A most disturbing trend in the service industry (but also beyond service) is that toward emotional labor. What makes this trend disturbing and revolting is the connection between bullshit work (restylized in Orwellian lingo of the twenty-first century as “meaningful work”) and the masking associating with emotional labor. The correlation proposed: the more bullshit work, the more emotional labor.

Predictably, from 1930 to the present the economy in the developing world has moved from manufacturing (which has become largely automated as well as outsourced) to service and technology. This, however, has not created more leisure but instead more work. How can this be so? I quote at great length from David Graeber’s potent short article, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”:

[R]ather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is exactly what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the very sort of problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don’t really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

Here is where emotional labor comes in, for how is it otherwise possible for individuals not to wake up and see that they’re manifesting doing bullshit work? More: how is it possible to motivate workers to keep doing bullshit day after day? Well, first get them to think that what they’re doing has “meaning,” has “purpose,” is “inspiring,” is “valuable.” Pump them full of those philosophical terms during their formative years. Then second get them to change not only their behavior but also their attitude toward the shit they’re doing.

Emotional labor is said to come in two varieties: “surface” or “surface acting” and “deep acting.” In the first case, I pretend, say, to be glad and cheery, but while doing so I am masking what I actually feel (say, discontent and churlish). In the second case, I’ve gotten myself to believe that I am actually cheery and so am emoting chipperness. Contrary to expectations, what is more perverse is “deep acting” for it goes to show that the individual has lost an important distinction between what is worth emoting (actual love for my beloved) and what is not worth emoting (a subtle, appropriate distaste for a smarmy colleague) so that he readily believes that doing this shit is meaningful, beneficial, valuable, etc. etc.

But that is not all. The perversity is to be felt in those who are “lucky enough” to have jobs that they are supposed to feel gratitude for doing the sort of bullshit work that others would “love to do.” “It’s a privilege just to be working.” Oh my. Hence, they can’t even admit to themselves without a sense of guilt that the sort of thing they’re doing is actually a bunch of crap. Mask that from themselves in a bout of self-deception and some “surface acting.” Then heap onto this perversity further ideological layers–all the positive psychology that would have us think positively about all sorts of nonsense as well as all the mindfulness that would have us become calmer when we should be justifiably angry in the face of injustice–and you begin to sense the sheer enormity of the mess we’re in.

In sum, the more bullshit, the more emotional labor; the more emotional labor, the more guilt and misgivings; the more guilt and misgivings, the greater my efforts at being mindful and thinking positively. Delusion. What has gone missing is a clear-eyed perception of reality.