But what is it that makes something worth doing? In a lecture delivered in 1900, meekly titled “What Makes a Life Significant?,” William James tries to find the line between ennobling, purposeful activity and its enervating opposite. He has just spent a week at Chautauqua—a kind of fin-de-siècle TED-talk vacation colony—and is left sickened by the buffet of intellectual delicacies on offer. His internal pendulum swings hard to the opposite extreme: under the sign of Tolstoy in his peasant phase, he tries on a sort of worker-worship, a hallowing of all that’s rough and rugged. But soon this too fails him, as he is unable to ignore the fact that most of the workers around him seem more or less miserable, degraded, directionless. “If it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees it labelled and dressed-up in books,” he writes, “it is really just as idiotic to see it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields.”

Characteristically, James tries to split the difference. Meaning, he proposes, must be a product of two factors: effort and ideal. Heavy toil without some explanatory framework is misery, but so is a life of ease and intellectual thrill without struggle. It’s their combination that produces stable purpose: a struggle against some worldly resistance, for some socially shared goal. Both the content of the activity and the way it’s understood in the culture, the what and the why, matter. “Ideal aspirations are not enough,” he writes, “when uncombined with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.”

Objectively and thoroughly significant! In Graeber’s story, the sort of work that meets James’s requirements is precisely what’s cut out of the present arrangement. It’s the hole at the center of the wheel. Hard but necessary labor (like cleaning) lacks the valorization and rewards that might make it bearable, while the sorts of large-scale undertakings which by their nature combine effort and ideal—projects aimed at reducing general suffering, like building affordable housing, adequately staffing schools or greening the power grid—are not being done, or only in small defensive formations. Between James and Graeber, we get an image not only of a busted material economy, but of an economy of meaning that’s weirdly warped as well: a wide base of important jobs denied social recognition, a thick middle of pointless or destructive feudal make-work, and a little penthouse on top full of tenured professors, superstar artists and NGO executives, the one-percenters of purpose, munching hors d’oeuvres and talking in hushed voices about the dire state of the world.