When does work feel meaningful?

Work can feel meaningful if one of two prerequisites are met.

Either the work you do is contributing to a greater good and the output of your work is part of a larger framework that tries to make a positive impact on society or your community or directly serves these people.

Or the execution of the work is fulfilling because you really enjoy what you are doing. The work itself is your target and you extract happiness from the act alone.

The reality

Most people do not enjoy doing their work. They would not do it as a hobby and will only focus on the monetary gains. According to a report published by Gallup in 2013, only 13% of employees are engaged at work. They take enjoyment out of it and are eager to contribute something to the output of an organization.

It makes sense to me that many people do not enjoy the act of working itself. Most of the time the work that gives you joy is not the work you will end up doing. Your company decides exactly what your daily work-life looks like. Deviations from that can often result in a worse outcome for the company.

But what about the output of your work? There exists the concept of the alienation from work defined by Karl Marx. It says that our input often has no real relation to our output. We ourselves do not need the things our companies produce or can simply not afford them. We are emotionally separated from the goods we create. There is a layer of abstraction between the things we do and the value we create.

Imagine you are living in a small town where no big companies exist. Everyone has to work but at a much smaller scale. That means that no goods produced leave this town and should only serve the people there. Once a week there would be a big market where goods are traded. There you see exactly who needs what and at which quantity. The output of your work would directly serve the needs of a person you can see and talk to. This person would be happy to give you money for your product. You would be happy because your work makes another person happy.

Important work

People have basic needs. To fulfill these needs is important because only then humans can continue existing as humans. Without it they have to fight for their survival or live in misery. Social work is work that can fulfill that need (collective needs fulfillment). People that do this type of work can understand at first glance what the value of their work is and how they are contributing to the fulfillment of people's needs. There is less abstraction here.

Does that mean that I can extract more meaning from my work if I contribute to the greater fulfillment of people's needs? If I slave away in a factory that produces chicken meat? Of course not. Working conditions are important too. People working in healthcare have it easier to see the meaning of their labor because they see the people that profit from their effort but that is not enough when the working conditions are bad and they are destroying themselves in the process.

The definition of work is doing something, either physical or mental, to reach a goal. If the positive impact on people that comes out of that goal is hard to pin down or is not important to us or society, we have a hard time extracting meaning out of it.

It is a fact that most of us are only a very small gear in a colossal machine. We are blind to the results of our labor and most of us don't even care what the output is. You can gaslight yourself that your work is contributing to a greater good but is it really what people need or is it only benefiting the people that sit on top of the food chain?