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PhD as a job

I recently reread this passage in David Graeber's _Bullshit Jobs_ (by the way, I highly recommend reading the book):

In the spring of 2013, I unwittingly set off a very minor international sensation.

It all began when I was asked to write an essay for a new radical magazine called Strike! The editor asked if I had anything provocative that no one else would be likely to publish. I usually have one or two essay ideas like that stewing around, so I drafted one up and presented him with a brief piece entitled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”

The essay was based on a hunch. Everyone is familiar with those sort of jobs that don’t seem, to the outsider, to really do much of anything: HR consultants, communications coordinators, PR researchers, financial strategists, corporate lawyers, or the sort of people (very familiar in academic contexts) who spend their time staffing committees that discuss the problem of unnecessary committees. The list was seemingly endless. What, I wondered, if these jobs really are useless, and those who hold them are aware of it? Certainly you meet people now and then who seem to feel their jobs are pointless and unnecessary. Could there be anything more demoralizing than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one secretly believed did not need to be performed—that was simply a waste of time or resources, or that even made the world worse? Would this not be a terrible psychic wound running across our society? Yet if so, it was one that no one ever seemed to talk about. There were plenty of surveys over whether people were happy at work. There were none, as far as I knew, about whether or not they felt their jobs had any good reason to exist.

This possibility that our society is riddled with useless jobs that no one wants to talk about did not seem inherently implausible. The subject of work is riddled with taboos. Even the fact that most people don’t like their jobs and would relish an excuse not to go to work is considered something that can’t really be admitted on TV—certainly not on the TV news, even if it might occasionally be alluded to in documentaries and stand-up comedy. I had experienced these taboos myself: I had once acted as the media liaison for an activist group that, rumor had it, was planning a civil disobedience campaign to shut down the Washington, DC, transport system as part of a protest against a global economic summit. In the days leading up to it, you could hardly go anywhere looking like an anarchist without some cheerful civil servant walking up to you and asking whether it was really true he or she wouldn’t have to go to work on Monday. Yet at the same time, TV crews managed dutifully to interview city employees—and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them were the same city employees—commenting on how terribly tragic it would be if they wouldn’t be able to get to work, since they knew that’s what it would take to get them on TV. No one seems to feel free to say what they really feel about such matters—at least in public.

It was plausible, but I didn’t really know. In a way, I wrote the piece as a kind of experiment. I was interested to see what sort of response it would elicit...

[Graeber reprints his poignant essay]...

If ever an essay’s hypothesis was confirmed by its reception, this was it. “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” produced an explosion.

It occurred to me that, just as "bullshit jobs" was taboo to discuss but of wide resonance, the same might apply to **the steps one should take to pick, perform and/or leave jobs if one has internalized that one's job or career is indeed bullshit.**

At least it seems that way in my university's PhD programs. I suspect many of my peers don't like their PhD jobs, and distinctly, many have jobs they "secretly believe [do] not need to be performed." I suspect many of those peers are actively interested in how to deal with these situations: should I leave PhD? If not and if I haven't yet chosen a boss, how should I choose? If I'm already stuck with a boss, should I switch? Should I try shirking and see what happens? Should I just keep working as I am and stop worrying about the utility of my work, which could very possibly make me happy? Will bringing in my own funding give me more negotiating power? I'll call these questions "bullshit job considerations." But it's taboo—I haven't found students talking about these questions, and almost always I'm the first one to bring up that I've even _considered_ these questions (which evokes one of a few reactions: giggles, "don't say that!" or rarely, "yeah maybe I should think about that too") before meaningful discussion ensues.

This is not to say that there aren't many students who enjoy their PhDs: it seems highly variable. On the question of the usefulness of their jobs, I suspect many students would say that they feel they're contributing to knowledge, teaching others and helping advance health and medicine.

But for those students who don't feel so positive, I think it could be very helpful to open up spaces in which to discuss what to do in reaction to those feelings, to make this area of discussion and thinking non-taboo. For example, many students entering PhD are confronted with the decision of which boss and lab to work for in their thesis research. Each PhD program, older PhD student and postdoc will recommend criteria with which to make this decision. Commonly, I've heard "Make sure your PI [principal investigator, aka boss] and you get along," or "Look for a PI has your interests at heart." I agree that these are important criteria, depending on the definition of "your interests." I think these criteria would be greatly supplemented by "Look for a PI who gives you ample free time," "Look for a PI and lab that don't believe in 'work as an end and meaning in itself' (Graeber), e.g. a PI who won't be happy or sad with you depending on the number of analyses or experiments you run," or "Look for a PI who won't pressure you into working on a project whose usefulness you don't understand or believe, even if that means long spells of no visible production." I myself am unsure whether I can realistically find a PI matching these criteria, given that my university research environment feels very productivity-focused, but I think these criteria are at least worth acknowledging as things to aspire to.

Talking about leaving the PhD is even more taboo, although surprisingly, I've heard more talk about that than about tactics for increasing free time, either by shirking (which seems to be more commonly discussed and practiced in other industries) or by winning negotiating power with your boss by "providing value" to them. The latter is a major subject in multiple books, including Tim Ferriss's _4 Hour Workweek_, which enjoys popularity outside my university's academic bubble. (This again deepens my stereotype that we have a longer way to go on these issues in academia.)

I sometimes feel, inspired by Nassim Taleb, that a very good work setup for me would be either complete freedom (i.e. retired and pursuing my own projects) or sinecure-cum-freedom (i.e. having a job that disappears after I leave the office at 12pm each day, and complete freedom afterwards)[1][2]. Another good setup would be in an organization I really believed in (a combination of many factors) and could contribute to. At this point, these feel mostly compatible with my PhD, pending finding a compatible boss, but I haven't seriously imagined if life not in the PhD would be better for pursuing these.

Footnotes:

I've experienced complete freedom and I think that some balancing force of commitment, i.e. the sinecure-cum-freedom, might actually feel better. It's hard for me to pinpoint exactly why—perhaps some routinized social interaction or feelings of immediate usefulness to your co-workers.

What counts as a "very good work setup" probably depends a lot on the person, but at the same time, I do think many people look for similar things. I think control and freedom over one's time and one's self is a common value, and I think the work setups I mention above are trying to honor exactly that value.