The AI post

A sprawling essay about bullshit jobs, bullshit desires, and belonging

In 2018, economist and activist David Graeber coined the term “bullshit jobs,” jobs in modern society that are so pointless, unnecessary, or harmful that even the employee cannot justify its existence. Graeber estimated that 40-50% of jobs were bullshit jobs.¹ Follow-up studies showed that 19% of US workers felt their jobs were “rarely” or “never” useful to society. The difference between that 40%-50% and 19% is what jobs Graeber decided were bullshit and what employees themselves thought about their jobs, so take it for what you will.

But I’ll ask a question:

If we’re already producing far more than we need, aren’t the jobs producing excess bullshit?

Not coincidentally, people working in private sector jobs in business: finance, sales, and management, were more likely to be feel like their jobs were useless. In other words, people making, marketing, and selling things were questioning: does anyone really need this shit, or at least this much of it?

I know the Chicago School of Economics and the market fundamentalists will disagree, but there’s a difference between work that makes a profit, and work that is genuinely useful for society.² The economic history of our last 70 years is finding new desires to fulfill and then digging up and heating the planet to fulfill those previously unknown bullshit desires.

And our culture considers this “success.” We reward people who are better at selling shit better and punish those who aren’t. Then we look up to people who buy more shit and look down on people who don’t.

It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad

Whether the percentage is 19% or 50%, the numbers mean tens of millions of people feel like they are (or actually are) in bullshit jobs. Are YOU in a bullshit job, creating busy work for yourself and others, producing/selling stuff we don’t need, or producing/selling more than we need? Even if your job isn’t bullshit, how much bullshit is there within your job, pushing paper around, responding to endless group emails, attending senseless meetings?

Dilbert, by Scott Adams (2015)

We accept bullshit job because as Americans we use work to justify our existence:

• Our jobs tells us our worthiness in society. It’s an extension of our adolescent desires to belong, to “get the A” and to feel like we’re getting approval from superiors, especially compared to our peers (we only like A’s if other people aren’t getting them. Same with promotions). I know a lot of people who work mostly because of … prestige.

• Our jobs justifies spending. We “deserve” to consume because we “work hard,” unlike those unless others who don’t have jobs so they don’t deserve to spend.

• We’ve been told that jobs are important and we’d lose a sense of meaning and purpose without it. We don’t want to be the lazy people who haven’t earned the right to be counted. (Side effect: so much of our debates around immigration are around whether immigrants are “hard workers” who “deserve” to be here or “leeches” on our social safety net.)

The worst pronoun

Yesterday my friend and Hindu sutras scholar Judith Sugg shared with me her great essay on silence and being:

As a psychologist, I have pondered the meaning of personality and ego. Psychologically, our patterns of thought and behavior, often established very early in life, build on themselves over time. Humans are creatures of habits, predictable and stubborn, and these habits extend to interactions with others and patterns of thought and feeling. Our personality requires energy to maintain and even more to change. Our ego is a defense of who we view ourselves to be in the world, helping us navigate the stresses of life and buffering our self-image.

[Yet] the ego obscures our understanding of our true nature and directs us toward the survival of the body and personality. In the language of yoga, the ego creates avidya: confusion about who we really are. We are deluded and trapped into thinking we are this creature of habits that needs protection, cultivation, and stroking. Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle said it well: “All the misery on the planet arises due to a personalized sense of me or us. That covers up the essence of who you are. When you are unaware of that inner essence, in the end you always create misery. It’s as simple as that.”

A job (“what do you do?”) simply strengthens our confusion and delusion of who we really are. We get trapped into thinking we need to defend the mask, protect it, cultivate it, and stroke it, quite frankly because we’ve been told our lives depend on it. And until you gain some sort of financial independence, it sorta does. Judith continues:

When we are self-conscious—meaning there are layers of self-talk about our safety, status, and image—we incessantly judge our own actions. This endless self-judgment generates fear, anxiety, and more cycles of mental activity. Future action is either heavy with criticism or impulsive, to avoid the criticism.

Isn’t this sense of self-consciousness and self-judgment inherent in depending on a job for income? This constant self-evaluation of how I’m presenting myself in order to stay employed? Judith talks about “endgaming” which is basically all we do in jobs:

Endgaming encompasses mental movements toward a goal or desire. Psychologically, this might include overt goals such as “I want a new job,” yet even something as complex as a new job can have layers of desire. I want a new job to feed my family, gain status, or avoid a bad boss. The layers of what we want or don’t want, and our approaches to quenching the desire, result in a labyrinth of thoughts and behaviors... “Searching and wanting to achieve something are the fuel for the entity you believe yourself to be” (Klein, Invitation to Silence, 14).

Endgaming takes up much of our mental activity. When I think about what I wear, I hope (endgame) for a particular response from others. In a way, I’m trying to influence other people’s reactions or responses, build self-image, or avoid negative judgment—all of that in just picking the shirt to wear! We endgame in relationships, direct or manipulate conversation, and position ourselves to be noticed or avoided—the list is endless.

All the misery of the planet arises due to the endgaming of the personalized “me.” The Reverend angel Kyodo williams points out all the world’s suffering comes from believing in the personal possessive pronoun “my.” Capitalism wants us to believe this lie, this avidya. At no time in history has our sense of individual separateness and its sense of personal ownership has been so strong. And jobs only strengthen it.

So wealthy, so depressed

Rob Bell has a thought experiment:

“Imagine if there was a culture that had more wealth, technology, luxury, and options than any civilization in the history of humanity and yet more people were stressed, depressed, worried, anxious, and unable to enjoy all of that abundance.

Just try to imagine that.”

Try to imagine a culture that had more wealth, technology, luxury, and options than any civilization in the history of humanity, and because they wanted more, they were unable to enjoy what they had. So much so, they were willing to work bullshit jobs to destroy the planet.

Imagine a culture so preoccupied with worthiness, status competition, and deservedness, they couldn’t experience grace. Imagine people, in perpetual pursuit of wholeness, stuck on a treadmill endgaming for more, unaware that they already possess the wholeness they desire.

If you were truly satisfied, deeply so, how much would you work?

If you felt that you were whole, how much would you spend?

The irony of pursuing Wholeness through bullshit desires is first half of life thinking.

Our jobless future

This is all is coming to a head because artificial intelligence is coming for our jobs. Estimates vary, but whether it’s in 2 years or 15 years, artificial general intelligence will likely replace many, and maybe most, office jobs (leaving a smaller number of human “AI babysitters.” Whether you think it’s a certainty, a probability, or a possibility, the repercussions are enormous. A recent estimate by Goldman Sachs found that generative A.I. could eventually automate activities that amount to the equivalent of some 300 million full-time jobs globally.³

You thought tens of millions of people doing bullshit jobs, creating bullshit things to fulfill bullshit desires was bad. Consider what it will mean when hundreds of millions people don’t have any job, bullshit or not. The techno-pessimist thinks the rich will become super-rich and the rest of us lose our livelihoods.

The techno-optimist believes everyone will become rich as new, more valuable jobs are created:

Technology has offset job losses with job creation throughout history. Horse drawn carriages were replaced by cars, which created jobs not just on auto assembly lines but also in car sales and gas stations. Personal computing eliminated some 3.5 million jobs, and then created an enormous industry and spurred many others, none of which could have been fathomed a century ago. — source

OK, let’s pretend this is the case and we’re allgoing to have amazing new jobs. That doesn’t answer the question: what are the jobs for? Do we need the future equivalent of more cars and more gas stations? Even if we created more jobs, it leaves unanswered the more important question of whether the production of the new thing is useful, or merely profitable. Is it meaningful or is it bullshit? And by extension, is the way we’re spending our lives are meaningful or bullshit?⁴

Here’s the thing: in either the techno-pessimist case or the techno-optimist case, we already have everything we could possibly want, except the very thing we can’t buy: meaning. In addition to the very important financial implications of a possible jobless future, we as a society are going to have contend with deeper questions that those of us who have reached FIRE are already asking:

• What am I really about? What is the Great Work of my life?

• Who belongs to me? Who do I really care about?

The taste of an orange

My dear Matthew Englehart teaches mysticism. His first question in the first class is:

"What is the taste of an orange?"

Without tasting an orange, you can't actually know what an orange tastes like. You can put it into Chat GPT (here you are) and it tells you nothing: you get a description of the taste of an orange, but the description means nothing unless you’ve actually had the experience of tasting an orange. Similarly, it's like trying to describe sex to a virgin. Or the impact of a Near Death Experience. Or the encounter within psychedelics. Reading about it or watching someone else have the experience doesn't get you there. Expand that to the entire experience of being alive in the world, about caring about someone or something that you'd be willing to sacrifice your life for it, and you see the limitations of LLMs. Without lived experience, AI can't transmit the things we crave most: connection and meaning. It experiences neither.

You have to participate in grace to know connection and meaning. And an LLM can’t experience either. It’s all knowledge and no wisdom. My computer science friend describes the inner workings of AI:

It’s input is the entire internet’s corporate marketing, plus reddit comments, plus science papers, and then statistically what’s the most likely next set of words to come next, and it’ll print that.

Have you ever asked Chat GPT a truly meaningful question? Ask it something like the FIRE questions I asked above (what should I do with life? How should spend my time?) What you get is a dry, corporate-speak response. No amount of technological advancement is going to get an LLM to know the experience of tasting an orange. Or having its heart broken. Or experiencing the joy of loving a child. It’s never experienced the primary satisfactions of life: being seen, being cared for, making a difference, helping others, celebrating with others.

An LLM doesn’t give a shit and life is about giving a shit.

Wisdom is figuring out what is worth giving a shit about. AI can help you the How to Do Something, but can’t tell you What’s Worthy of Doing. It’s an order of operations thing. Don’t learn How before figuring out What.

AI can tell you want to make for breakfast, but can’t answer if you should believe in God.⁵

Aside from AI hallucinations and slop, there’s a more fundamental problem with AI. I grew up in Silicon Valley and there was a saying: garbage in, garbage out. In other words, the output is determined by the input. The internet is a young medium overweighted with first-half-of-life information and underweighted with second-half-of-life wisdom. Do you really want the major questions of your life generated from the ramblings of 20 year olds: profitable but unuseful corporate marketing, inane reddit comments, credible and not credible science papers, and endless Instagram influencer posts selling “transformation” (physical/ emotional/spiritual)? Then getting an answer from a statistical rendering of the next best word?

Again, an LLM can’t experience. Without the taste of an orange, you’re eating bullshit.⁶

The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments. — Abraham Heschel

The answers are difficult and are in real life

I wrote, and deleted, a long post about gun violence because I realized I didn’t have anything important to say. In short, it’s not the guns: we have a 3x more guns but 27x more mass shootings than any other country. It’s not social media or video games: plenty of other countries has the same social media and video game usage but, again we have 27x more mass shootings. I suspect⁷ that it’s because Americans don’t feel like they belong. I suspect that our constant striving for worthiness and deservedness means none of us feel like we are inherently worthy and deserved. Gun violence and political assassinations are those most suffering acting out. But I’ll add what was savable from that post here:

Father Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries, one of my heroes, works with the “unredeemable,” or as Jesus put it, the least of these. The murderers, the rapists, the drug dealers. And his message: we are all kin. We all belong. Father Boyle’s frame for mass gun violence, political assassinations, rape is not good/evil. It’s not even people doing good actions or evil actions. It’s healthy/unhealthy. Only unhealthy people shoot up schools or malls. Only unhealthy people assassinate politicians.

We live in a very unhealthy society.

So here’s my answer for what is worth doing. The Great Work of my life, of your life, and of this country’s life, is to love each other back into healthiness. We are all wounded, and yet within us, there is also a hidden Wholeness. If AI is going to meet all our material needs (or if our materials needs are already met), the job for all of us is to stop making, creating, and selling bullshit. To stop even wanting to buy into the bullshit, work and consumption. The Franciscans believe that if we follow our deepest desires all the way to the end, we will find God. But only our deepest desires. That means we have to let go of the bullshit desires. The pathoadolescent, disordered desires of status, achievement, and display that we substitute for joy.

So the real question, the question that AI can’t answer, is: what is your deepest desire? Follow it to the end and you’ll find God. You’ll find Wholeness. You’ll find Yourself.⁸

When Martin Luther King Jr. talked about the love that would redeem this country, he was speaking neither of eros [romantic love] nor philia [reciprocal love of friends]. He was referring to agape, the understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all people, including, most critically, our enemies. In other words, kinship:

I am certain that Jesus understood the difficulty inherent in the act of loving one’s enemy. He never joined the ranks of those who talk glibly about the easiness of the moral life. He realized that every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God. So when Jesus said “Love your enemy,” he was not unmindful of its stringent qualities. Yet he meant every word of it. Our responsibility as Christians is to discover the meaning of this command and seek passionately to live it out in our daily lives.

When Jesus bids us to love our enemies, Only by following this way and responding with this type of love are we able to be children of our Father who is in heaven. — Martin Luther King

This is the Great Work of our Lives: Love. King isn’t asking you for the easy kind of love, the kind you feel for your partner (eros), or the love you feel for your friends and family (philia). No, he’s asking for the love that emcompasses the person on the other side of you on this terrible Charlie Kirk tragedy, the impossible Love includes the person threatening and persecuting you and the ones you love.⁹ This is the love he believed in and the love that is needed now. This is the love without endgame, the love of First Cause.

AI can’t fill the meaning hole. AI can’t tell us what to have faith in, what to be hopeful for, or how to answer “how do we live together, even after this?” AI can’t give us the taste of that peaceful Inner Being that naturally flows from out of us, if we could only let go of our ego defenses. And as my friend Judith puts it, “when the personality/ego dissolves, one is entirely in Presence.” And from that place of ultimate belonging, we are healed.

From that place of ultimate belonging, we begin the process of offering healing to others.

In the early days, we were saying, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” We thought an employed gang member would never return to prison. Then, as we started a school, we thought, “Well, an educated gang member won’t ever go back to prison,” but that was proving not true. Then we kind of landed, maybe 20 or 25 years ago (out of our 37 years), where we said, “No, a healed gang member will not ever re-offend.” Period. And it’s been born out as truthful, so that’s the emphasis.

We do all the other things: employment, here’s money in your pocket, a gainful job, education and all these other things like tattoo removal and therapy. All those things are secondary to the primary community of healing where people are receiving doses [of love] constantly, in a very repetitive way. It’s the repetitive nature of reassurance, affirmation, affection, hugging—all these things. We used to fret if somebody relapsed with drugs or returned to gang life for a moment or went to jail. We used to say, “Well, maybe they’ll come back.” Nobody says that now. Everybody says, “He’ll be back”—and they all come back. I’m not really aware of an exception. They’ll come back because once you’ve had a taste of having been cherished in a way that’s authentic, it’s so compelling that [you surrender to it]. — Father Greg Boyle

AI won’t ever get to this because this is not a statistical rendering of the next best word. This is wisdom.

This is care.

1. Graeber identified categories of useless work including “flunkies,” who are paid to make rich and important people look more rich and important, e.g. receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters; “goons,” who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists, “Box tickers,” who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, academic administration and “taskmasters,” who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals.

2. I observed in a career of nonprofit and government a significant number of bullshit jobs there too.

3. This is another argument for taking Financial Freedom seriously and getting out as fast as you can. Next cohort in November.

4. And it doesn’t answer who gets to share the “wealth” that new AI creates. I think any AI regime has to be complemented by universal basic income. Otherwise we’re in serious trouble. Also: the only true wealth is time.

5. Answer: only if you feel the presence of God

6. Of interest, people are increasingly relying on chatbot therapists, chatbot girlfriends, and even chatbot God. People report how scarily effective they can be, because they offer perfect empathy. But the problem is that it’s only the simulacrum of perfect empathy. The chatbot hasn’t tasted the orange; it doesn’t actually care. Imagine a real therapist or a real girlfriend pretending to care. That’s what you get from chatbots: AI pretending to care.

7. Without evidence, which is why I stopped.

8. Because they are really all the same thing.

9. Acts 9:4. Not a Biblical scholar.