Having a meaningful life is pretty important.
Think about it: If your life isn’t exciting, interesting, stimulating, fun, important, influential, or engrossing, what else is there to look forward to? Mindless consumption of entertainment? Repetitive chores and routines? The empty pursuit of money and material wealth? Those don’t sound very good to me.
People, I’ve found, find meaning in all kinds of ways. Many find meaning in family relationships: finding a romantic partner, having kids, raising their own family, or connecting with parents, siblings, or other close relatives. Society places a lot of value on family too, like how the nuclear family is super important in the West.
A lot of people grow up with the impression that family and romantic relationships are the best way to make a meaningful life (i.e., that family is the most important thing). As such, many people have the impression that careers and paid work are only important in that they allow you to provide for a family. In other words: it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as it makes enough money for you to support a spouse and kids—even if your spouse has a job of their own. (I once met a guy during a job interview who told me this in completely straightforward terms.)
I’ve always thought of meaning in opposite terms: It’s important to find meaningful work that creates a meaningful life, whether that meaning comes from creative work, a career, or even a Day Job.
Unfortunately, that can be REALLY hard to do, which is what I want to talk about in this post.
A World That Isn’t Designed for Smart Creative People
Recently I read Eric Maisel’s book Why Smart People Hurt and found a lot there that really resonated with me, including the idea that the world just isn’t designed for smart people who want to do meaningful work.
This is partly because of the anti-thinking environment we live in, or as Maisel puts it, “the pressure not to think.” We live in a world of routine chores, simple pleasures, and the pursuit of material values, so it’s not surprising that meaningful work rarely fits into that equation. Not only are there tendencies for people around us to mistrust scientists and other intellectuals as having an agenda, much of work and school, sadly, doesn’t involve much real thinking at all.
Think about it: in school, how many times do you remember being forced to sit and do busywork just because the teacher needed an activity to make it through the day? How much of school involved just following a textbook, or learning formulas, historical dates, scientific methods, grammar rules, and other minutiae? How much of school was merely teaching to the test, where students were given the incentive of getting a good grade (or at least avoiding a bad grade), and driven toward a material reward even if they didn’t engage in real thought or creativity?
The working world, though, is even worse. How much of our time at work consists of repetitive paperwork, pointless meetings, schmoozing with people you don’t care about, or accomplishing mindless tasks that, while at one time they might have been challenging, lose their value after months and years of doing the same thing?
How much of work, really, is just pointless shit that doesn’t create real meaning?
Lack of Meaning as a Source of Stress
“It is natural and predictable that our environment may pressure us not to think,” Maisel writes. “This pressure will produce pain as we intuit that we are missing out on a native opportunity and will negatively affect our personality, producing everything from math anxiety to depression.”
In short, living and working in an anti-thinking environment causes stress.
This is made worse because “Smart Work” becomes a kind of oxymoron. In contrast to earlier eras of the Renaissance Man (or woman) who could learn a trade while also growing their own food, building their own house, mastering several types of crafts, and engaging in intellectual pursuits, we live in a world where people are encouraged to choose one hyper-specialized job that pays a lot of money so they can pay other people to do all that other stuff. I’m talking about stuff that people used to do more of themselves but are now encouraged to pay others to do, like home repair, car maintenance, making coffee, mowing the lawn, and even cooking dinner at home, as the recent plethora of meal-preparation services shows.
Sure, many people find those things boring or difficult, but the problem with this model is that sustaining this kind of life involves working a job that’s, well…hyperspecialized, repetitive, and often boring.
Add to this the sad reality that some professions like doctors and lawyers are seen as more valuable than others, even though, for many people, these professions aren’t at all meaningful or interesting. If becoming a doctor or lawyer isn’t something that feels meaningful to everyone, why does society hold up these jobs as the Gold Standard for careers? Shouldn’t we encourage people to find the job that creates meaning for them individually? (And also ensure they can get paid for it?)
Valuing certain jobs in this way encourages young people to pursue them for either money, status, or both, even if they’re not personally interested in the field itself, and aren’t likely to glean meaning from it. For these kinds of people, work is about purely material gain, which doesn’t satisfy our innate needs for meaning and happiness.
For smart, creative people, not being able to use your brain to solve interesting challenges can create boredom, anxiety, and depression, because they’re more aware of these situations that have no meaning. Whereas a lot of people just accept boring situations, smart creative people understand that there’s more to life than just doing the same stupid job over and over.
Because that kind of life sucks hard.
Creating Meaning is Really, Really Important
The last few chapters of Maisel’s book go into how to create meaning by asking yourself questions about what you want to do and how you want to spend your life and what kinds of tasks you want to be involved in. He calls this natural psychology, though I think of this more as organizing your career in a way that works for you.
A big part of my creative journey has involved moving away from boring, repetitive, or stressful work that I don’t want to do and toward a career where I can do creative work that’s meaningful and interesting to me while also affecting others in a positive way. On this blog, I encourage other people to do that too, even if they’re not in a creative field, since I believe everyone has some kind of job that will bring them meaning and fulfillment.
I feel much, much better about the way I’ve organized my life in a way that allows me to do meaningful work now compared to, say, ten years ago, or when I was working a Day Job that I enjoyed but was simply too damned busy. I still have a little ways to go when it comes to obtaining more financial freedom, though, and moving forward, I’d like to do that while making sure the work I do still creates meaning for myself and others.