Headshot parents, if you didn't notice it in the title, our topic today is book the jobs

that bleep you just heard, it won't be in the rest of the episode.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan.

Many of us at some point in our careers have had jobs that seem pointless.

I once had a bullshit job working as a work study student when I was in college.

I passed out flyers for the street car during one summer, I could not figure out why I was doing it.

I've had some temp jobs where I've literally sat in the closet.

Jobs where you ask yourself, what am I even doing here? Like really, what is my actual role at this

company? If I disappear tomorrow, would anyone notice? I was doing some paper filing, but they didn't

have that much paper filing and for a week I sat in a supply closet.

Doing expense reports and creating like a new piece of paper for every single transaction item

on every receipt for every single thing that expense like down to like the most minimal thing.

This week we're looking at jobs that feel so pointless, so gut wrenchingly boring,

that they are in the words of one expert, bullshit.

If you don't have one of these jobs yourself, you probably know someone who does.

Like the guy binging YouTube videos on his computer at work, or the woman who always seems to be playing solitaire.

So it was almost all office workers, almost all people who had jobs where you know you kind of see them there and you kind of wonder,

is that kind of really doing anything? Well it turns out, you know, they're not.

Why do these jobs exist? Why do they seem to be proliferating?

And what effects do these jobs have on us?

The American TV show The Office tells the story of a paper supply company in Pennsylvania.

People show up at work, but it's not always clear what they're doing.

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