Why doing nothing can be a powerful 'catalyst'

Shoji Morimoto's donothing rental service reconfigures the norms of transaction that decide our self-worth

- Somak Ghoshal

In 2018, the late anthropologist David Graeber published his best-selling book Bullshit Jobs, a savage critique of the futility of modern labour, especially the utterly pointless and mentally depleting jobs that bring little to no self-worth to the workers who slave at them for most of their lives.

Graeber categorised his bullshit jobbers into five key types: "flunkies" (whose sole focus is to make their bosses feel important), "goons" (who deceive people on behalf of their employers or clients, like corporate lobbyists and lawyers), "duct tapers" (who fix problems, but only for the short term), "box tickers" (who give an impression of being useful when they are not, like survey administrators and corporate compliance officers) and "taskmasters" (who generate extra work for those who don't need it, like middle managers).

Bullshit jobs, Graeber argued, are endemic in the contemporary knowledge economy, where bureaucratic drudgery meets process-driven sameness to create repetitive and meaningless tasks that add nothing to the value chain, either in terms of human, or financial, capital. Even though Graeber was equal parts acerbic and serious, there's more than a grain of truth in his hypothesis.

Around the time Graeber's book came out, Shoji Morimoto, a Japanese man in his late 30s, quit his bullshit job in the education industry and started a "Do-nothing Rental" service. Using Twitter (now X) as his launchpad, Morimoto began his venture at a stage when he had had just enough of his toxic boss, whose daily remarks to him ranged from "I can't tell if you're alive or dead" to "You're a permanent vacancy."