For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose
This is tough. In many cases I think that people identify as 
superficially &quot;worthless&quot;, I think there&#x27;s a justifiable reason for those jobs even if it takes a little bit of digging to understand why it exists. For example, I know of a few jobs right now that a person does that, if it disappeared tomorrow, would have no immediate measurable impact on the company those jobs exist within. But wait a year or two and those jobs turn out to generate long-term cost savings to the company.<p>But in other cases, jobs that seem to be superficially necessary turn out to not be needed at all. I just said goodbye to a colleague last week and after they left we went through their entire list of tasks and responsibilities -- things that kept an intelligent, highly educated, adult human fully occupied for more than 40 hours a week and paid well into six figures -- and entirely eliminated or rolled over all of those things with no specific impact to our work. The scary part was that much of it was work producing material that was highly demanded of by one of our customers -- the bulk of those 40+ man hours were reports and other deliverable. We simply told the customer that they wouldn&#x27;t be getting some of that stuff anymore or it would take a different shape to satisfy the need and they were ultimately fine with it.<p>What really concerns me are those jobs that need filling and nobody knows they exist and there&#x27;s nobody doing them. Things that would eliminate waste, consolidate work, or expand business, but some collective blind spot prevents those positions from being realized. The classic examples in software are good QA people or in many small companies, good sales and business development people.<p>If this still doesn&#x27;t make sense to this tech crowd. I&#x27;ll pose this, in the 90s the revolution was &quot;making software useful to people by making the functions of the software discoverable in a well designed GUI&quot;. How many of us sit in front of entire screen fulls of discovery-free GUI-less command-lines all day typing out things that took thousands of hours to master and would be bulk eliminated if somebody just put a nice usable GUI in front of it?