You Are Completely F*cked.

if your job feels meaningless you're not alone millions of people right now are spending their entire day doing meaningless work but recently this Paradigm has actually shifted the 9 to5 is dying out and the essential way our society functions has begun to change decades ago stories like American Beauty and F Club spoke to Millions when they showed bureaucratic office jobs as the meaningless prisons they really are but even the author of f club didn't know how much worse it was going to get so let's find out why most 9 to5 jobs are useless why they're

dying out and what the Grim future work will really look like in the coming years you see lots of people think their jobs are meaningless in one of the more recent surveys on the topic 33% of people ask think their job makes no meaningful contribution to society some Industries is much worse for financial services retail work or Hospitality it's more like 50% this won't be news to lots of people working in these industries especially in bureaucratic office jobs books and films have been exploring this for decades now the reason Fight Club became so popular was

because of how related what the main character situation is at the beginning of the story we see a man who spends his life drifting through useless meetings and exchanging Buzz words with his boss he sees his work not just as meaningless but as an actual detriment to society it doesn't fulfill him and the fruits of his labor haven't given him a real life his fridge is full of condiments rather than real food but we're still only seeing half of the full picture surveys tell us how people really feel about their own jobs but it doesn't

tell us about the jobs themselves the fact that retail and Hospitality workers are at the top of the list is telling their work was declared to be essential when lockdown hits Society couldn't function without them it's clear that this kind of work is needed but it doesn't feel that way to people doing it it implies that how Society treats the people working these jobs is what makes them disillusioned the fact that their work is actually essential doesn't factor in but for other sectors like Financial Services we're not talking about essential work as we'll find out

their feelings aren't based on how Society doesn't reward their work instead they're based on the fact that they work is meaningless to society itself and it leads us to a Crossroads work can be meaningless in two different ways it can feel meaningless to the person doing the job or it can be objectively meaningless to society itself while the survey tells us a lot about the first way it doesn't tell us anything about the second Society is still only beginning to confront this the idea that a large proportion of the workforce accomplishes nothing of value and

contributes nothing to society many have suspected this to be the case for years if we continue in the way we've run our economy for the last 40 years it will be disastrous so when we talk about the future of work we're kind of talking about the future of the whole system that's right I mean you cannot have a prosperous economy without prosperous workers but no attempt was made to food explor it until David Graber released a book on the subject in 2018 based on an earlier viral essay he makes the case that a massive proportion

of jobs only half by his estimation are actually meaningless in that they contribute nothing to society according to him this a simple test to see if you have one of those jobs if you stop showing up to work tomorrow would the world care would any part of it be impacted in any way outside of your similarly useless colleagues noticing your absence David then further breaks these kinds of jobs down into five different categories first you've got the flunkies their only job is to make other jobs seem more important tasks that could be automated by machines

invented decades ago are kept around because it looks or feels better if a human does it like a dormant or receptionist whose only job is to tell people when other people have arrived at the office the next are the goons according to David their only real purpose is to engage in costy battles with other goons hired by other companies the legal world is full of them some lawyers only have one job to waste the time and money of their competitors by finding frivolous meaningless lawsuits ideally for any CEO employing them they'll waste more of your

competitor's money than your own Disney is especially notorious for the armies of legal goons who busy themselves suing nurseries that put a picture of Mickey Mouse on the wall we will miss halfway now the third category are the duct tapers who fix problems that shouldn't exist in the first place lots of people have had a job like this where the whole work day could be eliminated if something was fixed somewhere else in the company some service jobs fall into this category imagine you're the CEO of a company that's been making defective umbrellas people have been

complaining a lot and you could fix the production issue or you could just hire more people to man the customer service hotline box tickers are the next category people whose job it is to confirm the fact that other people are doing their job they'll create whole systems whose only purpose is to log what other workers are doing proving things which were already cleared to to everyone and lastly you've got the task Masters who assign meaningless work to other people these are the managers who ever see other jobs but only create problems rather than solving them

they might do this by making people fill out assessment forms and compliance paperwork for no real reason artificially extending the time it takes for other people to do their jobs all of this is the basic makeup of the 9 to-5 job this isn't to say all office jobs are like this there's nearly always some useful people but as companies get larger they become rarer and rarer while these useless parasitic RS become far more common we've at least known that as organizations get larger they become less efficient it's called prices law and the theory is that

the square root of the total population of employees is half the work in smaller organizations this isn't as noticeable in a company of 10 people for example three people are generally doing half of the work but as a company gets larger it only gets more lopsided in a company of 100 people 10 are doing half of the work in a company of 1,000 people only 30 are doing half of the work this wouldn't be possible in modern companies without the kinds of meaningless jobs that David describes this grossly inefficient system is what's defined the 95

for decades and it's one of the root causes of why people working these kinds of jobs feel so aimless in life but we've got to go even deeper to uncover the true reason why these kinds of jobs even exist in the first place and as we get there you'll see why this world of useless bureaucracy is destined to shrink into nothing over the next few decades and that's going to bring with it a bunch of problems which we'll see later in the video a lot of people tend to reach out to me to learn how

to express or communicate their ideas in the form of f length videos like I do where you can share what you're passionate about in the most seamless intuitive way possible irrespective of whatever skill level you're at and in video AI enables you to do just that you simply start by typing in a prompt or going through one of the workflows based on the video you'd like to create it's really gamechanging from there on you can fine-tune your video and edit it by using simple text based commands via the edit command box just type in whatever

you'd like to change like translate to French add my voice make the background music sigora beats whatever you want and this is really insane cuz you would never have to see or interact with a video timeline again and you can actually edit your videos using just these text commands and not only that but you can also go one step further and clone your own voice so that all the videos you create can be narrated in your own voice unlike traditional video tools with steep learning curves that only solve parts of your video creation process and

video is the creative partner that you've always wanted as it removes all the friction and puts you in the director seat letting you focus entirely on your vision and idea or nid does all the heavy lifting and you can try nid AI for free as this will save you hundreds of dollars that you would otherwise spend on editing animating and other production costs all of these useless jobs are because the system has gone wrong by analyzing a few key contradictions that sprung up over the past few decades we get closer to the truth take productivity

it's a pretty simple economic principle just take the economic outputs of a country often expressed as the GDP and compare it to the total amount of hours people worked over the past 70 years productivity in the us has gone up by over 250% all thanks to technological progression and other factors meanwhile wages have actually stagnated it's almost like people are only being paid for 15 hours of the 40-hour work weeks they're putting in decades ago when people saw how fast productivity was Rising they logically thought it would mean that people wouldn't have to work long

hours economists like mayard Keen writing all the way back in the 1930s predicted we'd be down to 15 hours by now obviously that's really not how it panned out instead hours have either remained stable or actually increased recent lots of cases for example over half of UK workers regularly exceed their contracted hours with 3.8 million doing unpaid overtime which averages out to about 7.2 hours each week European workers are finding themselves handling more unpaid work than they have for decades while in America more than 400,000 people work two full-time jobs or an Incredible 13 million

when you include part-time work as well anecdotally lots of people feel that ke was actually right about their jobs as often people in office jobs will say they only do about 50 hours of real work every week the rest is made up of useless emails mixed with endless meetings paperwork and conference calls it means that it could be the case that there aren't many truly meaningless jobs just lots of mostly meaningless jobs with a small amount of real work mixed in this would make meaningless jobs a good way to explain the productivity Paradox however well

it all seems to fit together though there's still the question of how all of this useless work could even exist but the answer to this question exposes the entire system and how we get there by changing how we think about work so far far we've been talking in purely economical terms but the modern 95 and the modern world of war clearly doesn't make sense economically but it does make sense politically though before the rise of meaningless jobs and meaningless work there was a pretty clear deal between companies and their employees the company would offer stable

meaningful work in exchange for a good salary the employee got enough to build their own life start their own family and their work hely gave them a place in the community as well meanwhile the company got a loyal hardworking employee in the wake of the second world war massive political instability it was a necessary deal for them to make with the people as the 20th century went on though this deal between employees and companies fell apart fast forward to the '90s and Fight Club gives us a pretty good picture of how it had changed meaningless

jobs had fully come in and now there was no social contract anymore before when jobs still had meaning they required specialized skills that took years to learn with meaningless office jobs one drone is the same as another so companies no longer had any incentive to stay loyal when it came to most their jobs lots of people no longer made enough money to a family or create meaning outside of their career and the higher paying jobs that could support a family were often those meaningless middle class jobs the hours for these kinds of jobs also went

up over time while Community slowly dies out in society people were left with no meaning in their work and no meaning outside of their work either other than blind consumerism and that's the Trap that millions of men fell into and the trap that the main character finds himself at the beginning of Fight Club at this point in time the only thing that the 9 to5 still really offered was a stable income there was still a sense of safety for people working these kinds of jobs even if it was a mental prison at least they fed

you every day but today you can't even be sure of the stability anymore this was the last thing that kept the 9 to5 going but it's on its way out the only thing left that's even recognizable about work today is that it keeps people busy and that's the only thing most jobs have to accomplish now this is the true reason why most likely your job is completely pointless artificial meaningless work only exists to keep people occupied and focused on their own Survival while the old system worked fine it's far more profitable to run the world

this way instead gradually over the course of decades CEOs turned up the pressure a little more on their employees prices went up ever so slightly more each month while wages remained static the hour still needed to be worked even though there wasn't enough to do so meaningless work and meaningless jobs came into the picture as the turmoil of the 20th century was forgotten it became accepted that people didn't need real incentives to keep showing up to work the carrot wasn't necessary anymore only the stick if you don't work the then you're eventually stared so you've

got no choice and if you don't have any money people won't respect you if you don't have the right products now there was never really a global conspiracy for this to happen it just makes sense as a collection of millions of individual decisions companies saw their competitors squeeze their employees harder and get away with it so they did the same today the 9 to-5 job is a relic of a bygone time when that amount of work was needed and it's still brought stability and meaning to people's lives meaningless jobs became the norm but it wasn't

until the 200 crisis that the next phase began and work the 2008 crisis represented the height of greed and negligence on the part of those in power meanwhile Millions who still believed in the old system and the old social contract overplayed what little they had left and bought into predatory housing loans in an attempt to achieve the American dream when the bubble burst it left regular people poorer than ever vulnerable to exploitation 2008 was a tumultuous year for the economy the housing market collapse created One financial crisis after another and it off seemed as if

the news could only get worse the world still hasn't recovered from this things like zero-hour contracts became common deals which offer no stability whatsoever to employees and at the same time new technology opened the door to a new kind of working system although as we'll find out it's horrifyingly similar to what you'd find in the least Advanced places in the world it's the new gig economy and it represents the final nail in the coffin for the 9 to-5 job first we went from needing one adult working per family to two now that isn't even enough

as we've seen from the 13 million people working the equivalent of two full-time jobs for people in low paying jobs the N9 to-5 died a long time ago it's all got a simple explanation wages have stagnated while the cost of living has risen people just can't get by without picking up extra work creating a population of people desperate for anything to see them through the month fast download speeds from cellular networks combined with features of mobile phones also enable the development of a new kind of company Uber is the classic example because they got with

that first traditional taxi companies have a lot of different responsibilities to their drivers they often provide the vehicles the license with the government to do business and sometimes all the taxi driver has to do is just drive the taxi the company then takes the rest of the responsibility Uber created a different kind of system where all they really do is connect customers with drivers they don't provide the vehicles the training or really anything other than a way for people to monetize driving they're just the middleman siphoning money out of an economic system that already existed

while transforming it in the Pro process this model eliminates meaningless work because it does away with paying people for their time to begin with even Zero Hour contracts pay people for the time they expend Uber and other companies like it only pay for the actual work people do as such it's an incredibly profitable system for the people who operate it once they get large enough to take control of the market Industries like driving or food delivery have already been taken over soon it could spread to everything else as well as the technology improves and these

kinds of platforms can manage different kinds of work the scale of this change is staggering the gig economy is now set to grow from over $500 billion to over 1.8 trillion by 2032 encompassing everything from just delivery drivers to high-end Consultants making up 12% of the total labor worldwide these companies will frame this as a new way forward that will imply that it gives people more Independence like they've taken control of their own work and as such they can enjoy the fruits of their labor in reality though it represents a far more Sinister slide backwards

all you need to do to see this is to look at the more exploitative economies with even less protection for people than ours the gig economy has also been used to great effect by new companies like Sheen for example the $66 billion company has made its money through the gig economy model for its closed manufacturers workers aren't paid a salary instead they're paid per product they can make in the same way as Uber drivers are paid per trip they make while there might be legal limits on hours they can work they're often ignored people work

7-Day weeks from the early morning well into the night talk to Uber drivers and you'll find this is often true for them as well the company obviously doesn't mind and the workers don't have a choice it's either this or even worse poverty and starvation for their families while isn't this extreme in the west yet the rise of the gig economy and the depth of the 9 to5 shows that it's just around the corner it's inevitable because in the short term it's far more profitable for companies to operate this way as high up Silicon Valley investors

like Nal rant have predicted the world's economy is going more individualistic it's becoming much easier to communicate with people gig economy I can send you small amounts of money I can hire you through an app I can rate you afterwards so we're seeing an atomization of the firm we're seeing the optimal size of the firm shrinking it's most obvious in Silicon Valley tons and tons of startups constantly coming up and shaving off little pieces of businesses from large companies and turning them into huge markets and the effects of this on normal people could be disastrous

all those benefits people used to get from the social contract are gone in the gig economy you're not even an employee anymore so there's no benefits or even paid time off there's always also no stability either if you can't work tomorrow because of an injury then you're on your own completely the pay for this kind of work is low as well because the people doing the work have no power or leverage in the system to change it it means that there's no way to build a family or meaning outside of work if you're constantly having

to put in hours especially if you're being paid below minimum wage for your work it means that people in this position no longer have any real stake in the system at all it creates apathy resentment and anger the same things we're seeing all over culture today or while the elites make even more money creating even more inequality frantically driving a need for more materialism and Status symbols in society to separate yourself from the masses the only good news if you can call it that is that the system will end up being completely unsustainable those in

power have been delaying this collapse for years but that can only work for so long the further it goes the more people realize that there is no way out and no way to build a life in a system like this eventually young people with nothing to gain by playing the game will just flip the table while this might change things it's not really a good result either without the LIE of the system what's left except for Anarchy while it might be cathartic to see it all coming tumbling down it's rarely gone well afterwards historically pretty

soon people are going to be missing the days when the meaninglessness of your job was the only thing you ever had to worry about at least the main character from Fight Club had enough to own his own apartment and his own collection of meaningless Ikea furniture the alternative we're seeing today with the death of the 95 is just as meaningless when it doesn't give you anything in return at all