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A Taxonomy of the Absurd 6:25 Nia: Okay, let's get into these five categories. I want to see if I can spot any "bullshit" in my own life. What’s the first one?
6:33 Eli: First up, we have the Flunkies . These are people whose jobs exist only—or primarily—to make someone else look or feel important.
6:41 Nia: Like a medieval lord with a bunch of attendants just standing around?
0:55 Eli: Exactly! In the modern world, this might be a receptionist at a company that gets maybe one phone call a day. The company doesn't actually *need* a receptionist to handle the volume, but they need one so they look like a "real" company to visitors. If you don't have a person sitting at a desk in the lobby, are you even a corporation?
7:03 Nia: It’s all about the optics. "Look at me, I have a person whose entire job is to say hello to you."
7:09 Eli: Right. Then you have the Goons . This is a bit of a spicy category. Goons are people whose jobs have an aggressive element, but they only exist because *other* people hire goons.
7:20 Nia: Give me an example. Are we talking like, literal hired muscle?
7:24 Eli: Think more like corporate lawyers, lobbyists, PR specialists, or telemarketers. Graeber’s point is that if nobody else had a lobbyist, you wouldn't need one. But because your competitor has a lobbyist to influence the government, now you *have* to have one just to cancel them out. It’s a total arms race of uselessness.
7:42 Nia: That makes so much sense. It’s like two people shouting at each other through megaphones. If they both put the megaphones down, they could just talk, but neither wants to be the first to drop the equipment.
7:53 Eli: Spot on. Next, we have the Duct Tapers . These are people hired to fix a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.
8:01 Nia: Oh, I feel like this is half of the IT world.
8:03 Eli: It really is! It’s the "bucket under the leak" approach. Instead of fixing the roof—the actual underlying system—the company just hires someone whose full-time job is to empty the bucket every hour. It’s like a programmer who spends all their time patching shoddy code that should have been rewritten years ago, but the management won't invest in a real fix.
8:22 Nia: So they’re basically human patches for a broken system. That sounds incredibly frustrating because you know you’re not actually solving anything; you’re just maintaining the failure.
8:34 Eli: It’s soul-crushing. Category four is the Box Tickers . These are the employees who exist solely to allow an organization to *claim* it is doing something that it’s not actually doing.
8:47 Nia: Like those "fact-finding commissions" governments always set up when they’re in trouble?
3:41 Eli: Precisely. Or corporate compliance officers who spend all year writing reports that nobody ever reads, just so the company can say, "Look, we have a 500-page sustainability report!" Even if they’re doing the exact opposite in reality. The report itself is the "product," not the actual sustainability.
9:09 Nia: It’s "reality on paper." If it’s in a PowerPoint with a nice gradient, it must be true.
3:13 Eli: Exactly. And the final category is the Taskmasters . These come in two types. Type one is the manager who just assigns work to people who don't need supervision. If the team can do the job without you, and your only job is to "manage" them, your job is bullshit.
9:32 Nia: And type two?
9:33 Eli: Type two is the "bullshit generator." These are the managers whose actual job is to create *new* bullshit tasks for other people to do. They’re the ones who come up with new forms, new "quantifiable metrics," and new meetings to discuss the meetings. They’re actively making everyone else’s job more "bullshit."
9:51 Nia: They’re the ones who turn a "real" job into a "bullshitized" one. Like a teacher who loves teaching but has to spend sixty percent of their time filling out "performance assessment" forms for a Taskmaster.
10:03 Eli: You nailed it. And when you add all these up—the flunkies, the goons, the duct tapers, the box tickers, and the taskmasters—Graeber suggests we’re looking at more than half of all labor in the economy.
10:16 Nia: That is a terrifying thought. It’s like we’re all part of this massive, intricate dance where nobody actually knows the steps and the music isn't even playing, but we’re all too scared to stop moving.
10:28 Eli: And it raises the biggest question of all: if these jobs are so great—nice offices, good pay, no real work—why aren't we happy? Why does this "spiritual violence" lead to so much misery?