There are essential jobs that need doing regardless of the opinions of the workers who perform them. In fact, if people focused on the value their so-called "bullshit" jobs provide other people, rather than on their own assessment of how meaningful their job is, they would likely end up much happier.
It's an incredibly condescending and self-centered way to look at the world.
Jobs don't exist for the employee, wages exist for the employee. Jobs exist because the employer feels that the wage is a good trade for the person's time. The employee's perception of their contribution has essentially 0 importance in this interaction. A better definition of a bullshit job from the employee's perspective is one where the wage isn't worth it for the bullshit they have to put up with. In that case they should find a new one. If they can't, than putting up with that specific bullshit is still their best choice. If they keep showing up to work and taking that trade, apparently they don't think it's bullshit. And if the employer keeps thinking that the money is a good trade for their time, they apparently also don't think it's bullshit, otherwise they'd fire them.
So if two people freely engage in the same trade of time for money everyday for years on end, then simply calling it bullshit isn't that profound. It starts to sound a lot like some way to intellectualize whining about not liking your job.
So yeah, no amount of writing is going to save a totally broken premise.
This is a handwaving assertion. It happens to be strongly correlated with the way our society(ies) allocates labor, but is not something inherent to the labor/wage relationship. It's not hard to imagine a world in which people do things because those things matter to them, or are interesting to them, or both.
Graeber didn't call them "Bullshit Jobs" because the jobs required dealing with bullshit, he called them "Bullshift Jobs" because the actual stated purpose of the job was at best deeply suspect and at worst, well, bullshit.
There is a better fundamental critique of "Bullshit Jobs" which is a little more sophisticated, I think. That critique says that the reason people get confused about the meaning and importance of their job is that our economic system has grown too complex for them to really understand the role they play. The division of labor has reached such extreme levels that it is very difficult for many individuals to grasp how their "apparently meaningless aka bullshit" jobs could be contributing anything at all to the world. But their inability to understand or visualize this does not mean that their work is, in fact, meaningless or without value.
I admit I only skimmed it, but I thought the point was "the employer" is not a homogeneous entity. "The employer" therefore doesn't make the wage decision. Managers with some extreme perverse incentives do.
What's bullshit is the idea that as soon as an enterprise does something inefficient, boom, they'll be outcompeted. They might, eventually, if no market failures or regulatory capture exists. So in reality, large and even small/medium organization with a successful pattern can tolerate a lot of bullshit.
Your evaluation seems fair to me but it's still not clear to me what he's saying should be done or even why this is a problem.
My suspicion is that people find it exciting to read a book with a curse word in the title that tells them they are right for hating their job
