I’ve sort of just accepted it. I work in a niche position in a software company that’s in a niche sector and while people do depend on me for their livelyhoods, I wouldn’t say the products I produce are, in the grand scheme of things, meaningful. What I do only exists as a job in the 20th and 21st centuries and humans got on just fine before that.
I instead find meaning in my hobbies and out of work activities. My job, while pretty meaningless in my mind, does pay me enough to allow me to have a good life outside of work. I don’t need my job to be meaningful, I just need it to not suck.
Same here
And those who are in crucial meaningful jobs are pushed to their very limits, overworked because “your job is your calling.” (Nurses, teachers, social workers, etc.)
Nothing highlights this as much when your management actually says and believes that “the purpose of our organization is to make money”. Totally clueless people.
No… the purpose is to deliver value to all stakeholders including customers, and society at large and by doing it well make some money. So it maters what you do and how you do it and the vision around it.
Lol, this is why I left comp engineering to work in a nature preserve
I would LOVE to go back to the tree farm or become a park ranger or something. It just doesn’t pay the bills that my cloud engineering does.
Yeah! Hey in this economy, I regret it at times! In the world we live in, there are always trade-offs. No shame in whatever path you take, as long as you don’t vote Republican!
No shame in whatever path you take, as long as you don’t vote Republican!
Oh you don’t have to worry about that!
plus as a park ranger you gotta be a fucking cop. no thanks, never. ACAB.
Conflating pointless and meaningless is an odd choice. My job, sending invoices, is meaningless but not pointless.
It helps to get paid a lot to not think about that
Vox did an interview with David Graeber about this back in 2019.
very happy i landed a job doing web work for mostly non profit clients. a few lawyers here and there, but we need them, too.
I moved out of finance into non profit but still doing tech. Every day I try to find “purpose” in my work but a tech job is a tech job. The income is the only reason I can’t jump ship out of BS and into something that I find meaningful.
Sometimes donating to the causes you care about does more good than working in the industry itself. A friend of mine who is really into dancing came to that conclusion.
It’s worth pointing out that feeling like you work in a pointless, meaningless job doesn’t necessarily make it true. This paper is solely about people’s perceptions, not facts.
yes but ultimately perception is reality.
I’m going to have to disagree with you on this.
People have all sorts of beliefs that can qualitatively be proven as right or wrong. For example, all the wingnuts who believe that the COVID vaccine has trackers from Microsoft. Their beliefs are 100% bereft of reality.
Now, can they go ahead and act on those mistaken beliefs? Sure. But that doesn’t make their beliefs correct in any way.
You’re right of course, but we are talking about two different things.
