, resulting in eviction proceedings being delayed, settled or dismissed—the atmosphere was far from victorious. There were literally hundreds more clients waiting.
Still, it was work. The attorneys clocked in, researched as much as they could, won some cases, lost others, then got ready for tomorrow. They grew frustrated with their bosses for good and bad reasons alike. They wished for less administrative responsibility so they could spend more time with clients, while understanding that demographic reporting and grant compliance were the reason their positions existed at all. They recognized they were underpaid, overworked and operating at the conflux of a swirl of compounding policy, labor and legal realities; that they were plugging holes rather than stopping the leak. But even if, politically speaking, they were thinking bigger, they honed that energy into the job at hand. The way they approached their work made me look at my own job—less skilled, more tedious, but part of the process nonetheless—differently. It didn’t magically make me feel fulfilled. But it helped me situate the monotony of my own workday within something bigger.
In contrast, the more didactic wing of the bullshit-jobs left seems to imply that even acknowledging the validity of the noneconomic reasons people want certain jobs—ambition, pride, genuine desire to do good—would risk ceding too much to the right’s “put your head down and work” mentality. Yet in this single-minded focus on contracts, hours and benefits, their analysis can become structural to the point of being stifling. When the thinkers of the bullshit-jobs left do grapple with questions of workplace discontent, they do so in a roundabout way, focusing on the absurd or the arbitrary. They paint the whole white-collar economy as a shared delusion we all buy into for the sake of keeping our schedules full and the economy running. Tellingly, I used the very same rhetorical trick in the opening of this essay. But writing off the average American worker as either a naïve dupe or an embattled burnout is reductive, an easy intellectual out. It skirts the messier question: Even if the contemporary economy is inherently exploitative, does the left have anything constructive to say about finding meaningful work within it anyway?
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One thinker who speaks to this question is the political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson. Though Anderson views today’s deeply unequal working world in much the same way as the bullshit-jobs left, she’s less dismissive of the persistence of the work ethic as a progressive value. Contemporary criticism of work ethic, she argues, is really a criticism of how the conversation has been co-opted by the right. But pride in one’s work—emotional and economic ownership—doesn’t have to be a vehicle of inequality.
In the lectures that became her 2017 book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It), Anderson argues that when classical liberals like John Locke called for free markets, they meant freedom in the early-modern, egalitarian sense. A Lockean market economy dominated by yeoman farmers and enterprising artisans would be more equitable than the feudal system of idle rich landlords that prevailed before. Their business would be small, responsive to local needs, cheap to start, and actively train the future workforce with a pipeline of apprentices and journeymen. Work ethic, then, would be the meritocratic vehicle by which the workers claimed their place in the new economy. Free trade would be synonymous with the individual’s right to enterprise, resulting in the “liberal reward” of a flush middle class, the rising tide that raised all ships. But importantly, this wasn’t only an economic calculus. Anderson’s artisans would be drawn to higher-skilled work not just for the financial benefits but because of its subjective quality—the jobs were better. Instead of being written off as “an inferior class of people consigned to drudgery,” laborers could own their land, their businesses, their time and their futures. Economic betterment came hand in hand with quality of life, and not at the expense of the rest of the working class.
In Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back (2023), Anderson develops a name for this: the “progressive work ethic.” Such creative, productive work would feel good and—by doing business independent from aristocratic landlords and monopolistic guilds—be a vehicle for wealth redistribution. In a way, it’s Baker’s notion of entrepreneurialism recast in a positive register. Instead of hustling as corporate folly—for a promotion to some middle-management role, job security, and the chance to boss around employees of your own—these proto-entrepreneurs were able to reorder the economy, and their own lives, from the bottom up.
The problem, Anderson argues, was that this system crumbled as industrialization, financial systems and international trade scaled up. When machines did the work and workers managed the machine, there was little room for human pride in the product of their labor. Craftsmanship was de-emphasized in favor of sheer industrial volume and efficiency. At the same time, the meritocratic apprenticeship system was replaced by siloed labor and management tracks. In the manufacturing sector, “employers no longer did the same kind of work as employees, if they worked at all. Mental labor was separated from manual labor, which was radically deskilled.” The discourse around work shifted away from celebrating self-determination and toward having to justify why your boss was paying you at all.
But even as she traces the emergence of the “conservative work ethic” that results from this shift (and shows up so prominently in the books by millennial leftists), Anderson takes care to trace the persistence of its progressive counterpart, from the writings of Thomas Paine and Karl Marx to the platforms of twentieth-century social democrats and, she hopes, the populist progressive movements of tomorrow. One of my favorite aspects of Anderson’s approach is how she situates her own career within the critique she is making—acknowledging that, whatever her books say about the work ethic as ideology, her own work ethic remains central to her identity. “I must admit a deep irony,” she writes in the introduction to Hijacked:
Is Anderson a hypocrite for trying to exist simultaneously as a left critic and someone who takes pride in her academic work, approaching it with intentionality and rigor? Does the reward she’s earned for that work—a successful career as a philosopher, but at obvious personal cost—undermine her commitment to the left’s cause? Is the ownership she feels over her career a delusion, masking that she’s really an unwilling tool of the system? This is the sort of thinking pattern that, in a vacuum, the bullshit-jobs left and their books were leading me into. But envisioning the workplace only as somewhere you (begrudgingly) have to go undermines a truth that many on the left live every day—that many jobs are, despite the bullshit, worthwhile. The academic putting in late nights on her monograph, just like the legal-aid attorney digging a little deeper to flesh out a client’s unique defense, isn’t an unabashed careerist. But neither is she a sucker, unaware of how her labor is being taken advantage of. Rather, she’s something unglamorously in-between: a worker doing the best she can to not lose track of the positive potential—personally and collectively—in something as mundane as earning a wage.
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In hindsight, the Bernie-coded millennial thinkers I was reading emerged from a distinctive historical moment—Occupy and the Iraq War and Google paying teenagers $200k to code while perched on an exercise ball. From the perspective of Gen Z, that moment has passed. It’s difficult to imagine those in my generational cohort (high school during Soundcloud rap, college during COVID) wholeheartedly embracing Harris’s relentless critiques of higher ed or Baker’s innate distrust of entrepreneurialism. Today, their point of view seems almost anachronistic. Things are different now, more dire. Entry-level jobs are drying up. Everything is more expensive, even while online—forced down our throats by bad actors and black-box algorithms—wealth culture rules. Side hustles and get-rich-quick schemes are everywhere. Nihilism is the mood.
And so, for today’s 23-year-old college grad, Anderson’s notion of the progressive work ethic might just be more compellingly “countercultural” than yet another broadside against the absurdity of having a job under capitalism. Her ideas channel the structural frustration of the bullshit-jobs left while holding on to the notion that work can be more than a scam or a chore. It grants permission to groan about bad, unfulfilling work without conceding that all work is always bad.
My own work at the legal nonprofit didn’t last much longer. I stayed for just under a year before accepting a new position, working on grants for the local government. The new job would be less public-service-oriented than the first, though still (if more abstractly) for a good cause. After everything, my reasons for leaving were the usual: better pay, better benefits, a better title; more work, more responsibility, more room to grow. There’s nothing bullshit about that.
Art credit: Eda Gecikmez, Transformation, 2014. Oil on canvas. 160 × 130 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galeri Nev.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.