Are you a telemarketer? Compliance officer? Middle manager? Corporate lawyer? Do you feel like you contribute nothing concrete or meaningful, day in and day out, as you toil away at a job you believe is essentially pointless?

Then you’re in a ‘bulls**t job,’ according to one professor – who’s just written a new book about the millions of people whose jobs could ‘vanish in a puff of smoke’ with no real consequences for the world.

Bulls**t Jobs: A Theory – by anthropology professor David Graeber – posits that, given technological developments and automation, we should all have much more free time in any given week; instead, the opposite has happened.

Continued tech advances and the rise of robots may worry people about their future job security – five robots have replaced seven employees at a Swiss bank, for example, and are so efficient that the bank is taking on more robots this month – but Graeber explains how technological developments to date have simply prompted the human workforce to make up new jobs and industries that have no discernable function whatsoever.

Millions of workers feel their jobs are pointless, as automation - which should have led to a shorter work week - instead gave rise to fields and jobs with no real function, claims David Graeber, anthropology professor and author of Bulls**t Jobs: A Theory

Graeber's mother worked in a garment factory and he says he comes from a 'very working-class background' in New York with 'people who worked with their hands' - giving him an outsider's insight into bulls**t jobs

‘Rather 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 of 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,’ he writes in a 2013 essay which laid the foundation for the book.

And if his research findings are anything to go by, there are plenty of unfulfilled souls trudging through their professional lives, wondering how they ended up in their positions and what the point of those jobs might be (often concluding that there is no point, at all.)

‘What I ended up doing, when I was researching the book, I created an email account called doihaveabulls**tjoborwhat@gmail.com,’ Graeber, who advertised the account and invited people to share their experiences, tells DailyMail.com. ‘I said, “Have you ever had a job that’s totally pointless? Tell me all about it.”’

The responses came rolling in – in their hundreds, says Graeber, who teaches at the London School of Economics and was also a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

‘I wrote them all in one giant file, and I color coded it for content,’ he says, clarifying that he’s not labeling any jobs ‘bulls**t’ himself; he’s only reporting the feelings expressed by people actually working in those positions.

‘Telemarketers were way up there,’ he tells DailyMail.com ‘There’s nobody in telemarketing who doesn’t feel that their job shouldn’t exist … It’s also unusual because most bulls**t jobs pay pretty well and have good benefits; telemarketers aren’t like that. It’s the worst of the worst.’

He continues: ‘Compliance workers were probably the biggest one of all. I mean, all these corporations have people whose job is to make it look like they’re in compliance with regulations which they have absolutely no interest in being in compliance with. So basically, they’re all just scam artists.

‘People in banks describe this incredible process whereby every transaction, they would send it to some guy in the Cayman Islands or Mauritius or some place, that just automatically stamped that everything was approved – say yes, fine, and then they go, “Well, we can’t have 100 percent right, so they have to find some errors, typos, claim they were errors. Then they would send it to another office where they would make statistical graphs out of the number of errors and send that to a data [department] … It’d be office after office, complete nonsense.

Graeber, left, teaches at the London School of Economics; his new book, right, follows a 2013 essay in which he outlined his views that 'just went mad' - prompting reaction that surprised him from people who felt they were trapped in the bulls**t jobs he described

Graeber says that people responded to bulls**t jobs in different ways; some quit and switched to more fulfilling work, such as one Toronto man who became a teacher on an Indian reservation; others powered through until they could save for retirement; others tried to compromise by supplementing their high-paid bulls**t work with more satisfying endeavors

‘A lot of middle management, I got people just directly saying, “My job is supervising people who don’t actually need supervision.” And also these people were promoted! They were doing the work and they’d kick them upstairs to management because they do a good job, and they say: “Well, what am I supposed to now? I sit here eight hours a day, but these guys would basically do exactly the same thing as my work here. I can try to encourage them slightly, but basically, there’s nothing for them to do.”’

Graeber admits that the entire process, from industry to industry, is often reminiscent of the transatlantic hit comedy show The Office.

‘The Office is actually real; this stuff does happen,’ he tells DailyMail.com. ‘The joke is: It’s not a joke.

‘It’s a cliché to say things make you laugh and cry at the same time, but this is a perfect example, because you can’t not laugh – it’s ridiculous – but then you realize the joke ain’t funny after the first year or so; you’ll be doing this for the rest of your life. So people laugh, and then they go crazy.’

There are additional ramifications, he says, when people feel trapped people in ‘bulls**t jobs.’

‘Another interesting thing that came up is that the less point there is to the work and the more everybody secretly realizes what they’re doing is stupid, the worse they treat each other,’ he says. ‘There’s much more screaming and abuse and bullying.’

He takes aim at his own industry of academia, claiming that they used to be run by scholars, whereas now they’re run by administrators surrounded by ‘flunkies’ whose job descriptions are vague and, often, unnecessary.

In his essay five years ago, he did point out the irony of his own position as anthropology professor when it came to pointing out ‘bulls**t jobs.’

‘I realize any such argument is going to run into immediate objections: ‘Who are you to say what jobs are really “necessary?” What’s necessary anyway? You’re an anthropology professor, what’s the “need” for that? (And indeed a lot of tabloid readers would take the existence of my job as the very definition of wasteful social expenditure.) And on one level, this is obviously true. There can be no objective measure of social value,’ he writes in his 2013 essay in Strike Magazine (The Economist wrote a response piece and called Graeber’s essay ‘amusing.’)

He describes jobs which are indispensable like ‘nurses, garbage collectors or mechanics, [where] it’s obvious that were they vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic.

‘A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place,’ he writes in the essay. ‘It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were we all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.’

Graeber says he’s seen the difference himself; the 57-year-old grew up in Manhattan, the son of a plate stripper working with off-set photography and a factory worker mother.

‘I’m from a very working class background, and I’d say that’s kind of relevant, because I’m an anthropologist, and anthropology is based on the assumption that the people from a different culture will be able to see things that people who grew up there wouldn’t be able to see,’ he says, offering the example that people from Madagascar or New Guinea may be best equated with their homes and culture, but they can’t view it through a wider lens.

The less point there is to the work and the more everybody secretly realizes what they’re doing is stupid, the worse they treat each other. There’s much more screaming and abuse and bullying

‘There’s an insight from being an outsider, and in the world of academia and the world of professional life, I’m kind of an outsider,’ he tells DailyMail.com. ‘I didn’t grow up this way; I grew up with people who worked with their hands and don’t come from this world, and that’s like, “Wait a minute – You guys don’t really do anything, do you?”’

He says it has been illuminating, watching and reading as people who hold these jobs come to the same conclusion. Following the publication of his 2013 essay, he says, ‘it just went mad.’

‘So many people just started writing these confessions. I still remember so clearly, blogs and sort of comment sections … I would just sort of stare at comments and areas, each guy saying, “Oh my god, it’s true; I’m a corporate lawyer. I contribute nothing to society. I’m miserable all the time.” So these kind of confessions like this. I was really shocked that I really kind of hit a nerve because no one was allowed to talk about it.

‘Obviously you don’t have much else to think about; you’re sitting there all day doing nothing but looking at cat memes or downloading TV shows, updating your facebook status or something, playing computer games. A lot of time to brood.’

The story of one miserable corporate lawyer came from one of Graeber’s own former schoolmates. He got in touch with a friend he hadn’t seen since the age of 12, and was ‘amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band,’ he wrote.

‘I’d heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world.

‘Yet, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he’d lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, “taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.”

‘Now he’s a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.’

Graeber says that valued and necessary professions such as nursing are being plagued by 'bulls**tization' - where workers are forced to file paperwork and reports and assessments that take away from time spent doing their actual jobs of caring for patients

Graeber explains how, as automation increased and reduced factory jobs and similar work, 'we have seen the ballooning of 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'

Various people who shared their stories after reading Graeber’s work took different paths, he said. Some had already realized their jobs were ‘bulls**t’ and decided it was the final straw, such as one man working in an unfulfilled position in Toronto.

‘The guy said, “Ok, to hell with it, I quit, and I’m going to become a school teacher on an Indian reservation,”’ Graeber says.

‘Other people went the other way. They said, “I used to be a preschool teacher and it was great, but I just couldn’t pay the bills,”’ so they got a job in medical insurance compliance, where the ‘entire job was to take forms, highlight them and put them in another file.’

Still others, he tells DailyMail.com, ‘just took it as long as they possibly could and then finally saved up enough money that they could quit and move to something meaningful.’

But compromising was the answer for another group of dissatisfied people.

‘They would figure out ways to do bulls**t on a contract basis for just some of the week, so there was this one guy that stuck in my head called Hannibal in the book – who figured out a way he could work one or two days a week writing bulls**t reports for pharmaceutical marketing research, and he could get £10,000 a pop for these things … so he spent the rest of the week doing work with a team of people who were trying to create a new diagnostic system to identify tuberculosis, which would probably save hundreds of thousands of lives across the world.

Bulls**tization happens all over the map. I talked to nurses who said that 50 percent of the time now is spent on forms. It never used to be that way. Grade school teachers – you have to have an elaborate lesson plan, reviews and meetings and again, half the time is no longer spent teaching

‘But nobody would fund it; it wasn’t really a commercial gain to be had by it. So now all of them were doing bulls**t a few days a week and then spending the rest of the time volunteering.’

Graeber himself offers a few solutions for how to combat the modern incarnation of bulls**t jobs. One solution, he says, would be to massively reduce working hours to 20 hours a week or some reduced timeframe. Another, he says, is offering a universal basic income.

‘It’s probably the best solution; obviously it’s very radical,’ he tells DailyMail.com. ‘I mean, just give everybody £15,000 or £10,000, and then after that say, it’s up to you – so enough to live on. The major objection to universal basic income is “People are lazy, so if you give them something for nothing, they’ll just sit around all day.”

‘Well, that’s clearly not true, otherwise these guys who are being paid to sit around all day [currently] would be somewhat happy. There’s a million examples. The one that I like to give is prisons. Even in low security prisons, where you could just sit around and watch television all day and play cards, they withdraw people’s right to work in like the prison laundry as punishment. People really want to do some work, and these are probably the least social people, the most anti-social people we have – they’re in prison. But they still want to be doing some better work than just sitting around.’

In addition to bulls**t jobs, however, there is also the ‘bulls**tization’ of jobs, as he deems it – overcomplicating jobs with real purpose and making them less effective. He says two prime examples of this are nursing and teaching, offering his own experience as evidence. Because of the hierarchy and the division of labor from the top down, he says, there are many ‘flunkies’ who, in order to justify their existence, ‘have been coming up with things for people like me to do’ such as weekly surveys.

‘Basically, you have to spend less and less of your time teaching and studying and running things – and more and more of your time assessing the way you do so. Therefore you actually can’t do it, because you’re busy assessing – and that type of bulls**tization happens all over the map.

‘Nursing is actually a really good example; I talked to nurses who said that 50 percent of the time now is spent on forms. It never used to be that way. Grade school teachers – you have to have an elaborate lesson plan, reviews and meetings and again, half the time is no longer spent teaching.’