A Joke with no Punchline

Two factory employees are sitting at the workbench. One puts down her brush, stretches, and looks to the girl next to her.
"Good god," she says, "we paint knickknacks for a living."
"So?" says her benchmate. "Its a living."
"But they're useless. They're intended to be useless. They're highly-detailed, hand-crafted, hand-painted useless pieces of crap."
"But people want them. If they didn't want them we wouldn't be selling them in bulk."
"But is it really worth it? We toil our lives away, painting every individual shutter on these little plastic houses, so that they can be boxed up, put on trucks, put on huge boats, shipped to America, put on trains, put on trucks, distributed to a thousand little boutiques, and eventually find themselves collecting dust on some little old lady's mantle piece? I mean what's the point?"
"Does there have to be a point? We work. We get paid. At least we know that somewhere out there, there's a little old lady who'll get excited next week when the new ones arrive, so she can add to her collection."
"But for every excited old lady, there's at least one entire case of these stupid little villages that gets thrown out because one magnetic ice skater got broken in shipping," says the painter. "I mean, sheez, our work gets thrown away because some cargo attendant in Los Angeles throws his back out and drops the box."
"It doesn't come out of our paycheck. We can still provide for ourselves."
"Yeah, tell that to the new girl--or did you forget, the girl who used to occupy her bench got fired for using the wrong shade of yellow on her windows? She used "smoky autumn firelight" instead of "cheery holiday firelight."
"Be thankful you don't paint windows. Are you going to get some tea or not?"
"I just wish I could find, I don't know, a purpose."
"Yes, well," says her benchmate. "I realized a long time ago that life has no meaning."
And the girls get back to work.