Even AI Thinks Working in Legal Is a Joke
Graeber was right about bullshit jobs and AI is about to prove it at scale.
In this issue
• Why most modern jobs are meaningless, and why we’re too polite to admit it
• How Graeber’s theory of bullshit jobs holds up in the AI age
• What Stanford’s AI Index reveals about careers with no revenue upside (hi Legal!)
• Why radical honesty about what sucks at work might be the only way forward
• Our summer-refer-a-thon continues, with the most referrals winning a pack for Neuro Gum blessed by the founders themselves in our upcoming podcast (Naz you are on top!)
There's a good chance you're working a bullshit job.
And before you pen a letter to the editor about how you are, in fact, passionate about whatever you're doing right now in order to keep the fridge full, reflect with me for a moment on the definition at hand here.
I've recommended Suzman's Work: A Deep History before, and if you've been an A+ student following our recommended readings you're now intimate with how work itself was invented, largely in response to the agricultural revolution which Yuval Noah Harari calls "history's biggest fraud."
From the perspective of our ancestors who eked out a leisurely living on a fraction of the hours we now grind out each week we’ve only made things worse. Even medieval serfs made do with about half the working hours we now accept as baseline.
I’ve taken part in this time-honoured career regression myself, watching promotions and pay bumps bring more work and less leisure. My first paycheck at BCG was a marked increase over what I earned at the UN, and yet it left me worse off per hour. Worse still when you factor in the new, now-necessary costs of nannies, dry-cleaning, and the ever-lengthening mental checklist of executive life.
That was some bullshit, I remember thinking, and I imagine my ancestors would have said the same as they watched me drag myself through a model of labour that would have made no sense to them at all.
Now, to simply say that comparatively all jobs are bullshit jobs, given the right vantage point, isn’t quite enough for me here. Instead, we need to wade deeper into it.
David Graeber got there before any of us, of course, with Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, building on his viral essay, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” He opened a survey asking people whether their jobs were, in essence, pointless and thousands responded with enough content to fill a book.
Graeber went on to classify what he saw into five distinct species of bullshit:
Flunkies who exist to make others feel important (think receptionists in firms that could have had a buzzer).
Goons whose job only exists because someone else has a goon (think lobbyists, PR reps, telemarketers).
Duct Tapers who fix problems that shouldn’t exist (the person who smooths things over between warring internal teams instead of fixing the system).
Box Tickers who pretend something is being done when it isn’t (hello ESG reports no one reads).
Taskmasters who create extra work for others (middle managers who exist to justify themselves).
I’m sure you see where I’m going with this.
The likelihood that your job doesn’t include a mix of these is effectively zero. Whether you’ve come to cope, or even take pleasure in the particular flavour of BS your job provides, is a separate issue entirely, and one I’ll write up for Psychology Today soon enough.
As I go through teaching my undergrad classes, CEO interviews, and research on leadership, I often stop to marvel at how naturally we speak about being passionate about Corporate Job X in Megaconglomerate Y in a post-Graeberian world.
Now I’m painfully aware that maybe I’m the problem here. Maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t feel the need to act as if every spreadsheet I touch is out of an act of passion. But a part of me suspects something deeper is going on, something to do with at-will employment and tight labour markets that make opening up to the level of bullshit we’re coping with career suicide for most. But I digress.
What I’ve started wondering more seriously is this: What would our workplaces look like if we were honest about the Graeberian bullshit happening right under our noses?
Imagine if your boss knew what sucked about your job, because you told them. Imagine if everyone did the same, not as an act of whining, but as a joint commitment to make the job less dumb to begin with.
Our collective failure to speak openly about the box-ticking, the empty metrics, and the operational theatre is what keeps BCG and their cousins raking it in on cultural transformation projects that never quite end up solving what they’re supposed to.
If we stopped to question the pantomime act, even briefly, we might find that instead of needing to reject the entire system, we could begin to de-shittify it step by step. But alas, the show must go on and the BS we deal with compounds layer upon layer, simply because we don’t have the courage to say what’s obvious.
Now, the final category of bullshit jobs, the one that actually prompted this essay, is what I call the Dead-End Bullshit variety: jobs that even the person who hires you to do doesn’t want to exist.
Earlier this week, I was emceeing the CIO Summit at Thomson Reuters’ Momentum AI event in San Jose. One of the speakers was a brilliant researcher from Stanford HAI, walking us through the latest AI Index report.
Two slides hit me right in the jellies. Both mapped the impact of GenAI and analytical AI on various industries, one on the cost side (reduction), the other on revenue (increase). And there, like a footnote to my own career history, was an old stage I was so very proud of playing a role on: legal. As a surprise to no one, the industry showed up as pure cost-cutting territory with no revenue upside from AI. Not even a per cent, just for old friends’ sake.
Imagine being a NY Bar-certified attorney with a PhD who once thought that a career in big law would make him whole looking at a slide that basically says: “Even AI can’t figure out how to make money with what you used to do.”
It stung, but only only until the bigger point hit home. Some jobs are bullshit by design, at least from the perspective of those who end up paying for it and who don’t even want the tasks to exist. The agent-principal relationship in my old industry is seriously perverted. It’s great for the lawyer if things go bad and regulation thickens, and the more complex contracts grow the better. For the firm that ends up being for it, its just cost centers all the way down.
I’ve long visualized the entire “regulatory AI” market as a steaming pile of manure, with a disturbingly enthusiastic number of founders rushing in with shovels. Give it enough time, and only the fastest, cheapest shovels will remain, proudly scraping away at a pile that regenerates faster than it can be cleared on behalf of someone who would rather not have the pile exist at all.
I’m still proud of my legal background, but at least I can admit that it was bullshit job that my clients would have rather not have exist in an ideal world. I’m also very glad I evolved out of it. At least now I work on the revenue side of things, where the bullshit, such as it is, comes wrapped in success fees and upside-linked bonuses, not in sunk costs and disappointed stakeholders.
The fact that most people don’t get out of whatever career they chose first is also painfully obvious to me. In fact, most people double down as time goes on, leaving us with ‘non-orthodox’ career paths with the trouble of explaining ourselves.
What the same people are missing is how far a few curious career steps might take them, and that’s exactly the part we should talk about more. Maybe they might even find a job where the bullshit they deal with is of the kind they actually end up enjoying.
Enjoy the weekend and refer a friend who just might be stuck in a bullshit job.
A book to read
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
There are few books that explain your work life better than you can yourself.
Graeber puts words, and categories, to that creeping sense of pointlessness many of us have felt firsthand.
You’ll enjoy reading through the stories about Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers, Taskmasters, and you might even find a part of yourself hiding somewhere in the pages.
A thing to do
Tell the truth about the bullshit in your job
You already know which parts of your job are bullshit.
What would happen if you said the quiet part out loud, not in revolt, but in the spirit of improvement? What if your boss admitted to it too?
Most bullshit persists because no one calls it what it is. Try being the first and you might be surprised how many others were thinking the same thing but lacked the vocabulary, or nerve, to name it.
A thought to have
If you love your work or your team or your mission, the kindest thing you can do is to be honest.
That means calling out nonsense, flagging inefficiencies, and naming the feelings that no one else has the guts to voice.
Radical candour is uncomfortable, but so is pretending your job makes sense when it doesn’t. One is painful for a moment, the other for a lifetime.
A product to love
Indoor plumbing
Let’s give it up for the least glamorous miracle of the modern age.
Every time you flush, someone somewhere made sure that worked. There is nothing bullshit about that job. The folks who keep the pipes running are angels, engineers, and civilization’s unsung backbone.
Recent writings on Forbes and beyond
Latest: Luxury Real Estate Isn’t Slowing Down, It’s Scaling Up (Forbes)
Why Your Neighbor’s New Car Feels Like a Personal Attack (Psychology Today)
Why This AI Entrepreneur Paid Six Figures For A Lunch With Benioff (Forbes)
The Power of "No": How Rejection Builds a Life Worth Having (Psychology Today)
What’s Holding Back Sustainable Business? The Challenges That Matter Most (Forbes)
What’s Next For Beverages In 2025? CEOs Predict The Path Forward (Forbes)
Why This Nasdaq Listed CEO Changed His Mind About AI, And What It Took (Forbes)
From Serendipity To Startup: Meeting Venus Williams And Other Lucky Strikes (Forbes)
What’s Next In Philanthropy? Decentralized Models And Smarter Giving (Forbes)
Declining Birthrates Are Breaking The Economy. Can We Fix It In Time? (Forbes)
In Defense of Intuition: Why Gut Feelings Deserve Respect (Psychology Today)
Your Brain Hates Your Cubicle—Here’s How to Thrive Anyway (Psychology Today)
Arvind Jain: The Humble Builder Behind Glean And The Future Of Agentic AI (Forbes)
The Outsider Advantage: How Naïveté Fuels Billion-Dollar Startups (Forbes)
Never Make a Bad Choice Again by Embracing Self-Nudging (Psychology Today)
The Psychology Of Better Choices: How Startups Are Rewiring Our Habits (Forbes)
Staying Curious Is the Most Dangerous Thing You Can Do (Psychology Today)
After Arkansas: The Future Of FEMA And U.S. Disaster Relief (Forbes)
Ryan Gellert on Building a Future Where Sustainability Is Not Optional (Forbes)
Why Struggling (the Right Way) Helps You Learn (Psychology Today)
Want to Make Better Decisions? Copy the Slime Mold (Psychology Today)
Your Brain Was Built to Forget—Make It Work For You (Psychology Today)
The Case For Terminal Optimism In An Unpredictable World (Forbes)
The AI Coordination Revolution You Haven’t Heard About Yet (Forbes)
Where and how to get involved
A book is coming.
The Curiosity Code (yes, the book) is officially in motion. I’ll be drafting chapters this fall, weaving together insights from CEO interviews, classroom sessions, and conversations like the one we’re having here. If you have stories about range, curiosity, or unorthodox paths. I’d love to hear them in the chat or comments.
A podcast is brewing
We’ve started taping episodes for the first season of The Curiosity Code podcast. Early guests include the CEOs of Turnitin, Lovesac, Grindr, NOVOS, Front, and Aampe. Can’t wait to launch the season in late 2025.
I am currently conducting a study on range and how it impacts people’s career trajectories. Ten questions and a name will get you on the hall of fame as we pump up the n on the study. Link below - thanks for considering it!
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Curiosity is best when enjoyed in great company.
Refer this issue and grab a chance to get a tester package of Neuro blessed by the founders themselves (randomly selected from all referrals made). I’m connecting with the duo for a longer chat, recorded for the upcoming Curiosity Code podcast, and will be grilling them on their curious path to setting up the company. If you want your question included in the mix, hit me up via the Substack chat or email.
