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.
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?”
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This surely happens but I would reframe it differently. "Meaningful work" is work that has meaning, to you. The fact that other people may or may not find it impactful is a secondary consideration. Why would I need other people to 'accept' my work for it to be found "meaningful"?
As a white-collar, let's say I work on some internal project which I enjoy, but for some reason it doesn't spread wide in the org (And bear in mind, there could be VALID reasons why what I worked on doesn't get largely adopted by the rest of the organization).
Did I do "non-meaningful work"? Not at all! My work was meaningful, I enjoyed it, probably learned something by doing it and it will stay with me long after somebody else dismissed it.
What is and what is not "meaningful work" is ABSOLUTELY a subjective decision, not an absolute truth.
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.
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?”
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This surely happens but I would reframe it differently. "Meaningful work" is work that has meaning, to you. The fact that other people may or may not find it impactful is a secondary consideration. Why would I need other people to 'accept' my work for it to be found "meaningful"?
As a white-collar, let's say I work on some internal project which I enjoy, but for some reason it doesn't spread wide in the org (And bear in mind, there could be VALID reasons why what I worked on doesn't get largely adopted by the rest of the organization).
Did I do "non-meaningful work"? Not at all! My work was meaningful, I enjoyed it, probably learned something by doing it and it will stay with me long after somebody else dismissed it.
What is and what is not "meaningful work" is ABSOLUTELY a subjective decision, not an absolute truth.