Are 'Lazy Girl Jobs' A Good Thing Or A Cry For Help?
In 2018, a pivotal book was released called Bullshit Jobs. At the time, the book was all the rage as it earnestly called out that most of the jobs that we do are, to be frank, bullshit. A bullshit job is easy to spot but harder to define. They tend to be repetitive jobs that are not really serving anyone—not even the company itself. They tend to revolve around tedious tasks such as pushing paper, answering emails, and attending meeting after meeting. What makes them bullshit is the fact that they tend to have no inherent meaning or seem to exist for arbitrary reasons. Many people working the jobs feel stifled and listless. They tend to have a high quit rate, even if they are easy to do. They encompass a lot of work that is done in the office today, and it is estimated that a good chunk of Americans work some type of bullshit job in corporate America today.
The thing about bullshit jobs is that tedium is the point. These jobs can help office work run smoothly, but oftentimes they do not and make things less efficient or productive. In most cases, they are not by any means necessary and are meant to be so people can either be employed or be doing ‘busy work’. In fact, many companies have been caught in a practice of over-hiring for just the sake of saying that they are hiring or have this many people working at their company. Some companies got caught red-handed for engaging in talent hoarding where they over-hired new employees and then gave them minimal workload to do on the day-to-day. That led to frustration and annoyance among workers and anger among more senior employees. The move ended up causing even more confusion when mass layoffs during the early part of the year.
Bullshit jobs, overall, are an interesting concept because they are not something that is accessible to all. In most cases, for someone to have access to a bullshit job, they would have to have a high modicum of privilege to begin with. Most bullshit jobs are congregated in the white collar sector. These are jobs where one would have to have some type of college degree, connections, or work experience to get access to these jobs. These white-collar jobs are typically low-effort, light-work jobs as they exist to help others or move things along. They are jobs such as admin, customer support, low-level marketing, receptionists, printers, scanners, etc - the list can go on and on. As previously mentioned, these jobs tend to have easy and repetitive tasks and tend to be devoid of critical thinking or creativity. They are jobs that you get because you know someone or because you look or act the part. They are jobs that are in places that do not have a lot of clients or work to go around and one is there to keep things moving along- not to come up with creative examples or challenge the powers who be. To be frank, they are basically capitalism's answer to universal basic income (but only for the well-connected and well-to-do).
While on the surface, this might all sound like a good deal, bullshit jobs can actually be double-edged sword. Bullshit jobs simultaneously serve a purpose and serve no purpose. They help prop up the economy, but can be a leading cause of worker dissatisfaction because people want to do meaningful work but do not know how to find it. And it does not mean every day at a bullshit job will be easy. Some days are hard, chaotic, and over-scheduled, but there is a sense of coasting that comes along with it, and the people working in these jobs are basically employees on retainer.
Earlier this year, many tech influencers took to TikTok to show off their corporate jobs with all their perks and their daily tasks and duties. The picture that these content creators painted was that each and every day was filled with only light admin, email work, and some phone work. Of course, for privacy reasons, they probably could not show the more intensive deep work or strategic calls, but many viewers took the day at face value, and not everyone was happy. Some viewers went as far as to call the tech industry an ‘adult daycare’- which was pretty offensive. However, the subtext is that these companies are just play pretend and the adults working there are not actually doing work or doing anything substantial until they go home.
Of course, that is offensive both to the industry and the workers, but these statements allude to the fact that many people are not only envious of workers who do soft labor, but we also have no clue what they do all day especially as we can’t physically see their impact on society as much as we can as a person who does hard labor like construction work, teaching, nursing etc. Though what tends to be missing from the soft vs hard skills conversation is that the reason many tech workers get those perks is to be chained to their desk and office for the majority of the week and that they don’t often get time outside of the office to just enjoy themselves without having to be proverbially 'on-call'.
We have to ask ourselves: Is this really the future we want to live in, and if not, then how do we change it?
To make matters even more interesting, there is a real fear of artificial intelligence (AI) taking over people’s jobs. AI is expected to overtake three hundred million jobs in the next decade or so, and it is not clear if it will create jobs to fill the void. That would be a lot of unemployed people, and without regulation, it could potentially capsize the economy. But there is also a very significant skills gap, and many industries do need workers, but not many people either want to work in them or have the skillset to thrive in them.
Take healthcare, for example. There is a shortage of doctors and nurses, and it is growing. Some studies predict that there will be a hundreds of thousands doctors needed over the upcoming years and, additionally, over thousands of home health aides. With an aging population and an increasing life expectancy rate, that number is almost sure to increase. And while sectors like healthcare are not easily automated—though some might beg to differ—there is also an ‘interest gap’. Not everyone can go to medical or nursing school. Plus there are caps and limits to how much a medical school and a residency program to take on. And many people do not want to be doctors and nurses. The most common job that teens cite to be when growing up is not in healthcare; in fact it’s being an influencer.
With a new generation entering the workforce, we went from being confused about bullshit jobs to having these jobs be romanticized. People don’t abhor them nowadays; instead, they covet them. Both younger millennials and Gen Z understand that we have to work to live and that the promise of universal basic income won’t come soon. They also know that labor-demanding jobs are not for the faint of heart-no matter how modern tech has become. We all need to earn money to survive, and young people are finally doing what they have been always advised to do. Get a job that is doable and has a decent salary. And to be honest, people have been doing this for decades. The main reason why people, in the past, were able to stay in certain jobs for so long was because the tasks were reasonable, their boss was decent, and there was some sense of camaraderie or community in the office. People in the old days did not job hop as much because there was not as much incentive to. Plus stability mattered more than anything, especially when you had multiple mouths to feed.
But some of the honest truth is that after a decade of job-hopping and pursuing passion, many millennials and others are starting to be able to admit that the sentiments of the past decade did not work out the way we all had hoped. The people who pursue their artistic passions are on strike. People who decided to teach and inspire got burned out. And people who wanted to climb the ladder and be bosses are turning away from it all because of the intensity of work and the general lack of fulfillment/support.
Ergo- the lazy girl job. The lazy girl job was coined by content creator, Gabrielle Judge. The term is slightly endearing, but it means people who are working easy going jobs and being paid to do so. The purpose of the term is actually to promote work-life balance, but the terminology has brought about lots of viral discussion. Some say working jobs like this is essential to our health. Others say it’s just another term for slacking off. Still, the rebranding of bullshit jobs to lazy girl jobs signifies yet another change in our times.
As a cohort, young people are not just burned out; they are burned to a crisp. They are tired of everything in both the micro and macro worlds while simultaneously being frustrated by a world that is continuously failing. They no longer believe in the passion to sustain and don’t want to be tasked with saving the world. While some are turning to cooperative solidarity and strike efforts. Others are checking out entirely. They are using lazy girl jobs or bullshit jobs as a way to say, “Fine, you win, but I’m not over-stretching myself thin for capitalism.” They are using it as a way to escape the hustle culture. They are using it as a way to take a break from constantly having to do and perform, be entrepreneurs, side hustlers, or the like. They are using it as a way to subtly rebel against capitalism by tacitly accepting that capitalism is a part of life, for better or for worse.
However, the truth of the matter is that lazy girl jobs or bullshit jobs won’t save us. They can’t. They aren’t designed to. They are designed to keep us complicit and working. They are designed to take up our time, so we don’t have much time elsewhere to focus on other things. And for many people, that in itself is the goal and the dream. But for many others, they get frustrated by the idea of having to clock in and out each day, even if the job is remote, laidback, or easy. There have always been people who need more, even if it is not the typical norm in society. It is easy to say, Why can’t they just be grateful? But for those who are upset by lazy girl jobs or the notion of lazy girl jobs, they are the ones that are actively searching for more or upset that they had to play the game without an option of a having a more worker-friendly job.
If there is any truth to life, it is that we are trading our time for money, and while we can always get back money, it is hard to get back time. Work makes up a third of our lives, and for some, they can’t stomach doing nothing for hours on end, even if they get a consistent paycheck. But the bigger question is: why have we accepted a life where jobs are divorced from meaning, and can we do anything to change it?
Another question we have to ask ourselves is: why have we accepted ‘lazy’ jobs in the first place? Why are we not incorporating meaning into our work?
The modern workforce as we know it has its roots in the 1950s. In the 1950s, office standards and practices began to normalize, and we started to see the roots of women working in the modern workplace in earnest, albeit with a very select few. You have people like Katherine Johnson, who worked for NASA. Women took jobs like secretary, telephone operator, and primary school teacher as a way to keep busy and to earn some extra funds for their families. Some of these jobs were relatively easy to do, but they were also highly administrative and detail-oriented. In the 1980s, more careers opened up to women, and the way we currently think of working women was born. Movies like ‘Working Girl’ popularized the modern working woman and their impact on society.
With shifts in technology, the way we work has become even more modernized. Work that required a huge amount of brainpower was automated or outsourced. Jobs that required more brainpower got higher pay, but though most jobs disappeared, many got refashioned as you still needed a person to work the machine. And often times, it was a woman who did that and taught others how to do the same. Today, many jobs are automated and will continue to be so. You don’t need that much brainpower for jobs that mainly require using the computer, depending on what sector or field you are in. You can spend days watching TV or listening to podcasts while doing work. And on some level, there should not be any shame in doing the bare minimum, as rest is still elusive in the modern workforce. But we should question why we should settle for purposeless jobs and jobs to which we don’t contribute meaningfully.
Some will say it doesn’t matter what you do at work and that you should find meaning outside of it by being with family, friends, and others. This is the crowd you would call the work to live crowd. They do not attach anything to work because they understand that work's purpose in itself is to do a task and gain a reward, i.e., money to live life. But there are many people who also understand that forty hours a week is a lot of time to dedicate to something you don’t feel attached to or have meaning for. They understand that once that time is used up, there is no getting it back and that it could have gone elsewhere. They understand that if you blink, you see a whole year gone by, and you ask yourself, What have you really done? Was it all worth it? They understand how much an hour, a minute, or a second is worth.
There is no right or wrong answer to this question, and it is better to have a bullshit job than no job, especially in a topsy-turvy economy where layoffs are happening in droves one minute and the jobs report is called ‘outstanding’ the next. And there are good meaningful jobs out there to tap into. What also gives me hope is that there is some cool work to be done in many different areas, especially around sustainability, renewables, longevity, healthcare, and more. And we can train the next generation and the generation after to go into these areas and fields of work and make a greater impact in the work.
Ultimately, it’s okay if you work a job where you come in clock out and do it all over again. It’s also okay if you want more than that. None of us truly knows what the future of work holds, and we can only take a guess at what the future of work will look like. What we all need is to be honest with ourselves and each other. Work is not everything, but it will always be a substantial part of our life whether we like it or not.