In a modern society, you will have complex systems where the individual worker is so abstracted away from the concrete value that they will not be able to see the immediate effect of their actions, but this does not make them pointless. To an investment banker, all they see are numbers growing larger, but that does take away from the fact that they're moving millions of dollars, which invariably comes from somewhere.
This is not an issue of capitalism. If you work for someone else, then by definition, the motives for your work are not your own, thus you will often fail to see the immediate point in your work past the description of your company on Wikipedia.
Do truly pointless jobs exist? Sure, but the author sure seems to across as simply listing jobs he doesn't understand as pointless. Perhaps his musician friend could have fared better if he had a better 'PR researcher' to publicize his work. Until we think of a system where we do not work for capital, our lives will revolve around creating capital to sustain ourselves, making it hard for all 7 billion people on Earth to derive meaning from it.
This is not an issue of capitalism. If you work for someone else, then by definition, the motives for your work are not your own, thus you will often fail to see the immediate point in your work past the description of your company on Wikipedia.
Do truly pointless jobs exist? Sure, but the author sure seems to across as simply listing jobs he doesn't understand as pointless. Perhaps his musician friend could have fared better if he had a better 'PR researcher' to publicize his work. Until we think of a system where we do not work for capital, our lives will revolve around creating capital to sustain ourselves, making it hard for all 7 billion people on Earth to derive meaning from it.