Work without meaning: what psychology knows about why we need it

Tuesday, a quarter to four in the afternoon. The spreadsheet has twenty-two columns, and for the third time this month you are copying the same figures from one system into another, because the two systems “don’t talk to each other yet”. Somewhere around row two hundred and thirteen a thought snags that you can no longer push away: If this spreadsheet disappeared tomorrow, would anyone even notice?

You aren’t unhappy in the classic sense. The salary arrives, your colleagues are fine, your manager isn’t a tyrant. And yet in the evening you go home feeling that you have been busy all day without actually doing anything. On Sundays it doesn’t feel as though you are dreading something — more as though you are avoiding something. Psychology has several names for this feeling, but the simplest is the one people use themselves: work without meaning.

In this piece I want to set out what psychology actually knows about meaningful work — and what it doesn’t. Why we need it, where it comes from, why it is so often lost in relationships rather than in tasks, and what you can do without handing in your notice tomorrow. And also where the search for meaning has its dark side.

What it means for work to have meaning

When people talk about meaningful work, they usually mean three different things at once. The first is the sense that the work is significant — that it has consequences, that it changes something for someone. The second is the sense that the work is mine — that I can use what I know in it and recognise something of myself in it. The third is the sense that the work is connected to something larger than me — to people, to a community, to values that matter to me.

Researchers who have gathered decades of studies on meaningful work in their reviews describe something similar: meaning arises where the self, other people, the work itself and the wider context in which it is done meet. It isn’t a feature of a job that you could read in a job advert. It is a relationship between a person and what they do. Which is why two people can do exactly the same work and one experiences it as meaningful while the other experiences it as an empty waste of time.

You’ll find a short explanation of the concept in the knowledge base under meaning. For this piece one thing matters above all: meaning isn’t a luxury reserved for doctors, teachers and artists. It is a human need that speaks up in every occupation — even when we can’t put a name to it.

Five minutes that changed a month

One of the most telling studies of how much we need to feel our work matters comes from a call centre. The American psychologist Adam Grant and his colleagues observed students who raised money by phone for university scholarships. The work was monotonous and often unpleasant — people hung up, refused, got angry.

One group of callers met, for a few minutes, a student who had received a scholarship and heard him say what it had meant to him. The other group had no such meeting. A month later, the callers who had met the student were on average spending 142 per cent more time on the phone and raising 171 per cent more money than before; for the others almost nothing had changed. The work itself stayed the same. The only thing that changed was that people had seen the face of someone who benefited from their work.

This finding matters because of something that often gets lost in modern work. Between the person who makes something and the person who benefits from it there are now often so many intermediate steps, departments and systems that the connection can no longer be seen. Work doesn’t become meaningless because it is useless in itself. It becomes meaningless because you can no longer see where it goes.

A job, a career or a calling

Amy Wrzesniewski, one of the best-known researchers of meaningful work, described with her colleagues in the late 1990s three different relationships people have with their work. Some experience work as a job: a means that brings a salary, security and freedom for what really matters to them in life. Others experience it as a career: a path on which they advance, prove themselves and gain standing. Still others experience it as a calling: the work is meaningful to them in itself and they wouldn’t want to give it up even if there were no money.

The most interesting thing about this research is that these relationships weren’t tied to occupation. Even among people with the same job title and the same tasks, some saw their work as a job, others as a career and others as a calling. So meaning isn’t only about what you do, but also about how you see it and how you relate to it.

This doesn’t mean a calling is the goal everyone should strive for. A person who experiences their work as a job is no less worthy or less mature. Their meaning may be firmly anchored elsewhere — in family, in community, in creative work, in faith. The problem isn’t when work is only a job. The problem is when work is empty and at the same time takes up so much time and energy that no room is left for meaning elsewhere.

Meaning is lost in relationships, not in tasks

We can look at a workplace as a system — much as, in relational family therapy, in which I am training, we look at a family. It contains roles, unwritten rules, alliances, triangles. And just as in a family, how you feel at work is rarely decided only inside you. It is decided in relationships.

When people describe when their work lost its meaning, they rarely talk about the tasks themselves. They talk about a manager overriding their professional judgement. About a project they had put months into vanishing into a drawer overnight without anyone telling them why. About nobody noticing their work until something goes wrong. About becoming the messenger between management and the team, so that now both sides look at them sideways. About a company that talks about values and acts by different ones.

British researchers who analysed extensive European data on working conditions came to a similar conclusion. In their data, the feeling that one’s work is useless was linked less to the type of occupation than to poor management, lack of influence and relationships at work. So meaning isn’t only a matter for the individual, who should simply try harder. It is also a matter of the system they work in. I wrote about how responsibility for exhaustion is shared between individual and system in System or individual: who is responsible for burnout.

When meaning is lost for a long time and persistently, it often shows up as cynicism: mockery in meetings, “it doesn’t matter anyway”, distance from people you once liked. Cynicism isn’t a character flaw, but often a defence against the pain of having once cared. There is more on this in Cynicism as a sign: when you no longer care and it isn’t your character.

Two voices to read carefully

Two names are often quoted today when meaningful work comes up. Both are valuable and both are easily misused.

The first is Viktor Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps and wrote a book about it that several generations have now read. His central idea is that the deepest human need is the need for meaning, and that it can be found even in the worst circumstances — in work, in love and in the stance we take towards suffering that cannot be avoided. It is a profound idea. But I have to be careful how I use it. Frankl wasn’t writing that a person in a bad job should simply change their attitude and endure. He was writing about circumstances that could not be changed. Most working circumstances can be — at least a little.

The second is the American anthropologist David Graeber, who in 2018 published a widely discussed book about “bullshit jobs” — positions that, in his view, even the people doing them believe to be unnecessary. The book captured what many people felt, and that is why it matters. But it is primarily an essay and an opinion, not research. When later researchers tested his thesis against data, they found that far fewer people experience their work as useless than he claimed, and that they aren’t concentrated in the occupations he singled out. Graeber described an important feeling. But it would be wrong to conclude from it that your work is meaningless simply because it is office work.

Reshaping work from below

If meaning lies not only in tasks but also in relationships and outlook, then it can be built, at least partly, from the position you are in. In 2001 Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton coined a term for this: job crafting — small changes people make themselves, without waiting for someone to prescribe them.

They described three levers. The first is tasks: what you do, how much of what, and how. The second is relationships: who you work with, who you connect with, who your work is for. The third is outlook: how you understand what your work serves. In the article they cite the example of hospital cleaners, who described their work very differently. Some talked only about cleaning. Others talked about the patients they chatted with, about how they took care to make their day easier, and about being part of the work of healing. The tasks were the same. The work wasn’t.

Job crafting isn’t positive thinking, and it isn’t persuading yourself that everything is fine. It is a careful look at where there is still some room in your work, and a decision to use it. For some people that room is large, for others there is barely any. But there is almost always some.

What a conversation about it can sound like

This is how part of a conversation in a session might go (composed, not a real person):

“I don’t know why I’m here. Nothing’s wrong. I have a good job.”
“But?”
“But in the evening I don’t know what I’ve been doing all day. I send reports that nobody reads.”
“How do you know nobody reads them?”
“Because nobody ever replies. Never a single question.”
“Who do you think should be reading them?”
A pause. “The sales managers out in the field. So they know where things are getting stuck.”
“Have you ever talked to any of them?”
“No. Never. I don’t think they even know who writes them.”

The conversation doesn’t solve everything. But it opens something important: the work isn’t necessarily empty — the connection between the person doing it and those who are supposed to benefit from it has been broken. That is something that can sometimes be repaired with a single phone call. And sometimes it turns out that nobody really needs the reports — which is also worth knowing.

Exercise: reshape one week

You can start this exercise today. You need a sheet of paper, half an hour and a little curiosity about your own work.

1. Draw your week. Write down everything you usually do at work, and next to each task note roughly how much time you give it. Not as it should be, but as it is.
2. Next to each task, write who benefits from it. Specifically: a name, a department, a client, a patient, a child. Where you don’t know, write a question mark. The question marks are the most interesting part of the exercise — that is where the connection has broken.
3. Choose one question mark and look into it. Ask a colleague, your manager or the person at the other end directly: “What does what I send you mean to you? What would be more useful?” The answer alone can change something.
4. Make one small change in your tasks. Something within your remit: more time for the part you do best, a different order, a new format for a report. Don’t wait for permission for things you don’t need permission for.
5. Write one sentence about what your work serves. Not in the language of the job description, but in your own. After a week, read it again and check whether it still holds. If you don’t know what to connect it to, use the personal values list.

If after the exercise it seems there is no room anywhere — that every task is prescribed and every relationship closed — that isn’t a failure either. It is a clearer picture to make your next decisions with.

And one note: the exercise doesn’t measure whether your work is noble enough. It measures whether you can see where it goes. A data-entry clerk who knows that people get their pay on time because of them may have more meaning than a surgeon who, under pressure and bureaucracy, has forgotten why they studied medicine in the first place.

When the answer isn’t the search for meaning

It is only fair to say that the search for meaning in work has a shadow side too — and that it isn’t always the right answer.

When meaning becomes a lever for exploitation. The American researchers Stuart Bunderson and Jeffery Thompson studied zookeepers, who often experienced their work as a deep calling. They found that this calling was a double-edged sword: people who experienced their work as a calling were also more willing to accept lower pay, longer hours and worse conditions. “You do it because you love the work” can quickly turn, in a bad system, into “so we don’t need to pay you more”. Meaning must never be a substitute for fair treatment.

When nobody should be persuading you that you must love your work. The message “do what you love” sounds liberating, but for people who can’t afford that kind of work it often adds a layer of guilt. Work can also be just work. Meaning can live elsewhere. Your job doesn’t have to answer the question of why you are alive — it is enough that it doesn’t exhaust you so much that you can no longer ask that question anywhere else.

When the emptiness isn’t in the work, but in you. If not only your work but everything else seems meaningless — friends, hobbies, the future — it may be a sign of depression rather than a bad job. Depression turns everything grey, including what once had colour. In that case talk to your GP. There is more on this in Depression and work: how to work when you can’t — and when not to. If thoughts appear that it would be better if you weren’t here, in Slovenia you can call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritan helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day). In an emergency, call 112.

When it is boredom, not emptiness. A sense of pointlessness is sometimes confused with boredom: with work that doesn’t occupy you enough. That is a related but different problem, which the piece Boredom at work: an underrated state that isn’t laziness deals with.

Where therapy can help

Our relationship with work doesn’t begin with our first job. It begins at home, at the kitchen table, where we listened to our parents talk about their work. Some of us heard “work is an honour”, others “as long as it puts bread on the table”, others still “I slaved away so that you won’t have to”. Some of us watched parents who loved their work, others parents who endured it in silence for years. We carry these messages with us, and they often decide how much meaning we even allow ourselves to expect — and how much guilt we feel if we look for it.

In sessions we can look together at where your sense of emptiness comes from, what in your work and in your relationships at work feeds it, and what might change it. Sometimes it turns out that the way forward lies in small changes. Sometimes that it is time for a bigger decision, which the piece Should I quit my job? Questions that tell you more than a list of pros and cons is about. If you are interested in how the relationship with work has been passed down through your family across generations, a longer session with a genogram, A Look into the Past, can be useful. Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients.

If you are curious about how the question of meaning arises when work one day comes to an end, read Retirement, the loss of a role and the question of meaning. And if you feel your worth is closely tied to how much you get done, you may find Worth only as much as you get done: self-image and productivity close to home. For a short explanation of what drives us forward at all, see the knowledge base entry on motivation.

What to remember

• The meaning of work isn’t a feature of the job, but a relationship between you, your work and the people it is for.
• Seeing the face of someone who benefits from your work can change more than any motivational speech.
• Meaning is often lost in relationships and the system — in overridden judgement, unnoticed work, empty values — not only in tasks.
• By reshaping tasks, relationships and outlook you can build some meaning even without a new title, but it doesn’t replace fair pay and respectful leadership.
• If everything feels empty, not just work, it may be a sign of depression: talk to your doctor; in a crisis in Slovenia, call 01 520 99 00 or 116 123.