The attention-grabbing title was: “A man gets a job where he must do strictly nothing all-day to get paid”. The comedy short film was “Nothing Co.” It reminded me of David Graeber’s talk about Bullshit jobs.

In the talk, Graeber said that he kept noticing “a strange phenomena of people who are apologetic of what they do for a living…you say…what do you do? And they say 'Oh nothing, really.’ And you think they’re just being modest but you interrogate them and you discover that they are literally doing nothing.”

The film begins with a man looking at a poster written in Spanish. We hear the voice over of the man reading the poster: “Would you like to get paid for doing nothing? This is your chance.” Esta es su oportunidad!

Graeber goes on to tell the audience about one of the people he met: “One of these guys, they work for two hours a week and it’s like “Don’t tell my boss but you could do the whole thing [in] two hours, otherwise, I basically update my Facebook profile and I make cat memes, play minesweeper a lot…”

In “Nothing Co.” the poor protagonist is literally not allowed to do anything, no wasting time on social media, no creating memes, no playing video games. In the first few seconds of the film, as the protagonist waits to be interviewed for this job of doing nothing, he tells us his backstory via voice over. This reveals that the stakes are quite high: “Three years unemployed, a thousand interviews and all I do is waste my time.”

Speaking of wasting time, Graeber mentions in his talk that one of the conclusions of his book is that “a lot of the forms of popular culture that have emerged in the last twenty years…it’s all the stuff that, like cat memes or Youtube rants, they’re all things that you can do while you’re pretending to do something else so basically like all these people are not really working at their jobs so this stuff that’s circulating is all the things that they’re doing when people think they’re working…”

The ironic ending of the short film points to why many people nowadays are choosing to “lie flat” and why Al Jazeera did a report asking “Why is Gen Z rejecting hustle culture and redefining the meaning of work” while The Hill did a report on “RISE of the TRADWIFE: Gen Z is BRINGING BACK Gender Roles, FALSE PROMISE of Feminism?”

By the end of the film, the protagonist is sadly unhinged, which underscores the hidden dangers of “bullshit jobs”. His state of mind is probably not conducive enough for him to do what a certain employee – probably a Gen-Z employee - did when she was being fired.

Boss: You're fired.

Baby Boomer: Okay.

Generation X: Oh well, whatever, nevermind. ("Smells like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana)

Generation Z: “Tech Worker Records Her “Termination” and Goes Viral. Here’s Where It Went Wrong.”

This new generation of employees has had enough. They are standing up. Some of them are even lying flat to stand up!