Here’s a question that keeps people up at night: does my work actually matter? Not “do I make money?” or “am I good at it?” but “if I disappeared tomorrow, would anything of value be lost?”
The anthropologist David Graeber called these “bullshit jobs.” Jobs that even the people doing them can’t justify. Middle managers managing managers. Compliance officers enforcing pointless rules. Entire industries that exist to create work for their own sake.
And it’s not just obviously pointless jobs. It’s talented, capable people spending decades on work that contributes nothing meaningful to the world. Marketing soft drinks. Optimizing ad click-through rates. Shuffling money between accounts. Work that pays well but hollows you out inside.
Here’s what that does to you. It creates what Graeber called “moral injury.” You know you’re wasting your life, but you can’t afford to quit. You see people doing work that actually helps others, teachers and nurses and social workers, and they make a fraction of what you make. The injustice of it gnaws at you.
The existentialists understood this. Camus wrote about Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity. That’s meaningless work. The question is whether you can find meaning anyway. Camus said yes, through rebellion, through choosing to push the boulder and finding satisfaction in the choice itself.
But that’s a tough sell when your boulder is a spreadsheet and the hill is corporate bureaucracy. You can tell yourself the work doesn’t matter, what matters is how you approach it. But after years of that, the nihilism wins.
Karl Marx wrote about alienation. When work is just a means to a paycheck, you’re alienated from your labor. You don’t see yourself in what you create. You’re not fulfilled by it. You’re just selling your time, turning yourself into a commodity.
This is why so many people dream about quitting their jobs and doing something “meaningful.” Starting a nonprofit. Teaching. Making art. Anything but this. But they don’t, because meaningful work usually pays terribly. So they stay trapped, knowing they’re wasting their finite existence on things that don’t matter.
What’s the solution? Honestly, there isn’t a clean one. We live in an economy that rewards bullshit work and undervalues essential work. Teachers struggle to pay rent while consultants get rich producing PowerPoints nobody reads.
But here are some options. First, you can try to find meaning within your current work. Maybe your job is pointless, but you can still help your coworkers, mentor junior employees, bring excellence to small tasks. It’s not much, but it’s something.
Second, you can preserve your real self outside of work. Don’t let your job become your identity. Do meaningful things with your free time. Volunteer. Create. Help people. Use your income from bullshit work to fund meaningful activities.
Third, you can take the risk and leave. Yes, you’ll probably make less money. Yes, it’s scary. But what’s scarier is spending 40 years doing something you know doesn’t matter and then dying with regret.
Fourth, you can work toward systemic change. Join movements to value essential work properly. Push for universal basic income. Advocate for shorter work weeks. The problem isn’t just your job. It’s how we organize work in general.
William Morris, the 19th-century socialist, argued that work should be a source of joy and creativity, not alienation. We should make things we’re proud of, contribute to our communities, express our humanity through our labor. Instead, we’ve created systems where most work is soul-crushing.
The crisis of meaningless work is a moral crisis. We know we should be doing things that matter. We know life is short. We know that the deathbed version of ourselves won’t care about the quarterly earnings we helped optimize. But we do it anyway because we feel trapped.
Maybe we are trapped. But recognizing the trap is the first step to finding a way out.