As Work Becomes Meaningless

Work is a complicated thing. Our society and understanding of self and others are tied up in the work that needs doing. It is blamed for being exploitative and harmful in many instances. It's also pursued with vigor to answer questions about ephemeral concepts like 'passion'. Whether visible or unseen, paid or not, it is a constant and plays an outsized role in our lives. For as long as most of us can remember, it was also part of a social contract that broadly agreed that making an effort in your working life would result in some amount of financial stability, and if you worked really hard, social mobility.

So, what happens when that agreement dissolves?

What happens when work becomes meaningless for almost everyone? 

When the aspects that made your work bearable, worthy, or sometimes even enjoyable are removed, yet you still have to show up and participate in the same way as before - what impact does that have on you? And others like you? And, then, on the society we are all a part of? 

What makes work meaningful?

There is a theory called the Psychology of Working Theory (PWT). Among other things, it "hypothesizes that decent work attainment across time allows individuals to meet needs for survival, social contribution, and self-determination components of autonomy, competency, and relatedness," [1]. From a slightly different perspective, another angle researchers consider meaningfulness at work is less focussed on personal meaning, instead emphasizing "the perceived importance of one’s work for other people and society in general," [2]. 

While I am soothed by the neatness of a set of criteria, I think the sense of something being meaningful comes from a much deeper and harder to study space within us. Part of the issue with studying the human mind and behaviour is that it isn't neatly divided up into discrete (and therefore measurable, and therefore classifiable) items. Likewise, humans and their big feelings do not exist in a lab setting. We wander around in our lives, bumping into people and fears, getting tangled up in biases and the occasional bout of hubris. We love a story, we are deeply social creatures, and we also like the feeling of overcoming things in order to achieve a goal. At our core, it is profoundly important to us to feel a sense of temporality, to experience embodiment, and to suffer a small amount of inconvenience in order for something to be meaningful.

Temporality

This is a nice word because it does a lot of heavy lifting. When I said we love a story, I meant that in the most layered up way you can conceive of it. I mean, humans love telling stories, listening to stories, conceiving of them, adding to them, using them as guidance, as warnings, as comfort, and on and on. We love stories so much, some of them become embedded in our legal structures and directives on how to live a life correctly. Maybe, then, it's not that we love stories as much as we need them. 

We need to tell a story to attach ourselves to a history. Where do I come from? What is my place in the here and now? Where am I headed? What am I working toward? The philosopher Han Byung-Chul [3] writes about how important story-telling is for humans to locate themselves, and how the act has been commodified in contemporary society. He argues that the storytelling and narratives used to anchor communities and to act as a form of wise counsel have been replaced. Come to think of it, it's worse - they haven't been replaced, but stolen, broken down into parts, rebranded, and sold back to us… when we were their creators in the first place! The audacity of it all. 

Consider this storytelling-to-storyselling process through your understanding of professional self. What narratives and stories were involved in you pursuing the career moves you have? How have they changed? Who has changed them? To what end? How has that led to your anchors, connection to others, and source of wisdom being hollowed out? 

Embodiment 

This is another nice word. I like words that have layered up meanings and aspects to engage in a fun zooming-in-and-out process. 

With the sight set to telescopic, pull back until you can see your body as an organism with feelings, systems, and needs that are in constant interaction with other bodies doing the same thing. You navigate the world, and your work, in a body with metabolic needs, sensorimotor demands, and requires constant intersubjective navigation [4]. In other words, you need to eat, decide how to complete a task, and take on board what your manager is trying to inexpertly communicate in this meeting that could have been an email. 

At this point, it's good to remind ourselves that we are not alone in this embodied experience of work. You have colleagues, fellow public-transport-takers, and those providing unpaid labour who form the woven tapestry that is your working week. To have a body while being in it - and settling on a sense of identity as informed by those two things - requires a synthesis which can be in harmony or not [5]. And, once again, so is everyone else in the office, on the bus, back home at the end of a long day, etc. 

When being in a body with metabolic needs like sufficient rest and restoration does not feel it has the right to 'switch off' from work - what then? What about when your big, dumb feelings in your squishy gorgeous body cared deeply as you completed all the tasks (and more) to produce achievements that were celebrated, but then one day when the contract came up for renewal there was no offer?

And then one day, as your output was reduced down into data points that the algorithm could manage well, it occurred to you that you've recently been feeling more and more detached from work. Perhaps it's a little hard to put your finger on exactly what's off, but you feel more and more disconnected from the people, how your tasks relate to others', and the shape it fills. It's almost like a bizarre combination of you feeling your edges of self being blurred, while at the same time every last thing you do is somehow a crisp data point. All that you do suddenly feels like a digit.    

Inconvenience

There is a hilariously heteronormative story that always pops up when you wander around long enough in tales of why-humans-need-challenge. The story (careful now!) goes something like this: Back in the heyday of the idyllic nuclear family, a company selling baking ingredients came up with a time-saving product - instant cake mix! All wife-y had to do was add water, pop it in the oven, and 30 short minutes later hubby and offspring would be most pleased. The company became confused when sales were initially very low. Why didn't these bird-brained women want the easy cake mix? Didn't they see how efficient it was? Surely, it would free up more time for ironing or putting on lipstick or whatever it was they got up to. Long story short, it turned out the instant-mix approach was seen as too easy and lacked effort, and thus lacked a demonstration of care, love, achievement and so on. 

Perhaps it would be more useful, and less irritating, to consider what's called the Effort Paradox. That is, while organisms usually avoid effort because it's costly, paradoxically it's also valued and even actively pursued by humans [6]. While researchers debate whether effort itself is being measured when ‘testing’ how much we like effort - some argue that the emotions a person attaches to the result of effort is being measured - for the purposes of this article let's allow for the idea that having no obstacles of any sort to overcome makes people weird. Think of those who can buy their way out of problems and inconveniences, who are surrounded by people whose job it is to say, “Yes.” They are good examples of why we need an amount of friction in our lives.

If you extend the need to overcome an obstacle into ‘meaningful work’, you might consider how the two ideas would occupy a venn diagram. At the beginning of this piece, I wrote about meaningful work meeting needs for survival, social contribution, and self determination. It seems to me that the pursuit of those outcomes necessarily relies on overcoming obstacles by making, at times, enormous effort. It further seems to me that such an effort would require the participation of others.  Both the effort required and the need to work with others, again, necessarily requires some inconvenience. In the version of contemporary life where much inconvenience is swatted away by algorithmic decision-making, it’s easy to lose sight of the need and value for inconvenience. Being surrounded by people who can’t or won’t disagree with you is an excellent way to fracture any sense of community and belonging. The same is true for a work environment.              

Autonomy 

This word that keeps popping up, over and over, as I wander around psychology, philosophy, and other disciplines asserting their epistemic authority. Autonomy, it turns out, is regarded in an interdisciplinary way as being important to our sense of self. For my graduate thesis, I carried out research on employees' experience of autonomy at work. The survey that I used to measure this included a lot of language related to decision-making, independence, personal judgement, and freedom. It is widely accepted across disciplines that the experience of autonomy is a consistent player in finding out what makes work a positive experience for people. 

As we watch our work spaces evolve with a new leap into automation, research has begun to suggest that "long-term reliance on AI tools for cognitive offloading can (…) lead to dependence and a loss of cognitive autonomy," [7]. I suspect here is where we can find a point of pain. As work tasks become increasingly digitalized and data-ified, we become engaged with work that is slipping further away from that which makes it meaningful. It's harder to tell the story when the temporality has been shredded. It's even more difficult to locate your Self within a story that lacks the connective tissue of past, present, and future. 

Likewise, it is a struggle to find meaning in work that is disembodied so much that you cannot make it harmonious within your own, nor with others. Adding more data points to the list is not allowing for you to feel connected or related to others in the work that you do. And, of course, there is a growing gap where inconvenience once took up space. The inconvenience of learning something new, of struggling through the cognitive process to become better at thinking critically, or writing more clearly, or communicating to a variety of audiences. The hyper scale of digitisation at work is taking away the component parts that once encouraged meaning to grow.    

Final thoughts

Perhaps the most painful part is in the process of becoming meaningless. It's painful because we are witnessing our humanity leaving. We can feel parts of self being hollowed out and sold off. We have a front row seat in our own objectification process, which will feel very familiar to many women. The scale is different this time, however, and we're in a global context where the façades around meritocracy and social mobility are crashing all around us. To exist as potential for extraction in every last corner of your life is a painful conclusion to arrive at. With any luck, the same realization will function as a motivator for us to find each other, and begin to create alternatives.      

Cover art by https://www.alexandralevasseur.com/‍ ‍

Works Cited:

[1] Blustein, D. L., Lysova, E. I., & Duffy, R. D. (2022). Understanding decent work and meaningful work. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10(1), 289–314. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031921-024847

[2] Zacher, H., & Baumeister, R. F. (2024). Differences among a satisfied, a meaningful, and a psychologically rich working life. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 20(4), 713–737. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2024.2417102

[3] Han, B. (2024). The crisis of narration. Polity.

[4] Deranty, J. (2025). “Working bodies: A dual enactive and psychodynamic approach.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-025-10124-0

[5] Lundh, L., & Foster, L. (2024). Embodiment as a synthesis of having a body and being a body, and its role in self-identity and mental health. New Ideas in Psychology, 74, 101083. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2024.101083

[6] Inzlicht, M., Campbell, A. V., & Saunders, B. (2025). Effort paradox redux: Rethinking how effort shapes social behavior. In Advances in experimental social psychology (pp. 1–55). https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.aesp.2025.04.002

[7] Gerlich, M. (2025). AI Tools in Society: Impacts on cognitive offloading and the future of critical thinking. Societies, 15(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006