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Is Your Job a Waste of Time?

Michael Galdo

In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, anthropologist David Graeber proposes that there is a vast swath of jobs (anywhere from 30–60%) that should not exist and, should these all suddenly disappear, no one would care. In fact, the world would probably be a better place: “I am a corporate lawyer, I contribute absolutely nothing to this world and I am miserable all the time,” shares one such employee about his job. Graeber defines a “bullshit job” as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence."

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Restoring Not Rebuilding Notre Dame: On Learning Millennia-Old Building Techniques

Patrick J. Keating

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Things: Issue Three

In work, says John Paul II, “man participates in the activity of God himself.” He takes part in that “gospel of work” proclaimed by the One who was “a man of work, a craftsman like Joseph of Nazareth” (Laborem Exercens). It is by way of Christ that the human craftsman involves himself with created things, acknowledging their inner goodness, and transforming them to bring out of them a new fruitfulness.

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Humanum is about the human: what makes us human, what keeps us human, and what does not. We are driven by the central questions of human existence: nature, freedom, sexual difference and the fundamental figures to which it gives rise, man, woman, and child. We probe these in the context of marriage, family, education, work, medicine and bioethics, science and technology, political and ecclesial life. We sift through the many competing ideas of our age so that we might “hold fast to what is good” and let go of what is not. In addition to articles, witness pieces, and book reviews ArteFact: Film & Fiction searches out the human in the literary and cinematic arts.

Humanum is published as a free service by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.