That's true. I've been in meaningless make-work jobs before, jobs where I could literally goof off 90% of the time. I left.

A lot of people might think "wow! awesome!" It's not. It's soul-crushing and unbelievably depressing. It doesn't leave you more energy for other things; it saps your energy and makes you feel like shit.

Meaningless make-work is the worst. Having nothing to do isn't so terrible. I can come up with plenty of useful ideas left to my own devices. It's when I have to do busy-work that's bad.

Couldn't you goof off 20% instead?

My point was that the job was demonstrably unnecessary. I have seen, from an outside vantage point, entire departments that are wholly unnecessary doing nothing but creating work for other wholly unnecessary departments.