If you, like me, are in your mid-thirties or younger, there is a decent chance you have worked in what anthropologist David Graeber calls a "bullshit job." In his 2013 essay, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, Graeber wrote that in the mid-twentieth century, economists believed technology would have rendered work unnecessary for most people in society.

But, he said:

"Technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul."

In an interview with the Guardian Books podcast, Graeber added, “One of the few things that actually helped the world in terms of slowing down climate change was the financial crisis. A lot of people were out of work, and the amount of carbon emissions went down. If we all worked half as much, we’d probably do a lot for the world’s ecosystems.”

People tend to see work of all sorts as an inherent good — but in reality, some sorts of work are at best pointless, and at worst, actively harmful.

Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. [Affiliate link]

I have, as far as I can tell, worked two bullshit jobs, both writing jobs where I was sold a "vision" by canny con artists who, in reality, were just using my work to make themselves money while underpaying me. In both cases, it was a degrading and demoralizing experience, and quitting, rather than feeling bittersweet, felt like liberation.

We -- especially those of us in the Millennial generation -- spend an enormous amount of time working in unstable, underpaid, high competition, low-benefit jobs that do not feel like they are moving us in any direction of value. Even when we work in the vocation we choose, even when we have good benefits, the work is often channeled and redirected by investors, bosses, and managers towards the service of a fairly cynical bottom line, rather than in pursuit of anything loftier and useful for society as a whole.

Sure, as a writer, I could choose the more stable path of working in advertising or marketing, but what I love about writing is the opportunity to be honest with myself, to work through human problems and emotions in a public way, and hopefully, in learning, help my readers learn something themselves.

This is not what advertising does. Advertising is the act of fibbing in order to separate another struggling human from their income. It sells best to the fearful and insecure, and it sows both of these things in order to sell more.

I am 33, and my professional life so far has been a strange mix of choosing career paths that sound meaningful to me -- teacher, professor, journalist, librarian, non-profit worker -- and either being talked out of them because of bad pay and poor prospects, or being ground down by the harsh realities of holding them.

I know I am not alone. This malaise, this feeling of being dead in the water, is pervasive among my peers. It is not, as Dr. Seuss suggested in our graduation gift, Oh! The Places You'll Go!, a mere waystation we'd be stuck in for a short time, but a perpetual state of being. It is a feature of the economy we had no choice but to enter into. We tried to avoid entering the economy, having been assured that it was only temporary: many of us who graduated during the recession to a world of bullshit jobs or just shit jobs went back into the safe bubble of academia to get another degree while we waited the storm out. But in the end, the bullshit jobs were still there when we got out, and now we had much, much more student loan debt.

Now, we tread water in this dreadful economy running through the motions: we take on the financial risks of buying houses, we get married and have kids, and are told by our elders that something will come along if we work hard enough.

Others, though, scientists, people we’ve been taught (till now) to trust, tell us that we're destroying the world and the biosphere in the service of this ocean of meaningless drudgery. They tell us that much must be done if we are to still have a planet worth living on by the end of the century. They tell us we have to start changing, fast. They tell us there's work to be done. But the work that must be done -- the equivalent of a full time job for 8 billion people -- doesn't pay, and we have bills to pay and mouths to feed. So instead, we rot in jobs we hate and watch our world slip away.

Imagine if it was different.

Imagine a Green New Deal

Imagine that there are jobs to be had, good paying jobs with benefits and healthcare. Imagine that you are no longer working for a trust-fund shithead who has power over you because his father made a fortune selling tobacco products to toddlers, and who was gifted $10 million in lieu of being raised into an actual decent human being. Imagine who you are working for is your community, your kids. Everything you do benefits them, and not just in the abstract -- you see the fruits of your efforts every day, because they are accumulating right here, right in your town.

Imagine what those jobs would be. You are no longer answering phones for a corporate attorney who makes weird comments about your body. You are out in your neighborhood every day planting trees, sprinkling milkweed seed around the fringes of your public park so you can not only bring back the pollinators and save the food supply from catastrophe, but so that in the summertime, the park briefly fills with hundreds, thousands of beautiful monarch butterflies.

Imagine you go back to college -- free this time, your old debt forgiven -- and you learn ecology and environmental science. Your classes take you on kayak trips out to the local rivers and marshlands, where you learn the name of every animal, every plant, and how each is vital to the system. You work to save the species you can, and one day, years later, you see a thriving ecosystem where once there was a toxic waste dump. Local kids swing from a rope attached to a tree and drop into the water, laughing, screaming, and you don't call out, "This water's not safe!" because you're the one who tested it, and, for the first time, found that all of the poison had been removed.

Imagine you join a rewilding program, and you set the first wolves loose in the deep woods of your state. They will control the deer population, which will allow more plants and trees, no longer grazed to death as saplings, to grow, and more carbon is sequestered. The atmosphere inches back down towards a sane level.

Imagine you take that engineering degree, and instead of building a more ergonomic Mountain Dew bottle, you apply that knowledge towards building a national high speed rail network. The trains crisscross the nation, publicly subsidized and cheap, with quiet maglev propulsion. You finish a railroad and hop on one of your trains to go visit friends 500 miles away. You're there in two hours -- your kids don't squirm in their seats, they instead play cards in the dining car and watch forests and canyons zip by from the glass-covered viewing car.

Imagine every morning you get up at 4 and get onto a boat. Fishing had to be pulled back on -- you eat it still on special occasions, really savoring the taste, since you only get to have it every few months or so -- but the fishing boats were repurposed, and you are now paid for the plastic you pull out of the ocean. You take it back to a processing plant, where the plastic is eaten by a special type of bacteria. One day, you start bringing in less and less plastic, but you start noticing shoals of fish so massive that no one in living memory can think of a precedent. You watch as dolphins and sea lions playfully dive through the swarms. You shoot video for your kids back home to get them excited for the upcoming snorkeling trip.

Imagine that teaching, a revered and well-paid profession, entails taking kids out into nature and teaching them that they are a part of this, they are neither separate from nor above it all. They camp under the night sky, which is getting clearer lately, and point up at shooting stars and satellites. Back at home, they go on foraging walks to learn the local edible plant life, and they take a gardening class where they learn how to grow plants with minimal fertilizer and no pesticides. They plant many crops at once, all complementary to each other, and they cook delicious meals with what they pick. No one has any memory of the bland, flavorless tomatoes of the 20th century.

Imagine being a milkman, a family profession until it disappeared in your grandfather's time. You know all of your neighbors by name, catch up with them while collecting the old glass bottles they used to deliver them back to a nearby farm. An older neighbor doesn't answer the door one day during a heat wave, and you, concerned, call her daughter, who brings over the key and gets her to the hospital. She lives thanks to you.

Imagine being a doctor, and realizing that your patients seem happier than they used to. You spend more time with them, you don't need to check charts, and you don't have to worry as much about malpractice suits, as no one needs to sue to cover their medical bills any more. Lung disease seems to be going down, as does obesity and depression -- a lot more people are outside these days, the air much cleaner. Because you're not feeling a pinch in your pocketbook, you don't feel pressured to push certain medicines, to churn through far more patients than you can handle.

Imagine coming home, after a day's work, and sitting outside. A lot still needs to be done, your kid's generation isn't out of the woods, but you're working towards something, dammit. If the feedback loops that the scientists are warning about destabilize it all again, you know that you'll all work together and try your best to figure it out.

The news isn't always good, but it's hopeful: there's an international coalition of scientists and environmental workers that is constantly experimenting on the best ways to lower emissions to under 350 parts per million, there are teams of economists figuring out how to make our economies work without eternal growth while still developing the most impoverished countries, there are policymakers working on ways to keep population stable without telling people they can or can't have kids (providing education to women consistently lowers birth rates, for example), there are security professionals protecting wildlife sanctuaries from poachers, and there are spiritual leaders teaching the anxious and the fearful how to be resilient, how to be hopeful, even in times of crisis.

You snap off the news and play with your kids out in the back. There are blackberries growing on the back fence, there's a six-pack of local microbrew in the fridge, and there are a lot of crickets in the woods behind your house these days, a lot of fireflies in the night sky. Not all problems have been solved, but it's not for a lack of trying. You go to sleep fulfilled with your work, excited to get up tomorrow and do it again.

Perhaps

This, perhaps, all sounds impossibly idyllic, perhaps a little bit too utopian. We have all gotten used to being cynical about our future. But you cannot work towards a better future if you cannot imagine a better future, and there's no reason for us to bargain our imaginations down from a best case scenario.

The arguments against such a world are almost always an act of bargaining down our imaginations. "How will we afford it?" people ask. The same way, of course, that we could afford to give tax cuts to the richest people in the world, the same way we could afford to blow trillions of dollars on wars and weapons, the same way we gave enormous sums of money to banks after they blew up our economy. We have the will, we have the resources, we have the labor. Past those three realities, all financial constraints are fictions created by "reasonable" men who just so happen to profit immensely from things never changing. If we can afford for you to spend your days sitting in a cubicle and posting funny marketing Tweets for laxative companies, we can afford for you to save our planet. End of story. It is only a matter of will. And in the words of the great Walter Sobchak, “If you will it, dude, it is no dream.”

The other option is to die not even trying. It's to leave nothing for our kids out of loyalty to jobs we hate, to an economic system which has never treated us as humans, but as cogs in an immense machine. We are not, as Charlie Chaplin put it, machine men with machine minds and machine hearts. We are humans. We can reject a world that we hate, that hates us, and build a world we love. We can save our planet and our children and feel joy in doing it.

All we have to do is to imagine it.

Imagine a Green New Deal

Imagine a Green New Deal

Perhaps

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