stop searching for purpose at work
If you feel disillusioned by work—wondering, “is this all there is?” or “will I ever be happy?” while feeling oppressed by the steady grind of joyless, draining, wall-to-wall routine, it’s because your career doesn’t hold purpose for you anymore.
So here’s my insanely hot take: what if our jobs are a TERRIBLE place to source your purpose?
Let’s look back at U.S. history for a moment.
OUR GRANDPARENTS’ GENERATION: “We just survived one of the greatest collective and individual traumas imaginable—combat warfare! The purpose of OUR JOBS is to be fruitful and multiply, and work to support the emergent nuclear family.”
OUR PARENTS’ GENERATION: “Um, look, I’m just trying to keep my head down and hammer this shit out so I can RETIRE. Hopefully I don’t die first. That’s why I work.”
OUR GENERATION: “I can’t even imagine retiring [either because social safety nets will be insolvent, or we’re so addicted to the grind that the idea of not having a job sounds like a nightmare]! My job is my life’s purpose and it should have a mission that inspires me every day, or I will despair. I aspire to make my job equally if not more fulfilling than family and social connection.”
“….and if my career doesn’t meet these insanely high standards, it means I AM FAILING.”
Oh boy.
Here’s my critique of making our jobs our primary source of fulfillment. The thesis is that the idea is rotten to the core, and actually it would be extremely weird to NOT have some level of disillusionment about working as a concept.
The nuclear family creates isolation, anxiety, and depression. We didn’t evolve for white picket fences and dark secrets. It was a construct invented by capitalism to stabilize war veterans and bury the effects of trauma into small cells where it might be kept conveniently private.
Loneliness, dark secrets and hidden trauma are extremely profitable. When everyone feels a hole in their spiritual existence, they try to fill it with BUYING STUFF. This was great for the post-war economic recovery.
Our parents optimized for security so that our generation might have a chance to dream. Sounds sweet, but only a small number of them succeeded, depending largely on their race and prior inheritance—and we dreamers are still stuck in the same capitalist machine. Dreams don’t pay the way-too-high rent.
So our dreams became interwoven with financial needs, survival, ego, and competition. It’s an underbelly we have tried our best to ignore, but 5-15 years into our careers, it fully wearing on the soul.
Buying stuff has become our religion. We’re totally trapped in this system that we know to be exploitative—and as economic disparity in our country continues to reach dystopian proportions, we find ourselves in the exhausting tension of trying to win a game we know is morally reprehensible.
The other aspect of this religion is Not-Enoughness. We worship at its altar. We hum the mantra “I am not enough. This is not enough” all day long.
Not-Enoughness is our greatest shared legacy. And with our self-worth, dreams, and literal survival fully tied up in our careers, racing against the clock as we try to hoard enough wealth (or ignore the fact that we aren’t hoarding enough wealth), while fretting deeply about how the 8-hour day has somehow turned into a 12-hour day—where is purpose and fulfillment supposed to live? There is no room left for it. Some of us are disgusted by the need to work. It makes us depressed.
Our jobs—the things that used to be about fruitfulness, then retirement, then purpose—are now turning into… something else.
What purpose are our jobs going to have? What are we supposed to be optimizing for in our careers?
The answer is: I don’t fucking know.
But what I do know is this: if we’re going to survive long enough to find out, we have to start optimizing for one very specific thing in our lives. Something radical. The opposite of every rotten dynamic that’s gotten us to where we are today.
Pleasure.
I don’t mean the kind of fake aspirational perfect-bodies-and-champagne-on-a-yacht “pleasure” we’ve been force-fed since birth. That’s the same old system of oppression talking.
I’m talking about the forbidden, shameful kind of pleasure. The kind that—especially for people socialized as women—we are absolutely NOT allowed to have. We must earn it, and somehow, we never get to the place where it’s deserved. We must devote all our energy to others, never to ourselves.
I’m talking about the kind of pleasure where a mother does something just for herself, just because she likes it, even if it means ignoring her kids for an hour.
I mean the kind of pleasure that comes from nourishing our bodies without thinking about “earning calories”.
The kind of pleasure that comes from deep connection with a friend.
And the pleasure of a four-day workweek, with an out-of-office reply all weekend.
This is the pleasure that comes from doing great, creative work when you’re fully rested.
It’s the pleasure of asking for what you want, and getting it.
The pleasure of looking around and saying, “This is enough.”
It’s the pleasure of fighting for something you believe in. Of flipping the script. Of calling people out on their bullshit.
It’s the pleasure that comes from seeing your vision for your life—derived from YOUR values, not society’s—come to fruition, and then deepening it.
Fulfilling work can have a place in that vision. But it’s got to look very different from everything we think of when we think of “work” today.
It starts with owning your pleasure, and asking one simple question:
What if this were enough?
What if you were enough, in all your imperfect, messy glory? What if it were sweet, and lovable, and even though we want some things to change, it doesn’t keep us from fanning the ember of joy within us?
What if we worshiped at the altar of pleasure instead?
I bet that makes you feel ashamed just thinking about it, doesn’t it?
Here’s my call to arms:
There is no more radical act than pleasure for its own sake. It’s a fuck-you to politics, to oppression, to burnout, to this broken culture that got us here.
If your life sucks, it’s because you don’t have enough pleasure in your life. It’s a matter of time spent.
So TAKE some. TAKE IT. Take 5 minutes for PLEASURE. You don’t need my permission, but you have it.
Work will not suddenly give you purpose. I’m sorry—we are all grieving for this, and it will be a process. We have tapped out that reserve; there’s no renewing that illusion; we have run it dry. There’s no un-seeing it now. Even if there were fun elements of our jobs, we are such strangers to pleasure, we wouldn’t know how to feel it.
If we relearn how to experience pleasure, we’ll birth the future of work—whatever it is—from a healed place, not from a fearful, traumatized one.