Bullshit jobs are ones that could disappear and the impact would unnoticeable or minimal for an organisation's output. Nice-to-have (for society?) professions still have value, otherwise they wouldn't be nice - if all the musicians disappeared people would definitely notice.

I'd also contest the idea that cultural labour is unnecessary. Lots of people in lockdown have depended on all kinds of music, TV, film, etc to maintain their mental health. This seems to go beyond preference, even if not everyone needs the same or as much cultural produce to survive healthily.

If COVID-19 has taught us nothing else, it's that (as Adams warned us) "telephone sanitizers" are absolutely essential.

There's also a whole lot of administrative, artificial, make-busy-work jobs, where we build complicated systems of bureaucracy to prevent losses that cost orders of magnitude more than the losses they prevent, and that in turn impose layers of bureaucracy on others.

Most of the parts of the bureaucracy that I think are useless are the parts that are non-negotiable from a legal perspective.

When we look at e.g. higher education, for a place that's particularly guilty of this:

Administrative costs have grown to be approximately equal to instructional costs at universities, from about a quarter of expenditures in 1980.

In essence, our desire to prevent waste and to ensure that money is spent the way we'd like has created an ever-ballooning set of administrative work. It might be better to tolerate a somewhat greater share of instructional and research expenditures being wasted or spent in non-ideal ways.

Any time there's a small bit of waste or money spent in ways we don't approve of, the impulse is to create rules and administrative procedures to prevent it from happening again. But this effectively creates a perpetual overhead for what may have been a one-time, very minor problem.