Is the best way to find meaning at work to stop looking for it?

Peace with pointlessness — maybe the best way of dealing with pointlessness at work is not to worry too much about it. That’s the provocative message from an article by Lucy Kellaway of the The Financial Times and the BBC, based on a talk she gave on British radio (” The best way to find meaning at work? Don’t look for it”).

“It pays the mortgage and gets you up in the morning, but these days workers want more from a job — they want meaning. Just don’t go looking for it,” she begins. Why not? This is her answer: “. . . we are in the middle of an epidemic of meaninglessness at work. Bankers, lawyers, and senior managers are increasingly asking themselves what on earth their jobs mean, and finding it hard to come up with an answer.”

And if that sounds glum, try this:

“This doesn’t mean that ambition is a mistake; it is just that there is no magic to advancement per se. The status and the money go up, but that’s it. And then, beset by affluence and by introspection we start to demand that our work has a larger meaning. This almost always ends badly: meaning is a bit like happiness — the more you go out looking for it the less you find.”

Sick jobs?

Maybe some jobs are simply sick — and so make the people doing them feel sick as well? I have certainly had to waste times in positions I thought were pointless at best and the product of insanity at worst. Too many jobs are created for some transient reason, then develop a life of their own and persist far beyond their ‘use by’ date.

Of course, whoever holds such a job probably (though not necessarily) prefers it to being unemployed, and fights to keep it in place. Bosses try to hang on to subordinate positions to boost their status and salary via the malevolent fiction known as job evaluation. Even after all the job cuts of the past few years, I am sure there are jobs around that should have been put out of their misery long ago.

Or sick people?

That’s what Ms. Kellaway thinks, and I agree with her. There’s no doubt that some jobs are pointless, but no one has to do them. We all have a choice: to find something better, change what we have, or get out altogether.

That’s especially true for managers, whose jobs are some of the most ill-defined and unstable of all ways of earning a living. Listen to Ms. Kellaway again:

“In fact managing is one of the most thankless jobs in the world. What managers are mainly trying to do is to get other people to do things that they don’t want to. To work harder, for a start. Their other primary function is to carry the can, and to get blamed for all sorts of things that probably aren’t their fault. Not only are they creating little meaning for themselves, they get blamed for destroying meaning for people below them.”

What can you do?

What are your options if you think — or know — that your job has neither meaning for you nor the business?

• You can accept it. It could be that the best way of dealing with pointlessness at work is not to worry too much about it. Make peace with the meaninglessness of what you do and try to enjoy whatever parts you can, like the comradeship and the interactions with others.
• You can do less of it. If your work has little meaning, put your energy into seeking purpose elsewhere in your life. After all, it’s your whole life that matters and there’s no reason that all parts of it should be packed with meaning.
• You can stop feeling guilty about it. Finding ‘meaningful work’ may be the fashion, but that doesn’t make it right. It’s too easy to be persuaded by various gurus that, if your working life is not packed with ‘passion’ and ‘purpose’ every moment of the day, you have somehow fallen short of your duty as a human being. Viktor Frankl, the father of our belief in purpose and meaning as essential for human health, didn’t say there was only one route to finding that meaning — let alone that it always lay through work. If your ‘passion’ isn’t for something you can use to make a living, you can still pursue it. You just need a job — even a pointless one — to bring in enough cash to fund the process.
• You can be grateful for small pleasures. Most people are terrified of admitting that their jobs are pointless or meaningless; though if your job saps your very soul, losing it would be a blessing. Will something better come along? I guess there’s a good chance that it may, so you might as well be cheerful as miserable. And if you remember to appreciate all life’s smaller gifts, you’ll probably find that the pursuit of greater things soon seems meaningless in comparison. Not all things worth having are found in the executive suite.

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