So it looks like we've well and truly duped by the system. A techno-commercial system that says your role and job title define who you are, a system that says your greatest achievements come from the ways in which you earn your living.
Not so if this BBC article The best way to find meaning at work? Don't look for it is anything to go by.
If you'd like to ponder on this topic further try this survey devised by Dr Ruth Garrett of Sheffield Hallam University in the UK.
My Life's Meaning and Purpose
I suppose the message is 'take charge' you have responsibility for giving your life its purpose and meaning. Don't abdicate this task to other people and institutions, even though they would like you to think you depended on them.
To paraphrase Clarice Starling's boss in Hannibal "the problem is Clarice you fell in love with the FBI - but the FBI didn't fall in love with you"
hi rr - excellent post. I haven't read the whole of the BBC piece yet but wanted to respond straight away.
ReplyDeleteI think the idea of a "meaningful" job is a middle-class thing. I've spent years trawling repeatedly through all those career self-help books, the personality tests, the Myers-Briggs analyses, in order to find the perfect life-enhancing niche for me, knowing that until I found it I would be dissatisfied with my life and, worse, not fulfilling my potential.
Then I got a Christmas temp job in a chain booksellers and I saw a whole different way of work. When you are working for minimum wage, with no hope of any great advancement, and when you are subject to the most ridiculous dictats coming down from Head Office, from the clothes you have to wear, to the exact phrases you should use when addressing customers, all apparently designed to strip you of any individuality or initiative, you quickly (well, I did) adapt to the credo that your real life begins the moment you walk OUT of work, and not when you walk in in the morning. What a RELIEF this was! It was a life-changing experience and now I feel sorry for the hood-winked middle-classes, droning away at their pointless jobs, earning enough money to pay for the petrol to get them to their jobs.