Alain de Botton on when a job feels meaningful
Last week, I was in Philadelphia, the city that I’m excited to say will soon be my new home. It was just my third trip to the city, and while I skipped checking out Benjamin Franklin’s privy pit this go around, I still had a lot of fun.
I wanted to write a shorter post this week, based on a book that I first read in 2013 and, while I haven’t read it in full since then, I frequently re-read my highlights.
In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, author and public speaker Alain de Botton asks and answers a simple question:
When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.
He elaborates on this in the below passages stripped straight from the book—I’m leaning on longer quotes than usual, but I promise they’re worth it:
Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit.
Continues de Botton, emphasis mine:
It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children’s books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks or farmers—people whose labour can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life.
I love the bolded part of that passage in particular because it so vividly brings to mind Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day, which I adored as a kid.
While the question of when a job feels meaningful comes up for me often, there’s one quote from The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work that has stuck with me for the last twelve years, and which shows the importance of having not just a meaningful job, but a meaningful life:
We too are never more than one hard slam away from a definitive end to our carefully arranged ideas and copious involvement with ourselves.
There are many reasons to do a job, and meaning isn’t always the top priority. Only you can decide what feels meaningful in your daily life. But I’m curious: When does a job feel meaningful to you?