Meaningful work is underrated, but your job ain’t it

Captured so perfectly by The Office, and Office Space before it, the typical American office oozes  boredom and triviality for anyone even halfway inquisitive. 

In 2018, David Graeber wrote a book titled “Bullshit Jobs” that argued that a significant number of modern jobs are meaningless. And indeed, a casual observation of your co-workers will reveal a meaningless job rate somewhere north of 50%, unless your critique of the American economy is deeper, in which case the rate is in the 80%-90% range.

And herein lies the real problem: meaningful work is so rare because our system of employment is a pyramid scheme, or a house of cards, or choose your preferred metaphor, but is nonetheless built to sustain an economic scheme of cycling between meaningless work in order to buy meaningless goods and services and back again. (I won’t mention its insistence on linear economic growth with its unavoidable link to natural resource consumption, but this system would be stupid even if it wasn’t eating away our entire planet.)

Our species has adapted to stress. If we’re not stressing about our basic survival, we’ll stress about TPS reports, Toby’s HR department, the score of the game last night, bedazzled jeans, the price of the latest thneed, or what flavor of puppet just got elected president. 

And yet, the worst problem is not that we’re stressed about precisely what level of luxury we get to live, it’s that most of us lack meaning and purpose in our lives (though the latter exacerbates, if not outright causes, the former). 

This void can’t be solved by work alone, but a job/career/profession/or even a task of meaning can go a long way toward instilling purpose.

Here's where to start searching: if you can't answer the question "what's the purpose of life?" drop everything and figure it out.