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  "description": "'What did you get done this week?'",
  "path": "/work-meaning-and-the-long-road-home/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-13T00:30:36.000Z",
  "site": "https://goodoil.news",
  "tags": [
    "Philip Crump",
    "Cranmer’s Substack"
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  "textContent": "Philip Crump\n_Member of the NZME Editorial Advisory Board, NZ On Air and the Waitangi Tribunal and incoming chair of Foundation North. Former lawyer at Russell McVeagh and partner at Kirkland and Ellis._\n\nIn April 2022 Elon Musk was a major shareholder in Twitter and had become engaged in an increasingly fraught public exchange with Twitter’s CEO Parag Agrawal.\n\nTwitter had just offered him a board seat.\n\nThen Musk publicly questioned whether Twitter was dying. Agrawal pushed back, telling Musk that the criticism wasn’t helping. Musk’s reply arrived less than a minute later.\n\n“What did you get done this week?”\n\nHe then told Agrawal he wasn’t joining the board. That the whole thing was a waste of his time. And that he would make an offer to take the company private.\n\nMonths later he did. He walked into Twitter’s headquarters carrying a kitchen sink, fired Agrawal, and cut 80 per cent of the company’s 7,500-strong workforce.\n\nThe deeper question beneath Musk’s dramatic action is one anthropologist David Graeber became famous for asking: not what do you do but _does it actually need doing at all_?\n\nGraeber popularised the term “bullshit jobs”, and the label stuck because many people immediately recognised what he meant.\n\nGraeber identified five types of bullshit job.\n\n_Flunkies_ , who exist to make their superiors feel important.\n\n_Goons_ , hired to work against the interests of others.\n\n_Duct tapers_ , who spend their working lives temporarily fixing problems that could be permanently solved but aren’t, because a permanent fix would eliminate the need for duct tapers.\n\n_Box tickers_ , who generate the appearance of useful activity such as the compliance report nobody reads, the survey which changes nothing, or the working group which reviews the recommendations of the previous working group.\n\nAnd finally _taskmasters_ , who create work for people who don’t need it, manage people who don’t need managing, and spend most of their working day in generously catered meetings organising further meetings.\n\nGraeber’s explanation for why these roles proliferate is worth considering. He called it _managerial feudalism_ : the tendency of organisations to accumulate layers of management, not because the work requires it, but because headcount confers status. Managers need underlings to feel important. Underlings need their own underlings in turn. The pyramid grows not because it is efficient or necessary but because hierarchy, in large organisations, becomes an end in itself.\n\nThe public sector is often criticised for this type of managerial feudalism but it is just as much a feature of private sector organisations.\n\nThe Twitter experiment was, in a sense, the largest real-world test of Graeber’s thesis. When Musk cut 80 per cent of the workforce, the near-universal prediction was that the platform would collapse. Critical systems would fail, misinformation would proliferate and the product would deteriorate beyond recovery.\n\nBut despite the dire predictions, the platform did not collapse in the way many expected.\n\nWhatever one thinks of Musk’s blunt methods, the core result is difficult to dismiss. It suggested that large organisations probably contain far more roles than are strictly necessary. No doubt when Musk walked into Twitter headquarters carrying his kitchen sink he saw many flunkies, box tickers and taskmasters consuming more productive energy than they generated.\n\nGraeber was not, however, simply making an efficiency argument. He recognised that the bullshit job often serves a social function we have never quite been willing to name openly. A job, even a largely pointless one, provides income. And it also provides structure, identity, routine and the right to say that you work. In a culture that has tied self-worth to employment for generations, the bullshit job is, in some sense, disguised welfare. It is society’s way of keeping people connected, purposeful and dignified without admitting that is what it is doing.\n\nThat is not nothing. The psychological research is consistent that unemployment damages mental and physical health in ways that go well beyond income loss. The structure and social connection that even a relatively meaningless job provides turn out to matter enormously to human wellbeing. Nevertheless, people in these roles usually know that their work is pointless.\n\nSo the question raised by the Twitter experiment is not simply how much organisational fat can be removed. It is the harder underlying question: as we increasingly strip out the roles that exist primarily to keep people occupied and feeling useful or which become redundant because of artificial intelligence and automation, what do those people do?\n\nUnemployment is not the answer. Neither, for most people, is a leisurely early retirement.\n\nIn a country undergoing the demographic transformation New Zealand now faces, this will quickly become one of the central economic and social challenges of the next 20 years.\n\nProfessor Paul Spoonley, one of the country’s leading sociologists, has documented this trajectory. In the 1960s there were seven working-age New Zealanders for every person over 65. Today that ratio, known as the old-age dependency ratio, is 4:1. By 2065 it is projected to hit 2:1.\n\nTwo workers supporting every retiree.\n\nNew Zealand superannuation, as currently structured, was designed for a demographic that no longer exists, one where people worked, retired briefly, and died. The average New Zealander now lives nearly 20 years beyond the age of eligibility. The fiscal consequences of that shift, compounded by a shrinking ratio of contributors to recipients, are simply not sustainable.\n\nBut the answer is not simply to raise the retirement age and leave people to manage the consequences. That treats a profound social and cultural transition as merely a fiscal problem.\n\nAlthough many jobs in New Zealand still involve physical labour, for most people work today is no longer primarily physical in nature. Structure, usefulness and connection matter just as much to people as income. That is why the hard-stop retirement model is not only fiscally unsustainable, but increasingly out of step with longer lives, healthier ageing and how many people now want to participate in society.\n\nWhat the current debate misses is that a person’s working life need not consist solely of full-time employment followed by complete retirement. In an economy shaped increasingly by knowledge, judgement and relationships rather than physical endurance alone, there is far greater scope for a gradual transition.\n\nThe shift required is as much cultural as it is administrative.\n\nWe have inherited a model designed for shorter lives, physical labour and a demographic structure that no longer exists. Adjusting the retirement age may prove to be necessary. But the larger question is how we build a society that remains serious about the value of contribution at every stage of life that is, for most of us, considerably longer than the model was ever designed for.\n\nThis article was originally published by Cranmer’s Substack.",
  "title": "Work, Meaning and the Long Road Home",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-13T00:30:35.780Z"
}