"Responsiveness" Defines Meaningful Work
Are you gaslighting yourself with dust bananas on the path to meaning?
Two of the questions I return to frequently in search of career and project-oriented self-knowledge are, “What do I really want?” and “What should I be doing next?”
I often reflect on a Twitter conversation I once had with David Chapman and Jake Orthwein which framed these questions as problems of meaning—the glib answer which satisfies both of them in the style of a koan is, “Do whatever is meaningful.” David mercifully further clarified that meaning is the byproduct of the intersection of work you find enjoyable + work that is useful for others in some way.
However, I often get stuck while considering the latter part of that equation: How do you know if the work you’re doing is actually useful for people in order for it to generate that meaning?
There’s a seemingly simple answer: “Because they’ll tell you.” But like many simple answers, it still requires more exploration. Why is it that we sometimes do things that we enjoy and that people tell us they appreciate but which still feel hollow?
Sasha Chapin’s observations on “responsiveness” added another piece of the puzzle for me today by distilling the essence of what I think it looks like when someone “tells you” that your work is meaningful:
But it’s hard to imagine anyone happy without a feeling that their actions have some impact, however small. Even if you’re not going to be remembered by history, you want to be remembered by your barista.
Impact is the key word in that sentence, and further comments he points to by Emmet Shear reinforce how this specifically applies to responsiveness, burnout, and meaningful work:
Broken steering is a metaphor for that feeling at work where your actions seem to have no impact. Turn the wheel, car still goes straight. This is rare in blue collar work: the car got assembled, now you have car. It is common in knowledge work: you sent some email, so what?
(Broken steering destroys motivation because it breaks the core feedback loop which makes work rewarding. When you throw a rock in a pond and it makes a splash, there is a little feeling of power in the impact on the world. Take away the splash and the intrinsic reward dies.)
There’s an important point in that splash metaphor, which is that directly observed impacts are the ones that are felt—but direct observations can be felt in both directions. As Sasha colorfully points out in his anecdote about his college job where no one cared if he showed up or whether his metrics were actually real, a known lack of impact can be even worse than being a cog in a machine where you can’t see your direct impact: you feel more like what he aptly calls a “banana lying in the dust.”
For knowledge workers, the “dust banana” problem often arises in the form of scrapped projects, unused designs, ignored research, and work-impacting top-down decisions that are made at odds with stated organizational goals, all of which are so common that it hardly bears mentioning. Anyone who’s had a white collar job for any length of time will be familiar with some degree of, “Why did I bother doing that if we weren’t going to use it?”
These problems don’t usually arise from malice—they’re the result of a well-intentioned blend of conflicting attempts to do things that work for the business, do things that work in the local political landscape, do things the “right way” as defined by whomever is looking at the problem, and needing to give people something to do in an environment where it might be unclear how to make an impact given those factors.
Regardless, it always feels bad to be a dust banana.
Getting paid (and thanked, and positively reviewed) to do work you can see is useless, or no work at all, can be maddening for people. Paul Millerd discusses this phenomenon in his recent post “People Won’t Work!”:
As a retired veteran of the dark arts of underwork and antiwork, it makes perfect sense that people working very little in a job would not love their situation. In my experience, I was always a lot more frustrated when I had very little work to do.
This is because it makes it obvious that you are in fact being paid to sit around for the future potential crisis and that a large amount of work that people create is invented to help people avoid contemplating life in the non-busy space.
I agree with his reasoning for why it feels bad, but I’d also expand on it to suggest that the underlying problem is that both the paid no-work and observed useless work cases defy your deeply-embedded monkey-brain sense of what it means to be useful to others and create cognitive dissonance for your meaning-making apparatus.
The “responsiveness” factors of your manager’s appreciation and recurring paycheck actually conflict harshly with the directly-observed (lack of) impact you’re making on the organization, since you might now feel extractive and deceptive rather than just useless. Even though intent matters and you’re not intending to do either of these things, the felt sensation when your efforts fall obviously flat can still be one of gaslighting and anti-meaning.
That same social monkey-brain tends to process “deceptive extraction” as being socially dangerous for you and generate anxiety about it. Fear that other people might also perceive the “extractive” nature of your dust banana work, even if it’s not your fault and everyone seems happy with it, can be agonizing to experience when you have no way to change the situation.
If genuine responsiveness is our internal gauge of when our work is useful to others, anti-responsiveness looks like everyone noticing how little impact you’re having and still not caring, which is worse for generating meaning than even bad or ambiguous work—if it’s pointless either way regardless of effort or quality, how could it be useful to anyone?
With this in mind, it’s evident that the solution for finding meaning-measuring responsiveness to our work is deeper than simply receiving compensation or verbal appreciation. For the responsiveness to genuinely meet our internal standards for generating meaning, we need to directly perceive its utility to someone, however small, and to not see it lying around uneaten like Sasha’s banana in the dust. I’d argue that the “dust banana” problem is much more destructive for employee morale and a larger contributor to employee disengagement and burnout than the “cog problem,” despite both of them feeling pretty bad.
As Sasha pointed out by highlighting people’s elated reactions to his delightfully responsive friend, genuine responsiveness is really hard to fake or replace. Lacking that genuine responsiveness doesn’t make you feel good about yourself even if you know the budget is intentionally absorbing a lot of dust banana work for good reasons. Your sense of derived meaning from the work you perform won’t lie to you about what you’re feeling, and if you’re anything like me, it probably won’t shut up about it either.
What you do with that feeling, and the likelihood of it changing on its own within a timeframe that you can tolerate, are exactly the factors you need to consider in a personal search for meaningful work.
Good reflections - this is spot on. People have in their heads "am getting paid so must be useful" and it makes their anxiety incredibly confusing. I've seen people become incredibly burned out once they went into more prototypical "meaningful" jobs like corporate social responsibility, social work, etc.. As soon as they start doing 70% admin stuff or start to realize top down change is perhaps the opposite of impact, they become quite down
I also got a lot of value out of @Sasha Chapin ‘s article and have been mulling it over for days now. I’ve actually written about this indirectly in my own life (it’s why I’ve moved to writing instead of compliance).
Part of me wonders: Are there some career paths (e.g., compliance) that are almost solely for the purpose of completing invented, pointless work (or as @Zvi Mowshowitz has called a related phenomena, generating the ‘symbolic representation of the thing’ and not the thing itself — https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-thing-and-the-symbolic-representation-of-the-thing/), or is it person-dependent?
FWIW, my husband noted that he couldn’t fathom how Sasha’s example was meaningless — because it meant he got to be a computer lab, and he (my husband) personally loved that role and all the side projects that came along with being responsible for the computer lab.