A large share of modern work is jobs that the people doing them believe are pointless and they don't find satisfaction in doing it: flunkies, box tickers, duct tapers, taskmasters, goons. This is not market efficiency, it is a moral and political arrangement, and it produces real psychological damage because humans need their work to have meaning and consequences.
An audit lens for the profession and the studio. Architecture generates plenty of Graeber's categories: reports nobody reads, compliance theatre, coordination roles that exist because contracts distrust everyone. The book explains why the practice stays small, why physical outcomes matter, and why scope should be pruned like a Fukuoka field.
Graeber's evidence is anecdote-heavy and his definition is subjective by design. Some "box ticking" (fire engineering, certification) keeps people alive. The useful move is separating ritual from safeguard, not torching both.
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