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- cross-posted to:
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And those who are in crucial meaningful jobs are pushed to their very limits, overworked because “your job is your calling.” (Nurses, teachers, social workers, etc.)
I’ve sort of just accepted it. I work in a niche position in a software company that’s in a niche sector and while people do depend on me for their livelyhoods, I wouldn’t say the products I produce are, in the grand scheme of things, meaningful. What I do only exists as a job in the 20th and 21st centuries and humans got on just fine before that.
I instead find meaning in my hobbies and out of work activities. My job, while pretty meaningless in my mind, does pay me enough to allow me to have a good life outside of work. I don’t need my job to be meaningful, I just need it to not suck.
What I do only exists as a job in the 20th and 21st centuries and humans got on just fine before that.
And your job is probably severely threatened by AI just like every other job out there. Hopefully humans will get on just fine after that, too.
Nothing highlights this as much when your management actually says and believes that “the purpose of our organization is to make money”. Totally clueless people.
No… the purpose is to deliver value to all stakeholders including customers, and society at large and by doing it well make some money. So it maters what you do and how you do it and the vision around it.
I mean, legally, that is the purpose of a for-profit company. From a policymaker’s perspective it has wider purposes, but to the managers that’s basically “not their job”
That is kind of my point exactly. The purpise of companies was not originally so. I is just a view heavily promoted by elites. Even the courts believe it now. Was not always so. Hence it does not always have to be so.
Yes, but what the alternative is isn’t so clear cut. Every corporation thinking through the impacts of their decisions on every other person in the world is obviously unfair (even governments have trouble tracking stuff), and even if they could how do you make them? Benevolent leadership is, if you look across history, a myth.
How do you allow a CEO to work against their shareholders without basically legalising embezzlement? You can’t write every possible scenario into your law, and shouldn’t ever try. How do you get random shareholders to care about a social issue, and how do you assure whatever social issue they pick is a good one and not “putting down the gays”? You could tear up the whole market system and start fresh but I’ve yet to see that done in convincing detail.
The solutions aren’t obvious. I do think they exist, but I’m trying to quit value judgements on the internet, so I won’t write a manifesto here.
PS on the history bit you mentioned, it seems to me a corporation is just an overgrown street peddler, and street peddlers have always been looking to make a profit. The occasions they don’t have been flukes.
It helps to get paid a lot to not think about that
It’s worth pointing out that feeling like you work in a pointless, meaningless job doesn’t necessarily make it true. This paper is solely about people’s perceptions, not facts.
Great so if I think my job is pointless and meaningless and hate it, I should just keep doing it? Because reasons?
Obviously most jobs are not pointless or meaningless. They exist because we need them to exist for things to function. Perception in this case is ultimately a much more useful metric for nearly any question you may want to answer about jobs.
Job satisfaction? Perception matters more. Job demand? Definitely perception. Mental health of workers? Perception.
What questions do you think are better answered by some kind of more ‘objective’ measure of job meaning?
A person’s perception is highly informed by how well or poorly they understand the subject or situation in question.
Let’s say you got stood up by a first date because they got hit by a car on their way to you. Your perception of them is going to vary wildly depending on whether or not you know the facts behind why they didn’t show up.
Similarly, knowing how you actually fit into things at your job - i.e. your importance to your working group, the company, it’s customers, society itself, allows you to have a more accurate set of facts to base your perception on.
So yes, the truth matters.
The opposite of that is also true - feeling like you’re doing something useful doesn’t make it so
yes but ultimately perception is reality.
I’m going to have to disagree with you on this.
People have all sorts of beliefs that can qualitatively be proven as right or wrong. For example, all the wingnuts who believe that the COVID vaccine has trackers from Microsoft. Their beliefs are 100% bereft of reality.
Now, can they go ahead and act on those mistaken beliefs? Sure. But that doesn’t make their beliefs correct in any way.
You’re right of course, but we are talking about two different things.
Conflating pointless and meaningless is an odd choice. My job, sending invoices, is meaningless but not pointless.
very happy i landed a job doing web work for mostly non profit clients. a few lawyers here and there, but we need them, too.
most non profits are just fronts for scams. they always say non-profit, but the profits are taken by the greedy backers. sorry to bust ur dream.
i’ve had the chance to see their work, and they’re bringing good into the world. i care less about where the money is going and more about the net positive for the folks who otherwise wouldn’t have it without the “greedy backers.”
That’s a gross over-simplification. I’d wager that you’re correct that the majority are scammy in nature since it’s so simple to create a nonprofit. But, there are thousands of important nonprofits out there doing good work. In my experience, the people that choose to mostly work with nonprofits are working with important organizations doing good work. That’s anecdotal, but it just seems pointlessly dismissive to lump nonprofits together as bad simply because they’re nonprofits.
Why not assume that this person’s job does some very basic due diligence to confirm they’re working with an authentic organization that’s doing good, rather than trying to “bust ur dream”.
I moved out of finance into non profit but still doing tech. Every day I try to find “purpose” in my work but a tech job is a tech job. The income is the only reason I can’t jump ship out of BS and into something that I find meaningful.
Sometimes donating to the causes you care about does more good than working in the industry itself. A friend of mine who is really into dancing came to that conclusion.
Lol, this is why I left comp engineering to work in a nature preserve
I would LOVE to go back to the tree farm or become a park ranger or something. It just doesn’t pay the bills that my cloud engineering does.
Yeah! Hey in this economy, I regret it at times! In the world we live in, there are always trade-offs. No shame in whatever path you take, as long as you don’t vote Republican!
