How to Experience Your Work as Meaningful Each and Every Day

A student in the “Philosophy, Work, and Business” course I teach at Ayn Rand University recently asked me what he could do to experience his work as more meaningful. He enjoyed his work—it involved wrestling with challenging questions and solving interesting problems—but it didn’t fill him with that fiery passion that marks deep fulfillment.

I answered, “Finding meaning in your work takes work.”

Sometimes things beat us over the head with their meaning. The other day I was working in my office and spotted my kids playing outside in the snow. I was rocked by an feeling so intense it was almost painful. “Oh man,” I thought, “I really do love the little buggers.”

But that’s the exception. Most times, meaning is something we have to actively generate. Take art. Sometimes you look glance at a painting and you’re instantly swept away. But in most cases, the meaning lies just below the surface, and you can only access it through conscious questioning. You have to study the painting. Ask yourself what the figures are doing, what they are feeling, what story the artist is trying to tell, and how that story relates to your own life and values.

And so it is with work.

Every legitimate job serves a human need. It produces goods or services that contribute to human flourishing.

A few weeks back, I was rewatching The Wire with my girlfriend and it struck me how every worker in every line of work thought their work was the most important work on earth. The cops thought: we are the line between peace and disorder. The teachers thought: we educate the next generation. The dock workers thought: we move the goods that make the world go round. The journalists thought: we bring truth to power.

The meaning of your work is not always so obvious. Years ago, I worked with Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future. One thing we noticed in working with the fossil fuel industry was that people often gravitated to it solely for the money. But money can’t supply meaning, and we heard from countless executives that it was getting harder to find talented young people willing to work in the industry despite the high wages.

We would show these executives the hundreds—literally hundreds—of emails sent to us by industry workers saying, in effect, “I was about to leave the industry before I encountered Alex’s work. Now, I love my job.” What was our solution? We taught them the meaning of their work: they were empowering human flourishing by supplying the world’s best source of affordable, reliable energy.

The way you find your work meaningful is by stepping back from the day to day details of the work and reflecting on the values that it serves.

This doesn’t mean that you can be satisfied doing any work. The fossil fuel industry’s work is meaningful, and we would live shorter, worse lives without it. But that meaning did not resonate with me personally. I could appreciate it in an abstract way, the same way I can appreciate the role of cops and teachers, but I knew that I couldn’t devote my career to energy, the way Alex had. For me, the most important work in the world is shaping the philosophical ideas that determine the course of a life and of a culture. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, and it’s what makes me feel at the end of the day like the work I did matters.

So I gave my student a homework assignment. I told him to spend the next few weeks keeping a meaning journal. At the end of the day, he was to spend ten minutes reflecting on the larger meaning of his work.

Try it. Reflect on the values your work aims at. You will get more meaning from your work—and you will discover if you need to search for new opportunities that will provide even more profound fulfillment.

Effective Egoism 101

The conception of earthly idealism I champion was defined by Ayn Rand. Here are three key works that summarize her perspective:

• Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World by Ayn Rand

• Causality vs. Duty by Ayn Rand

• The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand

And if want the full case for egoism, you can buy my book Effective Egoism: An Individualist’s Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness.