To believe most jobs are pointless?

This makes no sense.
Society shut down so of course there were jobs that were unnecessary at the time. That isn't a true representation of society and the labour market.
Plus, I bet you'd be surprised at how many jobs were needed and how many people kept on working.

My friend armed with a 1st class degree and masters in History got a job straight out of uni for a clinical commissioning group for NHS... she tells me she doesn't really know what she's doing and she just attends power point meetings and occasionally makes power points herself. She earns the same as my husband who is a registrar doctor working in theatre and ICU.

Reminds of the tv series 2012 followed by W1A , or going further back, ‘ Yes, Minister’ (and Yes, Prime minister)

The difference there is that whilst the outcome is obviously more important from the paramedics work, you could train a large % of people to do it if needed. The vast majority of people couldn't play at a level which is interesting to watch. Therefore the societal value placed on football players is high because people are willing to pay a lot for entertainment.
It's equivalent to saying all restaurants are pointless as you can buy a £4 chicken so they're not needed. But people will pay more for entertainment/experiences.

In my experience, the “lowly” jobs are the most important. Admins and techs running around like blue arse flies. And then the management positions where I’ve seen a whole of uselessness.

It’s not that I think compliance is entirely pointless - some regulations are essential, like H&S or safeguarding. But there’s also a lot of bureaucracy that seems to exist just to justify itself rather than add real value. Ever worked somewhere where paperwork and red tape slow everything down without making anything safer or more efficient?*

So what compliance is pointless then? I think the key here is in 'seems to' in that it suggests a lack of understanding, you're viewing it from an outside perspective. I understand that some roles may seem this way on the surface, however the more you look at them the clearer it becomes why they exist. Yes in large public sector organisations some roles can seem futile but that's the challenge of doing anything on such a big scale, it takes more people to manage the bits that, in a smaller private company, would fall under one person & not take much time.

You'd notice pretty quickly when your access to online resources at work broke down, retail prices increased from food wastage, or MOD spending went through the roof, or HR issues went unresolved, or you couldn't buy or sell property using a solicitor, or couldn't book a medical appointment because its being triaged by an AI system which is either manipulated to get results by service users overwhelming demand or can't understand your issue.
This is equivalent to when some men completely ignore the admin of running a home for example, things seem fine and unnecessary until they're not being done.

If the "product" of your work does nothing to benefit society or improve loving standards, then yes, you could argue that your job is pointless. I say this in the sense that ultimately you produce nothing of any real worth.

For example, a paramedic is paid a fraction of the amount that a footballer makes. But when someone you love needs urgent medical care, who is more valuable?

Who deserves the higher salary?

The footballer is absolutely replaceable, if they walked off the pitch in the middle of a match, regardless of how "important" the match was, nothing bad would happen, nobody would die. The Paramedic on the other hand could literally have someone's life in their hands.

So who is worth more?

Ultimately, what is the function of work?

To make money in order to keep the economy functioning?

To create jobs so people have a means of paying tax, regardless of the value of those jobs?

Unfortunately, we don't pay people based on the value of their job to society, if we did, then refuse collectors and sewerage workers would be the most highly paid. Instead,we pay people based on arbitrary measures. So a footballer earns more than someone who literally saves other peoples lives.

DH is a civil servant, always has been. A lot of his job sounds pointless to me to be honest.. all meetings and endless back and forth on stuff that sounds like a load of bunkum to me. However I can tell you he works very hard and is most certainly not sitting idle. It doesn't seem like his job has a lot of meaning or that anyone is any better off for all his drive in meeting his targets, motivating his team, travelling the country to all these meetings.. the whole system seems full of BS.

I am a police officer and I work fucking hard for not that much money.

My husband works in IT and is paid over 120k. He often gets up late, misses meetings, has naps when WFH, takes 2 hr lunch breaks etc (although frequently works late to make it up) and he moans about not getting a big enough annual bonus.

The disparity in value of work, effort put in, and compensation does annoy me, but I have to acknowledge that he worked harder than me at uni and went into a canny line of work when I went in for public sector work.

I am just glad I'm married to him and not another police officer!!

I was working prior to the expansion of computing. We did our work forms went to the data prep and run in batch. Next day a report would come of relevant information.

When PCs started appearing with excel it was mainly the accountants wanted them. The more the PCs improved the more they were used. I don't think we ever lost staff due to IT just moved them around. Basically they simply made more jobs to do. Businesses worked prior to all the analysis, makes me wonder sometimes if its just a case of making work for works sake.

As you can see OP, capitalism is a essentially a religion and many people don't like having their beliefs challenged. Most jobs exist for the sake of generating profit for the corporate overlords, and that's all there is to it. I work in advertising - the ultimate bullshit job. There are many jobs like mine where there would be no appreciable difference if they vanished overnight. Unfortunately I don't see any way out of this system because it's just too big of a beast. Humanity made a mistake moving away from agrarian living, but we passed the point of no return a long long time ago and a lot of people can't imagine living any other way.

I’m not saying all jobs are pointless - of course, builders, engineers, and researchers contribute real value. But let’s be honest, there are plenty of office jobs where people spend their time on unnecessary meetings, reports no one reads, and tasks that don’t actually improve anything. If those roles disappeared overnight, would the world notice?

As someone who is in a classic "Bullshit Job", there are several reasons why this line of argument irritates the fuck out of me (leaving aside the fact that I need my job to pay my mortgage).

Number one: it's economically illiterate: yes "the world would notice" if a large percentage of white collar jobs disappeared overnight. They contribute to growing the economy and get people paid. People who work in marketing may not pass your ethical "sniff test" but they still need jobs.

You have also missed the point that if people in bullshit jobs lose their jobs there is less money to pay for the worthy work which you consider everyone should be doing, such as plumbing, electrical work, home renovations or working for the NHS. You may think that this doesn't matter because City people and marketers don't deserve to have jobs but let me tell you it would massively hit the wider economy if they all got fired.

Two: the sanctimoniousness of sitting behind a keyboard and opining as to who should be employed is breathtaking. You basically appear to be saying no one should have a job except healthcare professionals, builders and farmers. What about the rest of us? Do we not get the right to make our own money? Who gets to decide which jobs are important. Should the government maintain an "approved jobs" list to make sure no one is illicitly working on a marketing plan?

Three: this argument is almost always a Trojan Horse for some homespun bollocks about how women are better off being at home with their kids. That's all good and well if you have someone to support you. Not all of us have this luxury.

Can I keep my Bullshit Job please or would you prefer me to live on benefits so you and your more ethically acceptable pals can look down on me?

Many nail bars and car washes are a front for money laundering or other murky business. Plenty of uber eats drivers are foreign student scammers who have brought their entire families over. Many jobs are not exactly what they seem.

David Dunning and Justin Kruger would have something to say about how you view your daughter's "pointless" job.

If MN is anything to go by, there seem to be plenty of "non-jobs" out there.

Lots of posts by people claiming to get all their work done in 2 hrs because they’re supposedly so efficient at what they do - translated this means doing a part-time job, could easily take on more work, but choose not to.

Yes that's absurd. I work in the private sector so all the easier efficiencies were taken years ago. I can only hope in your sister's example, that there are IT people in the background working to remove the need to do it because that sounds incredibly risky as you said.

I 'push paper' which ensures that people with disabilities are able to access safely designed & built wheelchair accessible vehicles. Is that pointless?

Before this, I 'pushed paper' checking that overseas job applicants genuinely had the qualifications they claim. Would you want your NHS trust to employ a surgeon who says he qualified at the University of Tripoli, without checking he is qualified to operate on your child. Or is fluent enough in English to communicate with the rest of the surgical team. Is that pointless?

I suggest you rethink your view of administrators. Life would be terribly dangerous without us.

But there are some tasks that can very easily be automated that don't take large numbers of people or lots of money.

These days, there's really no excuse for small armies of admin workers to be copying figures from one screen and entering them on another screen. It's usually very easy to automate the extraction/export of data from one system and import it into another system.

Yet, my sister works in an NHS admin role and her entire day job is re-typing data from one computer system to another computer system - she has two computers and two keyboards/screens, and literally spends all her day looking at data on one screen and typing it into the other. She says there's a room full of them all doing the same kind of thing, but just different data/different systems. They don't even use "copy and paste" as it's on different computers, not just one computer with two screens where copy and paste would be possible as you'd be using the same computer/keyboard.

Not only is it a monumental waste of time/money to manually do something like that which could quickly and easily be automated (or at least semi automated), it just creates a massive risk of error/omission when manually copying data from one screen to another, especially as a lot of the data is to do with test results etc. where 50.1 wrongly entered as 5.1 could literally kill someone if treatment/drugs are based on the wrong number!

Indeed, most office workers were working remotely during COVID.

Many people still went out to work.

The people who weren't working were those in hospitality, airlines, entertainment, personal services like hair, beauty and 'wellness'.

Of course jobs that provide those sort of services are rarely 'essential' but they contribute significantly to the economy, enrich people's lives and provide employment. They probably don't make up 'most jobs' but our lives would be much less satisfying without access to these services.

Nurses and teachers are public sector jobs and whilst they are invaluable they don't actually contribute to the economy. Manufacturing jobs and service jobs are what are actually needed in a capitalist society.

Having just come off a call with nurses, they seemed very grateful I was able to get the paper work (design, website updates etc) sorted and enable them to do their job. In hospitals, a lot of work is there to support nursing and clinical teams.

Do you believe that hospital responses to Covid were organised and planned by doctors and nurses?

Huge numbers of people still worked during covid to keep things moving.

Perhaps we should look at who were the ones living on furlough for months to see what jobs were really unnecessary.

All "essential" jobs carried on one way or another.

Yep. Dh did do something about it. He streamlined the office he was in charge of by not replacing people. With no discernible reduction in productivity (in fact the opposite). I'm a teacher still, and it makes me quite envious to hear about these people being paid to do so little. Unfortunately I don't have the higher level management experience dh had, so I wouldn't be able to go for roles anywhere near as well-paying as I'm getting as a head of subject with decadea of experience.

Covid lockdowns proved that.

Most jobs are superfluous.