U.s. Mainstream Media Reports Raving About People Who Can Do It All

Mr. or Ms. so-and-so is working a full-time job plus two part-time jobs. He or she is raising three young children as a single parent. He or she is also working on a degree full-time at the university and also devoting much time to community volunteering plus personally taking care of their aging parents. They're getting enough sleeping, are healthy, and are successfully managing their stress. They are living proof that you really can do it all!

 

Physically Impossible........But It Fills The Paper......



Cheers Glen.

 

Well if that's doing it all I want none of it.

 

https://youtu.be/yqZGFiDa0bM

 

Did anyone tell the interviewees that the Sims dont count?

 

I would paint my car flat black, shut the taillights off and head for Mexico to get away from that much "busy"...ain't nobody got time for that shit.

 

Fuck all that shit

I will never understand why society glorifies working 3 jobs. Yeah its so great when the first job doesnt want to pay their employees a living wage so they have to give up all of their free time and work 80 hours a week at different jobs just to barely scrape out a living. Yay who needs family time or down time or rest and relaxation, lets all just work work work until we drop dead right

 

Fabulous plastic people, healthy in body healthy in mind.

 

You have to work 3 jobs otherwise you are a lazy socialist. You see when you work you can have stuff and the stuff is great. The stuff shows you are not a looser, people will be jealous of your stuff.

This commercial sums it up for me. SO arrogant and dismissive of the idea of taking time off. Some idiot actuly looks at this and says "hell yeah". I don't know they take time off in Europe and they can still buy a BMW or other nice things. I take time off and I got a BMW. No desire to be like this ad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8

 

Click here https://web.archive.org/web/20140603121528/http://www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ or read the ton of paste below.

The website looks much nicer but some people don't click links, the OP is going to LOVE this !!!





Ever had the feeling that your job might be made up? That the world would keep on turning if you werent doing that thing you do 9-5? David Graeber explored the phenomenon of bullshit jobs for our recent summer issue everyone whos employed should read carefully

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.



Why did Keynes’ promised utopia still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.


So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).


But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.


These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organising or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

Once, when contemplating the apparently endless growth of administrative responsibilities in British academic departments, I came up with one possible vision of hell. Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

I think this is actually a pretty accurate description of the moral dynamics of our own economy.
*
Now, I realise any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: “who are you to say what jobs are really ‘necessary’? What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the ‘need’ for that?” (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value.

I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn’t seen since I was 12. I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I’d heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.” Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.

There’s a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

Even more perverse, there seems to be a broad sense that this is the way things should be. This is one of the secret strengths of right-wing populism. You can see it when tabloids whip up resentment against tube workers for paralysing London during contract disputes: the very fact that tube workers can paralyse London shows that their work is actually necessary, but this seems to be precisely what annoys people. It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

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 divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc) and particularly its financial avatars – but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value. Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days.

David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.

 

Well in some European countries when the winter hits and days get cold you can get 4-6 weeks paid winter blues leave might even be more prominent in Scandinavia.

Not for us though as tourism booms in winter months.

There's the meme on FB often enough like "I wasn't just born to work and pay bills" to me is no life, like, I get how some folks gotta work to survive like that and probably pull the 3 jobs and it's not cool.

Seems like we are just born to inevitably have to go to work for some reason.. and that reason isn't to make anything of ourselves it's to line someone else's pocket. Another reason why I think having children for the sake of having children in ill conceived thought. You're basically just having a child so they can work for someonenin the future? I don't know but I don't like the sound of it either.

 

no way a sim could pull off that schedule. it takes those fuckers forever to do anything.

a sim's day:

wake up at 7am
walk to the bathroom 7 to 8:30am
pee 8:30 to 9:15am
walk to the kitchen 9:15 to 10:45am
cook breakfast 10:45 am to 12:30pm
eat 12:30 to 2pm
walk to road 2 to 4pm
get in car and go to work 4pm to 12am
return from work and walk to bathroom 12 to 2:30am
pee 2:30 to 4am
walk to bed 4 to 5:30am
sleep 5:30 to 7am

 

My partner is Sims-obsessed, I can't bear the game personally. Each to their own.

 

i played the original quite a bit when it first came out. i haven't played any since then, so maybe the time issue i referenced has been corrected.

 

I have noticed that a growing subset of my coworkers consider taking no time off a virtue. They are embarrassed if they need a sick day, so they often show up to work racked with illness. With fevers. They never take vacation days, and then criticize their supervisees when they decide to take vacation days. As a supervisor I am extremely lenient with time off requests. I pretty much approve anyone for any day or amount of days they want. Work life balance is important, but I see it disappearing and we are supposed to be smiling about it. It's this weird unspoken cultural expectation.

 

in an infinite universe (or one close enough to it) i am eluded as to what 'it ALL' anything human can expect to be able to do.

like wishing new universes into existence? or painting tall buildings by telekenesis? painting grafitti on the outside of the upper floors of chump tower by levitating?

 

US Mainstream Media has it all the fuck wrong. Has for many years, and now it's out of control, complete with lies.

And stupid America is supposed to believe it. If they read Facebook over here, they'd find we think it sucks and we;re fed up with it.

At least here in Indiana. Other areas of America may (probably are...) buying right into everything they are told. That's who the media is marketed toward now.

 

That commercial was incredibly cheesy. So many people living that Mc Mansion lifestyle are so miserable driving there expensive car in traffic jams every morning and evening day in day out to a job they don't even like.

The Wright Brothers were driven by the dream of flight, not buying a BS Mc Mansion and a fancy car to schlep back and forth with.

Where did the "work ethic" come from ? I think it was born in WWII . Better work hard or you are getting conquered.

I could do the multiple job thing but nothing in the world of materialism is attractive enough to motivate me to do all that extra work to get it.

Working for a good cause is more rewarding and therefore motivating.