Aunties, there aren’t enough people doing the carework. There are not enough childcare providers, not enough teachers, not enough therapists, not enough home health aides and nurses and doctors, not enough social workers — the list goes on and on. In pretty much any caring profession these days, there’s a worker shortage. And in the home — in the domain of unpaid carework — there aren’t enough people doing the carework there, either. In many households, women do much more than their fair share. But even in households where the labor is divided equally, two adults often just aren’t enough.
Earlier this week, I spoke with Allison Lichter of Matriarchy Report about the relationship between not enough people doing the carework and too many people doing what we might call “jobs that don’t care.” Such jobs benefit the wealthy but add little real value to people’s lives. We may have to do some such jobs out of financial necessity, but they’re also kind of bullshit.
If you appreciate this conversation, I hope you’ll head over to Matriarchy Report and subscribe. Allison and her colleague Lane Anderson are both veteran journalists who became parents in their 40s — and they both spent a long time in Auntie roles before having kids. Their newsletter consistently focuses on the issues that matter to me — issues around kids, kin, and community. It’s a really, really good read.
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Now Let’s Get To It
Lisa Sibbett: Welcome, everyone. Today I'm so excited to be talking with Allison Lichter of Matriarchy Report. We're going to be talking about the idea that too few people are doing the care work and too many people are doing bullshit jobs. I invited Allison to talk to me about this because I feel like it takes a lot of nuance and she's got such subtle and thoughtful ways of thinking about this topic.
So “bullshit job” is a really provocative concept label. I'm going to kick this right over to Allison to help us start thinking about what this topic and what this concept even means.
Allison Lichter: Thank you so much, Lisa. I just want to say Matriarchy Report is a project of the amazing journalist Lane Anderson, and I’m so happy to be a part of that collaboration, and so happy to be here!
So, Lisa, you are the one who introduced me to the concept of the bullshit job, so I did some reading. The notion of the “bullshit job” comes from an American anthropologist named David Graeber. He conceived of this as a way of thinking about jobs where people spend their entire lives working to perform tasks that they secretly don't think really need to be performed. He argues there is spiritual and moral damage from this situation that arises when we're doing labor and work, often for others and for the profit of others, that on some fundamental level we don't really believe merits our time.
Lisa: David Graeber started articulating this idea in, I believe it was 2018 (Ed. note: His original essay on bullshit jobs actually came out in 2013). The way he was thinking about what it means was really around kind of drudgery and meaninglessness—any job that makes the world worse, or if it disappeared tomorrow it wouldn't matter, nobody would notice. I have often thought about this in terms of jobs in finance, jobs funded by venture capital, a lot of tech and startup jobs. And I think that he actually had a slightly different way of thinking about it that was more around this kind of drudge work, box checking and so forth. But I've always sort of gravitated toward this idea that with a bullshit job, maybe the purpose of the job is to benefit rich people.
Allison: I was talking about this with somebody recently who pointed out that it is a privilege to be able to say “my job is bullshit and I don't want to do it.” I'm totally Gen X, and one of the worst things you could do as a Gen X person was have a job that was lame. You know what I mean? That the worst thing in the world is a boring office job. What a drag.
But I don't really think that's what we're talking about anymore. I don't know if this was Graeber's real intention, but what we want to ask is: Do these jobs have meaning? Do they have meaningful social impact? Are people being served by these jobs? And for whom are they being created? If they're being created to create profit for somebody else, is that just a bunch of bullshit?
Lisa: Well put. And is it extractive? You know, in terms of what's being extracted both from the world and from our natural resources and also from the laborers ourselves?
We’ve been planning this bullshit jobs conversation for a few weeks, and then it was very timely because Anne Helen Petersen at Culture Study put out a great post about bullshit jobs last week. She made the point that the current job market makes finding any job really hard, particularly for entry-level workers and young people. Lots of people can't find a job right now. And of course, under this presidential administration, many people have lost their jobs, which is unconscionable in its own right and also has the effect of flooding the job market. So we're wanting to be careful not to assign blame to people, but rather to think about how we may find ourselves structurally pushed to seek out and persist in jobs that feel like total bullshit.
Allison: Capitalism incentivizes and corrals us into these bullshit jobs, David Graeber argues, and I kind of love this idea, that there’s a “bizarre, sadomasochistic” relationship we have with work, where we feel like pain in the workplace is the only way we can justify pleasure later. Our whole relationship to work, because of the way the structures and the systems work, is one of pain and discomfort and drudgery. That's the only way we can justify the pleasure we might take outside of work. But now, at a time when having a retirement plan or a pension feels less and less available for so many people, the idea that there’s a future when work is going to end and we'll just get to enjoy a retirement and be cared for is kind of unimaginable.
Lisa: Thinking of work as painful and the idea that we have to survive the pain in order to earn the right to have pleasure is so true – and it’s such bullshit.
I'm thinking about this bullshit job I had a few years ago, where I was really excited because I was going to be working in local government and I believed it would be such a meaningful job. Then it turned out that my whole team was just hamstrung, in terms of being allowed to do things that were actually impactful. Yet I was being paid twice as much as in my previous job as a public high school teacher. That had been incredibly meaningful work, but it was not physically sustainable with my chronic illness, and it was also really hard to make ends meet.
So many of us are being pushed into bullshit jobs for whatever reason – whether it's pay, whether it's that this is all there is available, whether we're just desperately grabbing for whatever job there is, whether we're on the hook for more costs than we can really afford.
And in the meantime, the very important care work jobs such as teaching, child care, health care, the list goes on and on – tasks both formally in the workplace and unpaid outside of the workplace – we just can't find enough people to do them.
Allison: We looked into some of the data around care work and who's doing it and how much you make doing it. Maybe I could just read some of this. This is all from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In 2024, the average child care worker in the U.S. earned $32,000 a year, which is $15.41 an hour. The numbers of people going into this work are declining, down in 2024 by 3%. That’s 29,000 fewer people working in child care from one year to the next.
Here’s some more data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average home health care aide makes $34,000 a year, which is $16.78 an hour. There are more people going into this kind of work, which is unsurprising because of how our population is aging.
And then 14% of the population – that’s 37.1 million people in 2021-2022 – provided unpaid elder care. This is a huge segment of people doing unpaid work, which is also unnoticed and unnamed. So what could be done to bring more visibility to this kind of care work? And to the role that it plays in people's lives and in the larger economy?
Finally, I also found some data about how many bullshit jobs are out there. A European survey found that about 4% of workers are doing what constitute “bullshit jobs.” It doesn't sound like that much, but then this research also found that one's perception of one's job as being useless has a really strong impact on well-being.
Lisa: It's occurring to me that there have to be ripple effects, right? If 4% of a workforce are feeling that way?
And if we broaden the definition of bullshit jobs to also include jobs that are simply extractive – extractive from our society, extractive from our natural resources, and also extractive from laborers ourselves – even if someone doesn’t self-identify as having a bullshit job, if they're miserable at work or experiencing a lot of diffuse distress because they're spending so much time doing work for the purpose of generating wealth, and then not actually having time to participate in meaningful carework, I think that that's got huge knock-on effects for our entire society.
It feels to me like a zero-sum game. The more people who are incentivized and pushed into extractive sectors, the fewer people are available to do the work that our society actually needs.
Allison: This is making me think that there have been so many conversations recently about the use of generative AI tools and how that will impact the workforce. And I remember seeing someone circulate a post something like, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” So this technology that we're all thinking about how it's going to impact our workplaces and our lives, what value is this going to bring? Is this going to free us up to do more of the creative and caregiving work?
Before today’s conversation, you and I talked about how when too many people are doing bullshit jobs and not enough people are doing the carework, this leaves us unprepared for emergencies. When we're so focused on bullshit work, it takes away our time from focusing on the household and the social. So when an emergency strikes, how then can we even be ready?
Lisa: Totally. Do our neighbors have structures of care to take care of children, to take care of elders, to take care of sick people and people with disabilities? Do we even know who's around us who might need care? This stuff is just so important. Our system of valuing work is so backwards.
You were rattling off important statistics about how underpaid care workers are. It’s making me think about a report from Oxfam International a couple of years ago, where they did a large-scale assessment of the value of unpaid care work, done primarily by women in the developing world. Let me just find these numbers, they’re bonkers.
So, according to the report, women and girls do more than two thirds of the world's paid care work and more than three quarters of the unpaid care work. And just the unpaid care work alone adds up to 12.5 billion hours of work a day, which we actually need for the economy to function. This care work is necessary for other people to go and do paid jobs. And even at just minimum wage, the value of this 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care work per day adds up to $10.8 trillion a year. This is what people are not being paid, but that's the value that their labor adds to the economy. And 42% of women worldwide can't get paid jobs because their unpaid care work responsibilities are so significant. And so care work itself is actually both valuable to our societies, but also economically incredibly valuable. Yet it's not where we're allocating resources.
Allison: All right, so this is the part where we switch to solutions. We are responsible for imagining possible futures. These systems have been designed the way they've been designed, and the most important thing to know is that they can be redesigned.
A few years ago, right after the height of the pandemic, I talked about this with the sociologist Jess Calarco. She explained that there used to be universal child care in the U.S. Around the start of World War II, we were able to create systems to provide universal child care because the economy demanded it. But then, of course, all of that got walked back in the 1950s. But it shows that these things are possible.
And then there are tons of people who've built networks of care because they're excluded from certain kinds of work, certain kinds of jobs, and all of us might be able to learn from them. We don't have to invent these systems from nothing.
Here in New York, there's a state-level initiative to develop more care policies, elder care policies, health care policies, and child care policies. And the governor of New Mexico has decided to make childcare a priority. Part of the answer is probably local and at the level of the state. This is a place we can put our hope and maybe draw attention to.
And then there's the personal level, too. What are we doing in our personal lives?
Lisa: At The Auntie Bulletin, I'm often thinking on the level of how our personal decisions can drive cultural change, which can then potentially lead to policy change. The thousands of Aunties and parents who read The Auntie Bulletin are building informal little networks of community care, usually unpaid – although there are also lots of paid alloparents who are part of community care networks, who are educators, teachers, athletic coaches, childcare workers. There’s a whole network of paid and unpaid care work where people are choosing to give our time and energy toward building a society and an economy that is less extractive and more nourishing for everybody in the system.
My sense is that there are some opportunities for personal responsibility and personal decision-making in the domain of bullshit jobs. We talked initially about how people in bullshit jobs often are doing that against their will or with very reluctant consent, just due to the economic system we're part of. But I also think there might sometimes be opportunities to phone it in a little bit more on the bullshit job and pivot a little bit more toward our informal care work responsibilities, or our formal care work responsibilities, our paid care work responsibilities. Because the more we drive cultural change at the hyper-local level, the more that cultural change can spread, and invigorate elected officials to make policies in alignment with the cultural milieu we foster.
New Mexico is such an interesting example, because clearly there has to be popular support for universal child care in order for elected officials to move forward with that plan. It doesn't come out of nowhere. It's not just elected officials deciding we're going to do this. It's because the people are demanding it and leading the culture in that direction.
Allison: I appreciate so much what you're saying about the power of cultural change and how what we do in our personal lives and our personal relationships does find its way into broader systems and policy change.
Some of what I love so much about what Lane Anderson writes about on Matriarchy Report, and what I also try to bring light to, is that there are a lot of different ways people can name what their labor looks like. We get really specific about how much money people are making or not making, how people are using their time and where that labor – whether it's elder care or child care – is being distributed. I think part of the point of doing this kind of writing, this kind of journalism, is to just keep surfacing the details of what people’s lives really look like. Then we can start to think about how things need to change, in order to support those individual choices.
There's something else you said that I also thought was so important, regarding giving a name to the Aunties. Before we got started on today’s Live, I was telling you how I've spread your newsletter to so many Aunties in my life. I think giving this role a name is such a powerful thing. It displaces or shakes up the primacy of “mother” as this key, essential, unchanging caregiver, which has been co-opted by the right to box mothers into a very specific vision. But in reality there are many, many ways to mother. So building community socially and interpersonally, and then letting it ripple up, I think can drive change.
I also want to mention that a few years ago, I did an interview with the researcher Jo Littler, who co-authored this book, The Care Manifesto. One of the things I appreciated about the idea of a manifesto around care is it really means that we have to put care at the heart of our economy. We have to put care at the heart of the state. And we can keep emphasizing that a caring government promotes collective joy, not just individual satisfaction and desire. A caring government means we reorganize work. We reorganize how local systems operate. We can even reorganize the idea of the nation. I believe if we can name this ideal, we can strive for it.
Now, I would love to hear you talk about the Interdependence Retirement Plan.
Lisa: Well, I have been – for many years – going back and forth between work that I love and is meaningful and is based in care and that doesn't pay enough money to make ends meet, and then jobs that are bullshit that do pay enough. I haven't figured out how to thread that needle. This had been leading to a lot of financial fear about my future because I keep choosing to do care work that doesn't pay very well. So recently I decided to double down on the idea of interdependence that I preach about so often, and just place my faith in the idea that interdependence is going to be a good enough retirement plan, and what I put forth will come back to me. It's a real leap of faith and it's a bit scary.
I also have the privilege to be able to do that. I have some safety nets that wouldn't be available to me if I had a less financial support from my partner, who has a little bit of money in his family, if I hadn't had access to property that was stolen from Indigenous people in my region, and lots of other kinds of advantages that make it a little safer for me to take a risk on an interdependence retirement plan.
But on the other hand, humans have been relying on interdependence retirement plans for most of human history. It's a scary thing to do to decide I'm going to stop trying to – well, I still would like to accumulate wealth, let's be clear – but that I'm going to stop fixating on trying to accumulate enough hundreds of thousands of dollars to live off the interest of my hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is the model that we are meant to be doing here in the United States and lots of other parts of the world, and instead care for the people around me and just have faith that care will come to me when I need it. I had to put out a request for help because my disability benefits were discontinued recently, and lots of people did offer help. So, you know, so far it's working.
Allison: Here’s one more small example. I live in an apartment building in Brooklyn with tons of elders. It feels so important that even in our little building, we are talking to our elders. I feel like these actions are enlivening in a way that creates more energy to look for opportunities to make structural change. We can do this work at many levels, which I'm really grateful for.
Lisa: Well, oh my gosh, what a great conversation, Allison. It's been such a delight to talk to you. I’m always afraid that nobody's going to come to these Substack Lives, and then we always have so many wonderful people show up. We're very grateful to everybody who was able to be here today. And Allison, thank you again for talking with me about this!
Allison: Thank you, Lisa!
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