Bullshit Consumption: What Lockdowns Tell Us about Work-and-Spend Lives and Care-full Alternatives

Covid19 disrupted ‘non-essential’ work and consumption, providing an unparalleled opportunity to examine our work-and-spend culture, which we do via forty-four in-depth interviews that capture experiences and reflections during UK lockdowns. Deploying Graeber’s (2018) conceptualisation of ‘bullshit jobs’ and related critiques of consumption, we first considerthe possibility that contemporary work-and-spend lifestyles may deny the normative separation of work as worthy toil and consumption as its pleasurable opposite. Within such experience, and in addition to Graeber’s bullshit work, we find a parallel in bullshit consumptionat work,in order to work,andbecause of work. Yet our findings also highlight that when freed from such bullshit - as many were during Covid19 - participants engage in more caring practicesfor the self,others,and theirpossessions.We therefore propose that much of our work-and-spend lives might be bullshit: routines that promise status, virtue, freedom and pleasure, but feel meaningless, while displacing experiences of care from which people may gain satisfaction. We conclude that a focus on subtractive logics - cutting the bullshit! - can activate both new critiquesand new optimism about society.