#012 - Attention Span: 8 Seconds. Bullshit Job: 8 Hours.
A "bullshit job" isn't a shit job.
A shit job is necessary. A garbage collector or a hospital cleaner does vital, but challenging work.
A "bullshit job," as defined by the late anthropologist David Graeber, is a role that the person doing it secretly believes is pointless. If the job were to disappear tomorrow, it would make no noticeable difference to the world.
Five juicy, intriguing categories of bullshit jobs:
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Flunkies: Jobs that exist only to make someone else look important (e.g., receptionists at firms with no visitors).
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Goons: Jobs with an aggressive element that only exist because other companies have them (e.g., corporate lawyers, telemarketers, lobbyists).
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Duct Tapers: People who exist only to fix problems that shouldn't exist in the first place (e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline staff calming passengers whose luggage is always lost).
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Box Tickers: Employees who exist so an organization can claim it's doing something it isn't (e.g., the corporate social responsibility committee that creates a single poster).
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Task Masters: Managers who exist to manage people who don't need managing, or, their ultimate purpose, "make new bullshit jobs" for others.
The core problem isn't the pointlessness. It's the "profound moral and spiritual damage" it inflicts. To survive an 8-hour day pretending your work matters, you are forced to stop thinking deeply about it.
So, you clock out, spiritually wounded. What do you do?
You seek an anesthetic drug.
Enter the 8-second attention span.
You're not just "relaxing". You're numbing. Research shows humans can't stand being alone with their thoughts doing nothing for too long. Especially if those thoughts, when left to wander, will inevitably land on the meaninglessness of their 8-hour day.
So we plug into the "endless loop of consumption", the trivial or unchallenging content that defines "brain rot." This digital world provides the instant gratification and dopamine we crave to escape the pain.
This is the Vicious Cycle.
The 8-hour "bullshit job" makes us crave the 8-second scroll. And the 8-second scroll shrinks the ability to invest in more restorative intellectual activities, such as deep thinking, reflection, or focused problem-solving.
We are too exhausted from our jobs to engage in deep leisure, and too distracted by our leisure to ever build the cognitive strength to escape our jobs.
How do you break this cycle?
This is the central trap of modern life.
We didn't just stop thinking. We were trained to.
Now, we are plugging Generative AI into this broken system, creating a "Verification Paradox" that could automate this "anti-thinking" machine to its logical, terrifying conclusion.
In my new blog post, "The Age of 'Brain Rot': How We Unlearned to Think," I dissect this Vicious Cycle and explore the analog habits of "genius" minds that hold the key to reclaiming our focus.
👉 https://www.piotrmechlinski.com/blog/the-age-of-brain-rot-how-we-unlearned-to-think
