In between sci-fi books, I throw in a non-fiction book from my backlog as a change of pace. This time it was David Geaeber's book "Bullsh*t Jobs".
Some books light your mind up and realign your thinking. Other books effectively connect the dots that you were kinda aware of in your peripheral vision that were never in focus. To me, this book is the latter.
I started out thinking we're going to get into a fun breakdown of the kind of bullsh*t jobs that I knew were out there, and I would get a good chuckle out of a series of "can you believe *that*?" anecdotes. And to be sure there were plenty of that in the beginning, things that make you shake your head with a sense of recognition, and all that.
What I didn't expect is where the book veered towards after that set up. A discussion on the moral, social, and political weight of the concept of a "job", a theory around why jobs that feel satisfying to do, the ones where you can actually feel like you're helping people and making the world a better place consistently pay less than jobs where you feel like you're sucked into a meaningless engagement and lost your soul along the way pay you more. It goes through what "work" is supposed to mean in society, it's moral/political framing. How that framing shifted during the transition from feudal society to capitalism, and this modern thing we're living under, which he takes as something different from capitalism in the classic sense, based less on production and more on (re-)allocation of wealth and looting, for all practical purposes. Plus a whole discussion on why corporations actually hire people for low-paid low status positions with no expectation that they'll be doing anything meaningful at all, and the corporate incentives around that concept.
This one turned out to be a far more interesting book than I had originally expected it to be. Highly recommended as an excellent read that has an interesting take on capitalism wrapped inside.
Now back to fiction and on to another Ballard book.