The Effects of Meaningless Work

> When I was most highly paid, I found the work the most meaningless.

And the flipside is most socially meaningful work (things required to keep our society functioning smoothly) are either underpaid or completely unpaid. Teachers, care givers, nurses, EMTs, police, musicians, chefs, and similar professions are systematically denied money because it's assumed the person should gain satisfaction solely from their work. Asking for money AND fulfilling work is considered greedy.

High salary is a reward only for the people who suffer through long unrewarding hours (usually through endless bullshit of their own making).

To be honest, in a way, even fighting cancer can seem meaningless. Of course, on a small scale, it is meaningful because it helps people. But on a larger scale, one could argue that we have traded a fulfilling life where we have purpose for a technologically-enslaved one. And in this enslaved one, we are locked in cages and eating/breathing so much artificial chemicals that have actually increased the cancer rate for some kinds of cancers [1].

Thus, fighting cancer is really just making a small correction to a fundamentally unsustainable system to allow the unsustainable system to appear less harmful, but in reality it becomes just less harmful per unit time so that the harm accumulates in later generations. (Lower risk of cancer means lower perceived risk of polluting and hence less backlash against polluting that eventually accumulates so high that the risk becomes even greater than before the medical amelioration of cancer rates.)

Thus, I think one must go beyond mere cut-and-dried solutions to find meaning in life. One must figure out what is right and go towards that as best as you can, even if in reality one may never reach that point.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12940-020-00670-2

But most people don't work increasing clicks. Most people are waitresses, cooks, nurses, policemen, trash collectors, truckers, masons, and such.

Maybe there is just a lot of bullshit in communications-based work, including IT

The kind of work the article means is where there is no measurable impact to the work done. These jobs are easily found in large bureaucracies where a wide range of activities exist just so that they are performed, but nobody would notice it if they weren't performed.

Going by the jobs of my closest friends:

One works on increasing clicks, or rather driving traffic to an admittedly important website.

One is a librarian, and does Kids Storytime.

One keeps streaming infrastructure for a major broadcaster alive.

One works at a famous zoo.

One is a nurse.

Out of all of them, only the first could really be meaningless.

“Does life have meaning” is an nonsense question. You can choose to attach meaning to your actions and your environment. Anecdotally, doing so is very rewarding. You could say the very definition of “rewarding” demands that meaning of some kind exist, so to have a rewarding life you have to make some kind of value structure and then stick to it.

Religious people are actually very good at this and can be learned from. For example I’ve learned about all the plants in my area and now taking a walk is very rich in meaning. How are the birches doing this year? Which roses bloom first? When will the fig tree on 23rd and main be ripe? These are only interesting questions to someone who values plant life.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a book that outlines how “quality” and “caring” are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have anything of quality including your existence unless you care about it. A Maserati is just another car if you don’t know how to drive.

Wrt/ work, having a “meaningless” job is one in which your actions aren’t tied to any of your value structures. Maybe the answer is to make more values. But jobs today seem more disconnected, remote, isolated, fungible, and temporary than in the recent past. This is likely to make us as a culture more anxious, closed off, cynical, and defeated. And that is a tragedy.

Even if you’re curing cancer a lot of the actual work you do is pretty meaningless

...in coding. Coding jobs by neccessity are about adding new functionalities, and most of the useful stuff has been written already. So now, whether you're coding for a power plant, a yogurt factory, a bank, or Amazon, you're probably working on some far-fetched idea sold by PM to higher-ups in hopes of improving their career.

But, there are other kinds of jobs, and many are far from meaningless. There are still many millions of people working everyday to make sure basic services are available to people.

Disclaimer: I haven't read the article.

I'm just responding to the end of your comment.

As someone who has spent years doing unimportant work that I was able to find some meaning in, and who has made sacrifices in order to expand my opportunities and eventually consistently find work that is important and meaningful, I totally disagree with your message.

I understand there are a lot of pitfalls people can get stuck in and most things aren't as good as they could be... But that doesn't mean everything is awful or that everything is getting worse overall on average.

I mean this in the most constructive way possible: I think you could benefit a lot from cognitive behavioral therapy.

Few things that helped me tremendously...

Victor Frankel - Man's Search for Meaning Marcus Aurelius - Meditations (or Ryan Holiday if you don't have the patience)

I am not religious but this prayer helped me a lot:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.

You aren't asking for help, and I understand that these suggestions may just piss you off... But if there is a small chance they help you or anyone else who sees them that feels similar to you, then they are worth sharing.

The world doesn't get better with apathy or victimhood or defeatism, it gets better by accepting reality as it really is and then getting to work on it. You are surrounded by meaningful work, it just seems like you have been tricked into not seeing it.

On the contrary, why should you enjoy your job just because some rich person “gives it to you” (more realistically, “foists it upon the public”)? Sounds like a mental illness to only value yourself as the amount of economic impact you could achieve.

When I was younger I had a friend that quit a job because they made her wear a uniform and she thought the uniform was degrading and ugly. Is she not valuing herself more than her employer in that instance?

As someone who has done many types of menial labor, I understand we all need to work to make our society function. But there are kinds of work that are so lifeless or degrading they affect the mental health of the employee. Where that line is is different for each person, but to pretend it doesn’t exist is naive.

> What is this trend of citing “meaningless” work I see recently?

I find it good that people (finally?) question what they are doing for a good part of their time, whether it's aligned with their values, and seek to improve things.

The world is being destroyed by people who employ people who are happy as long as they are doing technically interesting stuff and/or stuff that pays well. I find it depressing.

People should check that whatever they are doing has meaning for them, if they can afford it.

Why would you be against this?