Why Americans hate their jobs: fake email jobs, meaningless jobs

One possibility that's less widely discussed is the fundamental nature of the jobs people are expected to do: For some, work can be a source of meaning and fulfillment, while for others it's simply a means to earn a living. A 2021 YouGov survey found that only about half of Americans felt their job made a “meaningful contribution to the world,” with millennials and Gen Z feeling the least likely.

A 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center looked at this question from a different angle. When people around the world were asked what makes life meaningful, work ranked highly as a source of meaning in life in countries like Italy, Spain, and Sweden. In Italy, work was the number one source of meaning in life, with 43% saying they get meaning from their work. Spaniards prioritized work over family. But in the United States, only 17% cited work as a source of meaning in life. That's a significant drop from when the Pew Research Center asked the same question four years ago. In 2017, one-third of Americans cited work as a source of meaning in life; in 2021, that percentage is double. It seems that more and more people feel that their jobs are not important.

And when people feel their work isn't important, they tend to find it less rewarding: 56% of people who said they don't find their work meaningful also said they don't find it rewarding, according to the YouGov survey. In contrast, 88% of people who believe their work is meaningful said they find it rewarding.

In other words, the crisis of work engagement may actually be a crisis of meaning.

Research has known for decades that job satisfaction and engagement are linked to whether people find meaning in their work. The American Psychological Association highlights findings that people who find their work meaningful work harder, show up to work more often, and are healthier. A 2022 study by Great Place To Work, a workplace culture company that measures employee happiness, found that companies where employees find their work meaningful have higher staff retention and job satisfaction. In particular, it found that millennials and women are three times more likely to stay in a job they consider to be “more than just a job.” Other studies have found that employees, especially Gen Z, are more likely to leave a job they perceive as meaningless.

Some jobs are naturally easier to sense meaningful in. In YouGov's survey, people working in health, social care and education were the most likely to say their work is meaningful – in these fields, the work they do every day has a huge impact on other people and the world at large. But other sectors struggle to instill in their staff that the work they do all day matters. People in sales, media and communications and real estate rated their jobs as the least meaningful.

Many people who work in these industries have started calling their jobs “fake email jobs” – office jobs that mainly involve sending emails and not producing anything. One anonymous worker recently spoke to online news site Bustle about his “fake email job” as a video producer. “I did nothing for weeks just to see how far I could go,” he told the site. “The only reason I quit was because I got bored, not because someone asked me to do anything.”

Doing useless work is “severe psychological violence,” Graeber writes.

Some people have been able to juggle multiple full-time remote jobs because each one requires a limited amount of work. In some cases, some would say that the reduced effort required is a plus. Won't Who wants to earn a steady paycheck while doing the bare minimum, but ultimately feel frustrated and wish they could be more productive?

The idea of ​​meaningless work goes back much further than the fake email jobs meme. Scholar David Graeber coined the term “bullshit jobs” in 2013, writing about jobs “that their practitioners believe to be meaningless, that either they would not make any difference if they did not exist, or that they would make the world a better place.” In his 2018 book, Graeber outlined 21 occupational groups that people consider meaningless, based on surveys of how people feel about their jobs. The occupations included administrative support, sales, business and finance, and management. Working in a meaningless job is “severe psychological violence,” Graeber writes, robbing people of their dignity and generating “deep anger and resentment.”

Last year, Simon Wallo, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, explored Graeber's theory further. Do people in these “shitty jobs” really feel worse about their jobs than people in other professions? Analyzing data from the 2015 U.S. Survey of Working Conditions, Wallo found that people in certain occupations are more likely to feel bad about their jobs.

“Being in one of the gray area occupations significantly increases the likelihood that workers will perceive their job as socially useless (compared to other occupations),” Wallo said.

But other researchers don't think that means those jobs aren't actually helpful. They argue that negative feelings stem from problems with the work environment rather than the job itself. Brendan Burchell, a social science professor at the University of Cambridge, co-authored a 2021 study criticizing Graeber's theory.

“We looked at the small number of people who felt like their jobs were not helping them and looked at the causes and correlates of that,” Burchell said.

The study found that factors like a bad boss, how connected you are to your coworkers, and whether your employer provides public goods all play a big role in whether you find your work meaningful. Wallo's research agrees that a poor working environment can affect whether you find your work rewarding.

Feeling that work is not meaningful is often simply a result of bad management. In Burchell's study, he and his co-authors compiled several years' worth of survey results that focused on whether people felt their work was useful. They found that people who felt “respected and encouraged by management” were less likely to report that their work was not useful, and those who felt their work was useful reported that they were able to bring their ideas to the table at work. Other factors, such as having enough time to get work done, being able to influence important decisions, and being on board with the company's direction, also correlated with feeling that work was meaningful. Conversely, people felt that their work was not useful when they didn't have the opportunity to utilize and develop their skills.

“People expressed feelings of being disrespected or not being listened to by their managers,” Burchell said. “We saw similar responses from people in jobs where they had a lot of time pressure or were stressed.”

A UK biopharmaceutical employee who asked not to be named to protect his job oversees the safety of clinical trials at his company. His job is not a meaningless one – it directly protects patients taking part in clinical trials – but he said there are many aspects of the way it's managed that make it feel “pointless” and a “waste of time.”

“Companies exist to make money,” he said, “and no matter what the people at the top of the pyramid say about patient safety, at the end of the day they're after profits.”

Often times, meaningless work is simply due to poor management.

He says spending so much time dealing with bureaucracy and paperwork can make his work seem less meaningful, or even completely meaningless on bad days. Spending so much time looking at data and so little time seeing how his work is impacting patients can take away much of the meaning he wants to find in his work.

Clay Routledge, existential psychologist and director of the Human Flourishing Lab, said employers' top priority should be to make the work itself more meaningful to employees, regardless of their role or level. “A notable strategy to do this is to recognize the contributions of employees at all levels to the company. Managers should think about how their team members contribute to customers and clients, and can do so explicitly in job descriptions, company communications, and evaluations,” Routledge said.

When nothing changes, people start looking for an exit. A 2019 survey found that self-employed people, who have more control over their hours and work, see their work as more beneficial to society than traditional employed workers. This may explain why more people are becoming independent. From 2020 to 2023, the number of self-employed people in the United States increased by about 400,000. And the number of Americans filing to start their own businesses is 59% higher than before 2020.

“When you look at the paths people take in their pursuit of meaning, you see that some of it has to do with personality differences. Some people are really career-driven, and their sense of self is very tied to that,” Routledge said. For others, their ambitions may lie elsewhere: creative endeavors, family, or community activism. Routledge said working for yourself gives you more flexibility to pursue what's truly meaningful. It also gives you an escape from a toxic office environment.

Short of everyone quitting and becoming CEOs themselves, employers need to figure out how to make work meaningful for employees. Burchell's research summarizes that “when managers respect, support, and listen to employees, and when employees have opportunities to participate, use their ideas, and have time to do good work, employees are less likely to feel like their work is a waste.” Without such improvements, the U.S. seems doomed to a slow downward spiral of disengagement.

Molly Lipson I'm a freelance writer and organizer from the UK.