Back in 2016, there was a scandal going around the Spanish papers.

A civil servant named Joaquín García was supposed to get a medal for his long service at the municipal water board. He was a supervisor in a well-paid position — an engineer by training. When his superiors started looking for him to give him his award, it turned out García wasn’t at the office. Nobody had seen him for quite some time. Nobody knew what he was doing.

Long story short, this guy had spent the past six years at home, reading 17th-century philosophy. He dropped in at the office once in a blue moon. He collected his paychecks and did no work at all.

And literally, no one noticed.

Lashing out at pointlessness

When I first heard the story, I marveled at García’s ballsiness. I thought he had nerves of steel and not much of a conscience.

But according to the book Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber), it was a little more complicated than that. Earlier in life, García was enthusiastic, and he had big ideas. Unfortunately, being a supervisor didn’t suit him. He also had some enemies in higher positions, and they never assigned him any real responsibilities. They couldn’t fire him, but they could make sure he had nothing substantial to do.

He became clinically depressed. Turning to philosophy was his last-ditch attempt to find meaning in life.

When put like that, the situation becomes uncomfortably familiar.

I had a job where everything I did felt pointless. The only goal was to keep the higher-ups happy. I couldn’t see any deeper meaning in my work.

When I slacked off, it didn’t matter, and nobody noticed. When I worked extra hard, that didn’t matter either. All my effort seemed to fall into a void.

The only thing that mattered was my bosses’ mood. I was just there as a prop.

If I could have gotten away with reading philosophy instead of showing up at the office, I would have done. Instead, I went to work in a haze, and I spent half my workday procrastinating. I wasn’t doing a bad job, necessarily, but I was far from fulfilling my potential. In the end, I quit recklessly. I built something of my own, and I never regretted it.

These days? I never get that urge just to phone it in. I understand what I’m doing and why. Even on my bad days, my job is meaningful to me personally, and I work harder because of that.

Why jobs lose their meaning

When I hear people talk about pointless jobs, I remember my time as an office drone.

The thing is, though, I know some perfectly happy office drones. They like the routine and the relative comfort — more power to them.

Every job can feel pointless to somebody. It’s not just about the nature of your work but also your temperament, coworkers, and other circumstances.

I’ve spoken to many people over the years, and I noticed some patterns. A job might feel meaningless because of:

• Monotony. Doing the same thing every day can kill your creative side and make your whole life feel drab and gray.
• Toxic bosses or coworkers. Like with Mr. García, sometimes there’s a social reason why you can’t get anything useful done at work. If someone keeps sabotaging you, you give up trying eventually.
• Everything you do is too abstract. When you work exclusively with hard-to-explain concepts, you may feel unmoored. No task feels finished. Every success is relative. Even you lose sight of your mission. Plus, people keep asking that annoying question — “Explain your job like I’m five!” — and treat you with smug derision when there’s no neat answer.
• Everything you do is too mundane. Then there’s the other extreme: toiling every day at something that feels undignified — for example, certain manual, repetitive tasks. Other people devalue you for what you do, and thinking of the bigger picture doesn’t help. You feel alienated from your work, and there’s no job satisfaction to be found.
• Moral hangups. Have you ever been stuck working for an MLM? If you can’t convince yourself that you’re actually improving lives with your diet pills and etheric oils, you just end up feeling slimy. You know that the work you do is worse than useless, and that weighs on you.
• You’re stuck with no chance of improvement. As the anti-vaxxing trend spread, a surprising number of doctors talked about how their job felt pointless. Nothing would get better unless the general populace had a change of heart, and these doctors felt helpless to do anything about that. I hear the same from teachers, social workers, etc. We like to say that their jobs are the most meaningful of all — but so many of them burn out anyway. They feel like they can’t change anything substantial.

When you’re stuck with a feeling of futility, it’s hard to be productive.

You feel like a cog in the machine. Self-actualization is a basic human need, and you’re not fulfilling it.

So, some people just stop giving a damn. They show up late, they zone out, and they fuck around on their phone instead of working. They’re rude to customers and coworkers, they keep their files in disarray, and they don’t care about best practices. They take bribes if that’s an option.

On the whole, they do as little work as possible for as long as possible.

On some level, they kind of hope they’ll get fired.

If your job feels meaningless, is it wrong to slack off?

Doing a bad job is relative. How much damage you cause depends on what your job is. A shitty junior sales rep only harms his coworkers who have to pick up the slack for him. A shitty nurse can cause someone a lifelong injury.

I’m not your confessor or your boss. I don’t know your life, and I can’t tell you what to do. Only you can assess what the consequences are.

I do know this, though. Half-assing your job will bring you emotional and psychological problems in the long run. It makes you feel like a fraud — because hey, you are one. The guilt and shame have to go somewhere. They’ll poison your personal life and turn you into a bitter pessimist.

In the short term, this may be better than unemployment. You can collect your paycheck, conserve your mental and physical energy, and start making plans to change your path.

Just don’t remain stuck.

You don’t have to love your job; you don’t even have to like it. But please don’t spend half your life doing something you feel is pointless. When you’re retired, you’ll look back in regret.