Have you ever had similar thoughts and experience? Or perhaps you’ve already gone through this type of transition?
Oh yes, except at a life level, not career level.
I also found a pretty clear way to get "out of it". The key part to focus on is this:
I’ve been searching for the feeling of meaning through the work I do
The kicker is no matter what you are doing, you eventually find that the "meaning" of what you're doing starts to fade, you're actually realizing something. A career won't make your life meaningful.
The idea of "meaning" in life usually goes back to the idea that a life should have the meaning of some level otherwise it's "wasted". Except it doesn't and the acceptable level of meaning is abstract. Oftentimes we think our lives don't matter, our work we do doesn't matter compared to this abstract level of "meaning". It's that level that turns into justification of finding "more meaning" in our lives, by changing our lives to "find more meaning".
Except it doesn't have to. We don't have to seek "more meaning" out of life because we judge ourselves "meaningless" or "not meaningful enough". Instead, we could ignore the concept of a "meaningful life" and find value in what we do.
If you do something nice for someone, that's valuable to them. If you build something that helps 1 person accomplish something, that's valuable. If you pickup some trash and put it in the waste-bin, you add a little value to your earth. It's all these little things that produce value for others and yourself, it can be incredibly huge, especially over a lifespan and maybe even beyond!
The amount of value one can produce in a lifetime can be incredible. You start from 0 and it can basically only go "up" over time, compared to taking your whole life's meaning and comparing it to some abstract concept of "meaningfulness".
It's not a zero-sum game either. The value you produce isn't in some competition with someone else. It's just you, what you do, and the value it produces for your fellow universe.
Ultimately it does mean life is without meaning, but that does not mean life is without value.
I think meaning is largely up to the individual. Most careers these days are pretty meaningless - a lot of what we do ends up as apps that do pointless, business BS things for people with what David Graeber called "BS jobs", and when we're developing those kinds of systems our jobs are BS jobs too. But when we're able to do something that makes life genuinely easier for people, that is meaningful. Heck, if we're able to make someone genuinely happy for a bit, that's meaningful. I spent a lot of my career working for massive corporations whose systems were about making rich people a lot richer, or ensuring insurance policies only rarely paid out, or making it hard for people in need to claim the benefits they were entitled to, or chasing people for tax money that just got spent on weapons of mass destruction. Negative meaning there - I guess I have my place in hell reserved already. Some apps though - I once interviewed for a place that did an app for students that hooked into Google maps & showed them where all their lectures were, what they needed to bring, which of their friends were going too, let them make library requests, all kinds of stuff. So useful, I wish I'd had something like that when I was a student. That kind of thing, if you can do that you enrich so many lives. That's meaningful.
You make a lot of good points! I agree with everything you said here...
If you build something that helps 1 person accomplish something, that's valuable
This here is I think at the core of my motivation to write this blog post - it felt cool when I built a silly Slack app for memes that was used by a bunch of people. That's what I want to do more of but with some more meaningful projects.
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Oh yes, except at a life level, not career level.
I also found a pretty clear way to get "out of it". The key part to focus on is this:
The kicker is no matter what you are doing, you eventually find that the "meaning" of what you're doing starts to fade, you're actually realizing something. A career won't make your life meaningful.
The idea of "meaning" in life usually goes back to the idea that a life should have the meaning of some level otherwise it's "wasted". Except it doesn't and the acceptable level of meaning is abstract. Oftentimes we think our lives don't matter, our work we do doesn't matter compared to this abstract level of "meaning". It's that level that turns into justification of finding "more meaning" in our lives, by changing our lives to "find more meaning".
Except it doesn't have to. We don't have to seek "more meaning" out of life because we judge ourselves "meaningless" or "not meaningful enough". Instead, we could ignore the concept of a "meaningful life" and find value in what we do.
If you do something nice for someone, that's valuable to them. If you build something that helps 1 person accomplish something, that's valuable. If you pickup some trash and put it in the waste-bin, you add a little value to your earth. It's all these little things that produce value for others and yourself, it can be incredibly huge, especially over a lifespan and maybe even beyond!
The amount of value one can produce in a lifetime can be incredible. You start from 0 and it can basically only go "up" over time, compared to taking your whole life's meaning and comparing it to some abstract concept of "meaningfulness".
It's not a zero-sum game either. The value you produce isn't in some competition with someone else. It's just you, what you do, and the value it produces for your fellow universe.
Ultimately it does mean life is without meaning, but that does not mean life is without value.
I think meaning is largely up to the individual. Most careers these days are pretty meaningless - a lot of what we do ends up as apps that do pointless, business BS things for people with what David Graeber called "BS jobs", and when we're developing those kinds of systems our jobs are BS jobs too. But when we're able to do something that makes life genuinely easier for people, that is meaningful. Heck, if we're able to make someone genuinely happy for a bit, that's meaningful. I spent a lot of my career working for massive corporations whose systems were about making rich people a lot richer, or ensuring insurance policies only rarely paid out, or making it hard for people in need to claim the benefits they were entitled to, or chasing people for tax money that just got spent on weapons of mass destruction. Negative meaning there - I guess I have my place in hell reserved already. Some apps though - I once interviewed for a place that did an app for students that hooked into Google maps & showed them where all their lectures were, what they needed to bring, which of their friends were going too, let them make library requests, all kinds of stuff. So useful, I wish I'd had something like that when I was a student. That kind of thing, if you can do that you enrich so many lives. That's meaningful.
"A career won't make your life meaningful"
Absolutely true - love this!
You make a lot of good points! I agree with everything you said here...
If you build something that helps 1 person accomplish something, that's valuable
This here is I think at the core of my motivation to write this blog post - it felt cool when I built a silly Slack app for memes that was used by a bunch of people. That's what I want to do more of but with some more meaningful projects.