Photo by Kenneth Surillo.
When will I ever use this?
The kitchen table is covered in #2 pencils and the gummy dust of animal erasers. We’re officially into the mid-September dip. Where the buzz of the first week subsides and, in its wake, June is still a long way away.
The specific question of usefulness is around writing out numbers long-form. Which, to the uninitiated, seems like an exercise in torture. The worst part about having small-business parents is that for most of the random, obscure stuff you’re learning in elementary school, there actually is a practical application. Writing out numbers in long-form is useful when writing checks (cheques for the Canadians). And when checking the sums on those checks to make sure the right funds end up in the right place. As a family who eats on the basis of invoices being processed in a timely and accurate manner, long-form numbers are annoying but sorta useful.
Any dinner table discussion that ends with, “and that’s how we put food on this table” gets an immediate eye-roll. This is true for all children. Across all time. “When will I ever use this?” isn’t a question. It’s a statement. It’s the kid-equivalent of saying, “I think this is a waste of time and I don’t care about it.” It doesn’t even matter that practical use cases exist. Because once you’ve decided the thing doesn’t matter, it’s hard to come back from that.
Hard, but not impossible.
Work devoid of meaning
Last week, we went way too far down a rabbit hole on meaning at work. We’re talking primary cites, research from the 1950s, PDFs from old textbooks. What does meaning at work look like across 75 years of tracking it? How does it move or shift over time? And where are there things buried in PDFs that we can apply to actual humans working in actual jobs?
One of the nerdy/cool parts of our jobs is that there’s a strong and long-running economic motive to understand humans at work. If you can think of a question about humans in offices or factories, not only has someone asked it already. They prolly took good notes along the way.
So into the meaning mines we go. Pickaxe and headlamp in tow. And what we find, deep in the mine, is a core framework. That folks who study meaning at work have three buckets. We love a good three-bucket framework. Let’s go.
In the first bucket, we have Jobs. Where work is a Jay Oh Bee. We’re lazy girls. We’re quiet quitting. We’re signing on at 8:59:59 and we’re clocking out at 5:00:00. This doesn’t mean we’re bad at our jay oh bees. It’s just that our sense of meaning comes from somewhere else. Could be family. Could be hobbies. But it’s not work and that’s ok.
In our next bucket, we have Careers. In this category, we emphasize professional advancement. We’re on the ladder, scaling mountains, eye-on-the-prize, 9-boxing our way to greatness. Our sense of meaning at work, as Miley sang, is about the climb.
Last bucket is where work is a Calling. And if you’re thinking ministers or nuns, yes and. Yes, many religious leaders are in this group but the real way you know if you’re on Team Calling or not is a single sentence. And that sentence is “I would do this work even if they weren’t paying me.” Here, the work and the meaning are very tightly coupled.
If you can’t imagine saying that sentence but are also not content to clock in and clock out, there’s a good chance you’re in the Career group. And this is a tricky place to be. Remember that meaning for Calling is inherent to the role. And meaning for Job is external to the role. Meaning for Career hinges on advancement, not impact. Less about practicing law. More about making partner. And for a lot of people, that sleight of hand is where it all starts to fall apart.
Heroes and bards
Like, if this whole system works for you, then you’re all set. Plenty of career folks, especially in highly competitive disciplines, draw a lot of identity from their ability to race up the mountain, and dodge all the boulders, with half the organization on their backs. It’s a feel-good identity. Capable. In control. Rising star. Heroic. Exceptional and indispensable. Do it for long enough and you’ll start to accumulate bards who tell your tales ahead of you. You’ll be at some event and people will say, “This is Farah, she’s basically carrying the entire EMEA practice single-handedly.” How can life feel empty when you have your own bard?
And yet somehow a lot of folks we talk to describe exactly that. They talk about running hard, racking up a bunch of wins, and then…something happens. A long flight, or a vacation, or a health scare. Whatever it is, it gives them a moment to look around and take stock. And what they find is that they’ve lost the plot. The wins they’ve put up are hard to explain to anyone outside their org because they’re largely wins of status or prestige, not real-world impact. And they have a lot of colleagues and maybe even a lot of respect internally, but not a lot of friends.
This turns out to be a problem for them.
That’s key, right? If you go around telling people that their work should have meaning, a lot of them will fight you on it. Work won’t love you back, something something quiet quitting, something something lazy girl bullshit jobs side hustle capitalism jay oh bee. And, like, okay fine. Then there should be no problem, here.
But for these people, and maybe for you, the secret honest truth is that it is a problem for them that work isn’t meaningful. Not because some influencer told them that it has to be, but because they feel that themselves. There’s a hollow sort of sadness to it. They want meaning, and they aren’t getting it, and despite the heroics and the bards singing songs of their glory, they feel that gap.
If that’s you, we have some good news.
Meaning is relational
Meaning at work is a deeply personal thing, but mostly in the particulars. The first piece of good news is that, at a structural level the research is pretty clear. For basically everyone, meaning at work boils down to this:
Doing work that matters to me, with people I care about.
The deeply personal bits hide in your own definitions of “matters to me” and “I care about” of course, but there’s still enough substance to this definition to be useful. Among other things, this definition lets you spot which beast is underfed — the work that matters, or the people you care about. Maybe both need help, that’s okay too. It’s still progress to be able to name and understand the problem.
The second piece of good news is that when you ask the people who do feel fulfilled. Who feel like work gives them energy instead of taking it away. They almost universally tell a story about shaping or crafting their job. About changing elements of their role, or how they do it, to get closer to the parts that are meaningful. It’s okay if the meaning doesn’t arrive fully formed in the job spec. You are not a machine that receives tasks; you can be in conversation with your role.
And if you need help thinking about how that could work, remember that meaning is relational. If you want to figure out whether your work matters, get closer to the impact and the people. Figure out the humans who directly benefit from what you do — customers, clients, communities — and get yourself closer to them. Talk with them. Ditto the people you love working with. Do they know it? Have you told them? And can you find ways to do more work together?
We’re not saying you have to do any of this. Lots of people have a Jay Oh Bee and find their meaning elsewhere. Lots of people keep their head down on their career ladder and make meaning and fulfillment a problem for their future selves. You can do that too, if you want! It’s a very popular choice!
All we’re saying is that if it matters to you. If you’re feeling like work is a bit meaningless and that’s a problem for you. If you’re feeling that gap. You’re not alone, and also you’re not fucked. Spend more time with people you care about. Get closer to the people positively impacted by your work. It’s hard work, but it’s not impossible.
— Melissa & Johnathan
