Amerika

Jobs are part of the cluster of means-over-ends thinking — socializing, compromise, religion, careers, advertising, pacifism, political correctness, trends, Control — that blight societies that have entered the long slow fall and sudden end of the death process.

We know that people need money and they need something to do all day long, but we have no idea how to manage this except paying people to do things, which replaces any sense of goal with going through the process and methodology so that others do not criticize them.

Humans generally are happiest when they feel they are in a position where no one can legitimately say they did not do their part; sociopaths want to do their part as a token and then use victimhood to make everyone else do things for them, pay for it, and clean up.

For this reason most people truck off to jobs, but like other symbolic and social things, jobs quickly become more focused on the method than a goal, and so the worker becomes a cog who does what he is told lest someone attack him and make him look like a free rider.

Note: the free riders are the most notorious accusers.

Like socializing, jobs reward compromise, which means that the goal becomes deprecated in order to find some result that everyone can agree on. Like reality or the inner self, goal must be removed because it questions the purpose of things, and that is hostile to compromise and socializing.

Not surprisingly, when you operate in means-over-ends style, your methods become you ongoing and neverending goal (you can never win or lose) and therefore, soon the meetings and paperwork take over from functional productive work:

On average, managers spend 23 hours a week in meetings. Much of what happens in them is considered to be of low value, or even entirely counterproductive. The paradox is that bad meetings generate even more meetings… in an attempt to repair the damage caused by previous ones.

A 2015 handbook laid the groundwork for the nascent field of “Meeting Science”. Among other things, the research revealed that the real issue may not be the number of meetings, but rather how they are designed, the lack of clarity about their purpose, and the inequalities they (often unconsciously) reinforce.

Faced with what we call meeting madness, the solution is not to eliminate meetings altogether, but to design them better. It begins with a simple but often forgotten question: why are we meeting?

No wonder humanity is dying out. The sheer banality and repetition would kill anyone who had a functional mind, so the people without functional minds are thriving. Society likes compliant idiots because those do not threaten other individuals.

Perhaps the Peter Principle and Dilbert Principle are true, namely that we promote fools to important positions to keep them from interfering with actual labor being done, but in these places of leadership they seem to have even more negative influence.

After all, they are the decision-makers. More likely what we are doing is forcing our best people to jump through hoops and do nonsense in order to prove that they are suffering just like the workers, so that the workers do not revolt.

Even more, because this process is mind-numbing, it attracts incompetents and bunglers and makes them wealthy because they unlike everyone else are willing to endure mind-bending tedium for most of their years.

In other words, the Peter Principle and Dilbert Principle get it backward: we promote the most important people so that we the workers can enslave them, and because we do that stupid thing, over time we get incompetents, sociopaths, and neurotics in those roles.

Interestingly, when you take away the obligation to method that is part of a job, and instead have a calling because you have a genetic link to others in the company, the tedium is reduced as is the case in family-owned businesses:

Around the world, family businesses produce about two-thirds of all economic output and employ more than half of all workers. And they can be very profitable: The world’s 500 largest family businesses generated a collective US$8.8 trillion in 2024. That’s nearly twice the gross domestic product of Germany.

In our recent article published in the Journal of Management, we set out to understand this different kind of “why”—not just the purpose of family firms, but why they thrive around the world.

Unlike other types of enterprises, family businesses prioritize noneconomic goals involving the reputation, legacy and well-being of the family — both now and in the future.

When they make decisions, they don’t always need to hire a fancy, Harvey Specter-like lawyer from the show “Suits.” They can decide on the next move for the company while having dinner together.

A family business will always be more compelling than a job. With a family business, you work toward providing for people like you and building future equity with your successes. With a job, you work for a paycheck and equity that goes to someone else. With a corporation, the equity goes to the shareholders.

When working for a family, the noneconomic goals like “reputation, legacy and well-being of the family” both provide greater motivation and make the business less soulless and opportunistic. It cares about enduring and being seen as honorable and decent.

This makes it more like a calling than a job. If this society had any brains, it would return to a system where every man had his own business, and any additional employees needed would be contractors.

Even better would be if the business were downstairs from a residence, so that commuting was not a factor, lunch could be had in the family kitchen, and there would always be that reminder close at hand that life outside of work is important and fulfilling.

It seems that newer generations are discovering work-life balance means having less ambition and more desire for normal life:

A recent survey reveals that nearly half of Gen Z professionals favor promotions that do not entail supervisory responsibilities. This reluctance stems from the perceived drawbacks of traditional leadership roles, including heightened stress, rigid scheduling and diminished autonomy.

Some Gen Z workers even indicate a willingness to accept reduced compensation to avoid managerial obligations. This phenomenon, described as “conscious unbossing,” presents a structural challenge for organizations anticipating leadership gaps as baby boomers retire and millennials ascend to senior positions.

Flexible scheduling and outcome-based performance metrics are perceived as baseline expectations rather than discretionary benefits. Employers that adhere rigidly to traditional work structures risk attrition among Gen Z employees. Instead, employers should prioritize policies that emphasize results over physical presence.

When they hold the carrot of success over your head, they can make you work longer hours than you need to in order to get to that next rung of the ladder. But if a job is a means to an end, and not a pursuit in itself, you will be happy with “enough” money plus spare time.

Those who are happy with “enough” find themselves spending more time on real life, and seeing it as an end in itself, instead of spending all of their time on symbolic victories like money, titles, and social status.

Naturally, in a declining society, people work out of pure paranoid fear that they might end up in the underclass or living under a bridge. The more society decays, the more people cling to their jobs and bank accounts.

It turns out that in our time, it is not the love of money that propels people, but the fear of not having money. It turns out that this has mental health consequences:

For women, commuting time had no detectable effect on mental health. But for men, longer commutes were tied to poorer mental health for those who already had strained mental health.

The biggest gains were recorded when women worked mainly from home while still spending some time (one to two days) in the office or on-site each week.

For women with poor mental health, this arrangement led to better mental health than working exclusively on-site. Gains were comparable to those from a 15% rise in household income.

Why might commuting stress us? For starters, it is inherently stressful because it is both dangerous and tedious. But even more, it is burnt time. We only have so many hours alive, and yet there we are, sitting in the car as traffic inches forward, or half-asleep on the bus.

We could do a lot more with those hours. The eight plus a day at the job are bad enough already, since most of what goes on at jobs is not only unnecessary but contributes nothing positive to the world, and stacking commuting on that merely raises the frustration level.

It turns out that the opposite approach, looking for meaning in what one does, not only stresses the organism less, but produces more positive results:

“Highly positive experiences predispose people to favorable behaviors, such as collaboration, commitment and the search for meaning at work. This can translate into greater initiative, collaboration and willingness to contribute new ideas,” the researchers pointed out.

“In the long term, these experiences can strengthen personal and collective qualities, such as confidence, motivation and the ability to tackle challenges. When organizations foster environments where these emotions can emerge — through trust-based leadership or recognition and career development policies, for example — employee delight can enhance the well-being and effective functioning of teams,” concluded Escobar and Rimbau-Gilabert, who are affiliated with the UOC-DIGIT center, along with Manresa.

Where does “meaning at work” originate? Most likely in believing that a task has utility, or helps to achieve some useful purpose or improvement to human existence (and ideally, nature as well). But this is rarely found in offices.

People are going through the motions and achieving nothing because the goal of a job is not to achieve anything. It is to avoid getting fired, and get promoted if you can, by endorsing things that make other people happy. You act out a role in exchange for rewards.

This means that jobs, since they disconnect meaningful actions from necessary actions, essentially destroy happiness and initiative in others. Jobs make people into zombies obeying procedure and methodology who have forgotten goals.

People enjoy homeworking in part because they can skip most of the job — meetings, trainings, paperwork, collaboration — and focus on what they do well:

“The research study, which measured actual employee departures (and not just intentions to leave), found that when the proportion of time that employees spend working from home is aligned with individual preferences, remote work reduces turnover through improved work-family balance satisfaction,” said Prof. Sanders.

Among employees surveyed, 76% valued working from home because they could more effectively manage personal and work commitments. Another 74% appreciated saving time on commuting, while 68% found they worked more effectively on certain tasks from home, particularly more focused work requiring concentration.

At the same time, only 15% viewed remote work as effective for team collaboration, showing workers recognized trade-offs in different arrangements.

They recognize that remote work is not effective for collaboration, but find they are more effective on individual tasks. In addition, they have more time to actually live instead of wasting endless hours on job activities unrelated to those individual tasks.

In short, once you pull the goal away from the job, the goal can be achieved in less time. This results in more time to live and experience what it is to be alive. This restores the soul of the human being which has been sleeping during this Age of Symbolism.

Tags: antiwork, careers, crowdism, jobs, means over ends, meetings, socializing