Those people were harmlessly bullshitting (or maybe demonstrating the concept of revealed preferences), but you're still doing it when you take them too seriously and proclaim it's a society wide trend.

(Not you personally I mean.)

I dunno man, a manager taking home $500K a year when all they ever did was draw charts that NOBODY looked at (not even the CEO or the CFO, not once, I asked them; and not any of the other managers too) and just to ask us every now and then how are things going, seems quite opposite to harmless bullshitting.

That guy could have been fired and we would have just elected one of us to keep track of several tickets once a week and we'd have been better off.

People get assigned to high-paid bullshit jobs all the time, and most of them are aware of it and do their best to hold on to them. Nothing really complex, it's all perverse incentives all the way down.

There must be bubbles at play. Like some folks just don’t closely know enough people in enough parts of the economy to see what the other bubble sees, so assumes they’re wrong or exaggerating just to have a laugh or something.

There are definitely bullshit jobs, and jobs that are mostly bullshit.