Walk through the City or Canary Wharf at 8am and you'll see thousands of people who look purposeful. Sharp suits, coffee in hand, calls already starting. The whole thing looks impressively important.
But talk to those same people individually, and a different story emerges. They're in back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided. They're managing projects that exist primarily to justify the existence of project managers. They're creating strategies for strategies, optimising things that didn't need optimising, disrupting things that were working fine.
A friend at a major bank recently told me about his typical day. He arrives at 8am, leaves at 8pm, and when I asked what he actually did in those twelve hours, he couldn't point to a single tangible thing. "I enable decision-making," he said, then caught himself. "Whatever that means."
I keep meeting people who describe their jobs using words they'd never use in normal conversation. They attend meetings about meetings. They create PowerPoints that no one reads, which get shared in emails no one opens, which generate tasks that don't need doing.
The strangest part: everyone knows. When you get people alone, after work, maybe after they've had time to decompress, they'll admit it. Their job is basically elaborate performance art. They're professional email forwards. They're human middleware between systems that could probably talk directly to each other.
The economist David Graeber called these "bullshit jobs"—roles that even the people doing them suspect are pointless. But I think it's evolved beyond that. We've built entire ecosystems of mutual nonsense.
It's like a corporate version of the emperor's new clothes, except everyone can see the emperor is naked, everyone knows everyone can see it, but we've all agreed to keep complimenting his outfit because our mortgages depend on it.
What's emerging isn't the collapse of corporate work—it's something more interesting.
