The meaning of work.
I kinda enjoyed this bit on the meaning of work, or rather on the need for work to have meaning. The premise is simple, but it scans. Meaningful work should contribute to a goal that connects the individual to something embiggening. It doesn’t have to be overloaded and groaning with meaning. Some pretty simple jobs can have that meaning. I’d argue that street sweepers and designers of spam-blocking apps both contribute meaningfully to making the world both neater and nicer.
The piece asks what makes work meaningless and quickly defaults to Greek mythology, specifically, Sisyphus, the dude who had to clock in and roll a boulder up a mountain only for it to roll back down just before he reached the top, whatever and ever amen.
“The gods knew what they were doing with this punishment – anyone who has spent time doing Sisyphean tasks in their work will understand how soul-crushing they can be. Fyodor Dostoevsky certainly understood this. Partly informed by his own experience in a labour camp, the novelist wrote that: “If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely … all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.”
When I started writing, I imagined myself doing super-meaningful work because I was a ‘crusading journalist’. I don’t think that way any more. In fact, I tend to think of what I do now, simply entertaining people, as being just as meaningful, if not more so, than all of the earnest, activist writing I used to do. Looking back on all those feature articles, I can’t think of a single one that changed a damn thing.
But giving people something they want to read in the age of Tik Tok? That’s the Lord’s work right there, I reckon.
i have this working theory (which probably already exists because i'm not that original a thinker that the thousands/millions before me havent already come up with a version) that where you work depends on a triangle of salary, meaningful work, workfriends/good management. Most people can tolerate missing one point of the triangle as long as the other two are there and then there is serious risk of leaving when there is only one left (if you hit all three you are living the dream). My main worry about it is that i have been stuck in so many conferences and powerpoint presentations that i am at risk of having been accepted into the corporate presentation cult of basic but meaningless pseudo information. Welcome to my TED talk.
As someone who gets very little feedback on the quality of my work, unless it's-touch wood-one of the biggest cockups in the history of cockups, or so good it has just killed off all the hopes and dreams of our (prospective) client, that's where all my work based meaning comes from, the crushing of dreams. It's wonderful. You get no meaning from just going through the motions.