(At risk of being angsty or I’m 14 and this is deep-esque …) I commented this on a reply to a thread on r/LinkedInLunatics, and it got me wondering what people’s thoughts are on this:
If you have a job, a career even, do you find the work you do meaningful?
Someone submitted a screenshot of some guy grandstanding on LinkedIn, with some ridiculous notion about work-life balance in your 20s leading to a mediocre career.
And what’s so wrong with that? How many of us have careers that would even be considered exceptional? And I don’t mean a bloated sense of self importance, but something you could actually explain to others and they’d be impressed by what you do. Something your grandma could understand and be proud of; print it up and put it on the refrigerator sort-of work.
Don’t get me wrong, those jobs exist. There are plenty of people out there who are busting their asses, and all that work goes toward the betterment of society in some way. The rest of us though? Can we honestly say that?
It’s different than being good at what you do. I’ve always been decent at what I do. I do take pride in the quality of the work itself; I guess I’m partially motivated by a job well done. But if you ask me about the larger body of work? The product? The services? The company? Hell, the industry at large?
Is it meaningful? Do I need to do mental gymnastics and speak in broad platitudes to answer that question positively?
You can like what you do. You can even find pleasure in doing your job well, but it doesn’t automatically mean it’s meaningful or impactful.
So back to the work-life balance comment. Let’s say you buy into the whole grind culture thing.
You grind and grind and grind in some obscure niche of an industry that doesn’t really have a net-positive impact on society. You make it your life; your friends (if you have time for them) and family only have a vague idea of what you do, and are only humoring you when you talk work, which you’ve made your life in lieu of actually living.
Then one day you die.
No one remembers the contributions of the senior product manager on a handful of features in some train of the second most popular project management software for B2B organizations. You didn’t move the needle in society, or even in your field. Even those closest to your work struggle to concisely describe what you did to those out of the loop. People you worked with are sad on a superficial level, but you’re soon replaced by someone just like you but younger, repeating the same pattern.
For the few people that actually knew you, their feelings aside from familial obligation are lukewarm, and can be summed by some variation of saying you were married to your work. If you had time for a family, they won’t remember how many units you sold, or bugs you solved, or how much time and money the thing you helped make saved for some other company.
Unless is was part of some greater purpose, it was only ever a means to survive, but you made it the center of your universe.
A wasted life.
So again: if you have a job, a career even, do you find the work you do meaningful?