Searching for Meaning at Work

Why so many people apply to Imagination Machine

In the past 12 months over 2,000 people have applied to work with Imagination Machine, the “startup studio for good” in France where I work.

We’ve been able to hire or partner with less than 20 of them.

I wish I had a job to offer all 2,000, because they all seem to share one thing: a deep desire to find a meaningful job.

Actually, it’s more specific: they want a meaningful job with a reasonable, competitive salary.

It seems that millions of people are waking up to the same desire – a job that makes sense to them, that they can be proud of, that aligns with their values and their hopes for the future – and realizing they don’t have it. Maybe it’s a post-Covid thing, or maybe it’s climate change, or the seeming breakdown in the liberal democratic order. Maybe it’s the millennial generation reaching some kind of career maturity. I don’t know.

But the supply of these jobs is either too small, or not quite right.

I think about it like this:

There is, of course, a major supply of jobs that are not in the business-y world but are clearly meaningful: teachers, healthcare workers, spiritual leaders, social workers, small-scale farmers. Local jobs that are about directly caring for people and the planet in some way.

But these truly meaningful jobs, the less business-y ones, tend to be low-paying, with bad working conditions, and can be super hard to access.

Want to change careers and find meaning as a teacher? In France, that means going back to full time professional-training for a year or more (with no salary) and going through a job-placement process that will almost certainly require moving your family. If you can do all that, you’ll end up with a job that pays something like 2500€/month, being managed by people with little-or-no management training, in a workplace with constant stress and an overwhelming load of administrative paperwork.

Want to change careers and find meaning as a hospice nurse, or a home health-care aid? It’s a similar story: expensive training followed by low pay, terrible hours and frequently toxic workplace culture.

Want to go back to the land, find a property in the country and be an organic, small-scale farmer? Sounds romantic, but trust me, it’s a hard life with near-poverty wages and back-breaking physical work.

No wonder people look for the business-y jobs.

We all have the right to live a meaningful life, we all ought to accept nothing less. To do that, we need meaningful work.

I wish I had an answer here, or thousands of well-paid jobs to hire for at Imagination Machine.

I do not. But I do have three hopeful ideas.

1. Let’s expand the narrow slice of the economy that does good.

I do not have the delusion that all jobs can have a positive-impact… but I do believe that over the coming years we can double, or triple, the size of this corner of the economy. It will still be a small minority, but hundreds of thousands of new jobs could be created.

At Imagination Machine, we test and fund lots of crazy ideas that could become positive-impact businesses. Most fail or lose steam, but the ones that succeed have created hundreds of jobs over the past few years in Western France.

Those of us lucky enough to have a job “for good” can fight to expand our sector through innovation, growth, and advocacy.

2. Let’s create a world where teachers make $100k/year salaries.

And I’m not just talking about teachers, I’m talking about nurses, small farmers, social workers, and everyone directly taking care of people and the planet every day.

If we want to live in societies that maximize human flourishing, and justice, and abundance, then it just doesn’t make sense to make direct care jobs so unappealing and poorly paid.

The budget we dedicate to education, and social and environmental care more broadly, is largely a political question. There are not enough political parties or leaders who dare to imagine a society with truly well-paid teachers. This is a failure of imagination. As citizens, voters, and advocates, we ought to start imagining a world with competitive pay for the caretakers.

3. Let’s adopt missions to bring meaning to our jobs, even the meaningless ones

If you have a reasonably-paying job that isn’t scratching your itch for meaning, maybe there are ways to add a meaningful mission without changing careers.

You can push your company to start tracking carbon emissions, and reduce them. You can study business ethics, and find ways to change your company culture to have more respect for the dignity of every person – including clients, coworkers and community members. You can organize your coworkers to volunteer.

Easier said than done, I know. But you probably have coworkers who feel the same way you do, and banding together in teams will magnify your strength.

I hope that one day, all 2,000 people who applied to Imagination Machine this past year will find meaning in their work. I hope that one day they will be able to use their energies to make the world more compassionate, just, and in harmony with nature.

I am impatient for that day.