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Remember that your job doesn't define you.

If you think of a job as just a tool to make money, lots of the pressure of having a "meaningful" job goes away. The job has meaning because it allows you to feed yourself and your family.

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That's some any-time-previous-to-the-late-20th-century shit right there. Only a few decades ago did we start to have the luxury of even thinking our job should be "meaningful". I often think of a caveman or a child working in a textile mill or the lead dude in "The Jungle" screaming out "My job has no meaning!" as they're trying to just not die of starvation. I often find myself too thinking that I would like my job to have more "meaning", but the truth is, my boring corporate job provides me creature comforts that most of the world present or past will never know, and me deeming it meaningless really points to the fact that I lack volition and drive to make it or my life outside of work sufficiently(existentially?) meaningful. Still, fuck corporate bureaucracy that keeps me writing TPS reports instead of using my trade skills.

This. Especially fucking the corporate bureaucracy! I always enjoyed my work before I joined my current company and, with just how _corporate_ it is, it’s opened up the “where does my meaning come from if not work?” can of worms for me. I had quite a negative emotional reaction to the workplace at first but now I realise I have an opportunity to grow by finding meaning somewhere else in my life.

For reference I work at a large bank, so I suppose the availability/features of our systems/applications is not meaningless for our customers. That said there’s no way I can see my professional experience moving forward here. Maybe experience surviving in a corporate environment counts?

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