Does it suck to have a job?

Evaluating three viral narratives about the American economy.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of work; in part because of the potential for AI to remake the modern economy and in part because running The Argument over the last 8-ish months has given me a very different vantage point on what “having a job” actually involves.

I keep noticing a pattern: Every few years, a totalizing, negative narrative goes viral.

In the 2010s it felt like all anyone could talk about was how Big Tech was ushering in a new era of gig work.

Then, of course in COVID-19 years, there was the quiet quitting narrative and the “nobody wants to work anymore” meme, which are two sides of the same ‘workers are actually lazy’ coin.

And, of course, who could forget the “bullshit jobs” narrative, anthropologist David Graeber’s idea that endemic to capitalism is the proliferation of useless, makework jobs.

Each of these narratives is based on something real—usually qualitative evidence or concerning anecdotes about worker exploitation and harm. But each of them is wrong in ways that matter. Here are a few things that I’ve found as I’ve looked through the data:

Gig workers are happier than employees.

Earlier this week, Gallup released new polling results on the state of work in America. The survey includes responses from more than 18,000 employed U.S. adults and was fielded over a year ago between January 13-February 25, 2025.

Gallup’s headline finding is that self-employed workers are more likely to report having “quality jobs” than employees.

Quality jobs are defined by five metrics: Financial well-being, workplace culture and safety, growth and development opportunities, agency and voice, and work structure and autonomy.

Gallup broke down self-employed workers and employees on each of these metrics.

What jumps out at me first is that 66% of self-employed workers reported high levels of “agency and voice” compared with just 50% of employees. One of the core arguments against gig work has been that it strips employees of their power in the workplace by classifying them as independent contractors.