"This is basically selling your soul. It's so pointless."
On reducing the pressure for your job to have meaning.
A man wakes up. He wears a cosy little dressing gown. He has a shower. He puts on a polo shirt, trousers, a belt, shoes. He inhales asthma medication. He finger guns himself in the mirror. He makes a shake, then slowly slides a laptop into a bag. He takes the bin to the kerb. Finger guns again. A doughnut for breakfast. A 10-minute commute. Working on a laptop. Early lunch of mini burgers. A picnic. Back to work ‘til 4. Laptop slid - again, oddly slowly - back into the bag. Buying dog food. Home at 4.30. Time with dog. Dinner. Done.
How does this sequence make you feel? What do you think of this man, with his tucked in top and his enjoyment of American restaurant franchises? Does he make you sad? Mad?
To some people, this man is a symbol of all that is wrong with the world. He is an ordinary man with an ordinary job who shares his life on TikTok under the handle hubs.life, where his bio says he wants to “normalize the norm”. He now has an agent, perhaps in part because last week his TikTok videos crossed the internet regions and ended up on Twitter, where someone who has paid for a blue tick (and thus earns money from engagement) decreed that hubs.life’s average day is “basically selling your soul”.
Some people have responded to disagree with this description. Others have agreed that hubs.life is stuck in an endless cycle of dull, meaningless drudgery, and that this is not how any of us should be living. “This video was so depressing that I started tearing up watching it,” said a man named Mike (the music hubs.life has chosen probably doesn’t help).
It’s true that this man’s work doesn’t appear to be especially fulfilling, meaningful, or purposeful. He doesn’t describe it as his life’s calling. Given that it’s primarily done in a cubicle on a laptop, his employment might be one of Graeber’s bullshit jobs. And this is very different to the type of work that we’re used to seeing on our screens, where we’re more accustomed to clips of influencers who have quit the grind and found freedom, or fictional doctors running from emergency to emergency, or celebrities who earn money through creativity.
But while this type of work, this type of life, isn’t often put in the spotlight, it is very much the norm. Most of us don’t have the super exciting, super meaningful jobs that are now held up as the ideal (rather than the girlboss roles that used to be). Instead we have very ordinary lives; 9 to 5s and dinners made from Gousto boxes and watching that TV show everyone in the office is talking about. And here’s what I’d like to say about this: it’s okay.
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
It’s true that meaning and purpose are important, vital things. We need to feel our lives have a point to them, that there’s some bigger reason for the effort required to drag our bodies out of bed. But in our understanding of this fact, we’ve misdirected our focus and created a pressure - a pressure for the work we do to be the most meaningful part of our lives.
There are some people for whom this will be the case. They’ll find meaning in their work. They’ll wake up and do something or make something and that’ll make them feel fulfilled and it will also earn them money. But there are others who just… don’t find meaning in employment. That doesn’t mean their life is ‘pointless’ or less than, but that they find meaning elsewhere in their lives; maybe in their relationships, the potatoes they grow in the garden, the children they raise, the paintings they do. These things are difficult to make money from, and so work is a necessity. For these people, work isn’t providing meaning, but it’s providing the ability to do the things that provide meaning.
I believe we all need to recognise which of these camps we fall into, and to give ourselves permission to lean into that. Mr Hubs.life (real name: Connor) is a great example of someone for whom meaning comes outside of work - he’s happily married, he has a nice home, a dog, a baby on the way. His job gives him the funds needed to have all these things. He knows his job is not the point of his existence, and as such he doesn’t invest any more time or energy in it than is necessary - he leaves at 4 on the dot, he doesn’t define himself by his job, and he takes his full lunch break to go hang out with his dog. If hubs.life were to win the lottery or to receive universal basic income, I doubt he would still turn up to the office and clock in every day. He’d spend his days doing all the other non-work stuff.
To some of us, this all feels off. We need our work to be our everything, or at least a major component. But one type is not better than the other. We just need to recognise what makes us tick and then go with that - if your meaning comes from work, go all in and pursue that passion, if your meaning comes from non-work time, stop putting pressure on yourself to have a job that ‘matters’ and instead treat your work as a means to an end. Bullshit jobs are fine if they enable you to do non-bullshit. Bullshit jobs are great as long as you’re not defining your life, purpose, and worth by them.
If living a life like hubs.life makes you despair, that’s fine. Don’t do it! Pursue purpose and passion and chase your dreams. But if you watch his videos and think ‘actually, that looks quite nice’, that’s entirely alright, too. [Imagine I’m ending this by doing finger guns].