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This Artist Will Pay You $2,320 a Month to Do Absolutely Nothing (Seriously)

Kells McPhillips

March 7, 2019

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Photo: Getty Images/Westend61

There are easy jobs and then there are easy jobs. But here's something you'll rarely—if ever—read in a job description: "Whatever the employee chooses to do constitutes the work." No joke, the "eternal employment" position offered by Swedish artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby requires little more than doing whatever you want. In 2026, the artists will begin accepting applications for a lifetime tenure in Korsvägen, Sweden, reports Atlas Obscura. The chosen employee will do, well, whatever they please for the equivalent of $2,320 a month, so long as they clock in each day to the art installation at the local train station.

Why would anyone do this? Art, of course!

"In the face of mass automation and artificial intelligence, the impending threat/promise is that we will all become productively superfluous," write the artists in the job description. "Eternal Employment not only offers a different understanding of work and the worker, but questions the very notions of growth, productivity and progress which are at the core of modernity."

A sum of $650,000 has been set aside to pay the employee, courtesy of the Public Art Agency Sweden and the Swedish Transport Administration. Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the job is that the employee is guaranteed a salary in perpetuity, with annual pay increases of 2.3 percent, according to The Washington Post.

The eternal train station apprentice is expected show up regularly to a special booth and spend the workday reading, staring into space, meditating, studying rocket science, practicing yoga—literally anything they want to do (or not do)—under the glow of conceptual lighting orchestrated by the artists. There's just one catch: The lucky employee can't work another paying job while they're on the clock. If at any time the chosen candidate should grow bored with making their own TDL, they're free to quit without two-weeks notice; Golding and Senneby should have no trouble finding someone new to fill the position.

Is there a better way to comment on the age of exhaustion than paying someone to do nothing at all?

Taking time be bored can actually supercharge your creativity, so make JOMO your new FOMO.