Martin spent ten years as a financial analyst. His salary was above average, the company was stable, and his coworkers were fine. Yet every evening he came home feeling like he had wasted the entire day. "I'm doing things right," he told his wife one night. "But am I doing the right things?" That question nagged at him for months before he realized what it was really about. He was not looking for better pay or a higher position. He was looking for meaning.
Why meaning at work is not a luxury
Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor at the Wharton School, studied hospital janitors in 1997. They all had the same job, the same pay, and the same working conditions. Yet their experiences differed dramatically. One group saw the work as a necessary evil, just a means to a paycheck. A second group saw it as a career with room for advancement. And a third? They saw cleaning as a calling. They helped patients feel more comfortable, rearranged pictures on the walls, chatted with visitors. They did exactly the same things as the first group, but experienced them in a completely different way.
Wrzesniewski called these three approaches job orientation: work as a job, a career, or a calling. And here is the surprising part: which group you belong to is not primarily determined by the type of work you do, but by how you perceive it. A surgeon can view their work purely as a job. A janitor can view it as a calling.
According to a meta-analysis by Allan et al. (2019), published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, people who perceive their work as meaningful show higher engagement, lower burnout, and greater life satisfaction. These effects were stronger than the effect of salary.
Viktor Frankl and the will to meaning
When Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl survived three years in concentration camps, he brought back an insight that changed modern psychology. He wrote it down in Man's Search for Meaning (1946), a book he dictated in nine days that has since sold over 16 million copies.
Frankl's central idea: the deepest human motivation is not the pursuit of pleasure (Freud), nor the pursuit of power (Adler), but the will to meaning. A person can endure almost any suffering if they see meaning in it. And conversely, someone can have everything they ever wanted and still feel empty if meaning is absent.
Frankl called this state the existential vacuum. He described it as a feeling of inner emptiness and boredom, masked by the pursuit of money, career advancement, or entertainment. Does that sound familiar? According to Frankl's logotherapy, meaning cannot be manufactured or forced. But it can be found, in three domains:
- Creative values: what you bring into the world (work, projects, creation)
- Experiential values: what you receive from the world (relationships, beauty, nature)
- Attitudinal values: how you face suffering that cannot be changed
For the work context, creative values are the most relevant. Frankl argued that work becomes meaningful when you use it to accomplish something that goes beyond yourself. Not necessarily saving lives or fighting for world peace. It is enough that your work helps someone specific, improves something concrete, or creates something that would not exist without you.
Ikigai: four circles and one intersection
While Frankl approached meaning from the perspective of suffering and existential crisis, Japanese tradition offers a lighter entry point. The concept of ikigai (生き甲斐) literally means "your reason for getting out of bed in the morning." In Japan, people apply it to small things too. Your ikigai might be a morning walk, your favorite tea, or a conversation with your grandchild.
In the West, however, ikigai became popular mainly through a diagram of four overlapping circles, compiled by Marc Winn in 2014, based on a schema by Andres Zuzunaga. The four circles represent:
- What you love: activities that make you lose track of time
- What you are good at: your skills and talents
- What the world needs: problems you can solve
- What you can be paid for: the market value of what you offer
The intersection of all four is your ikigai. If one circle is missing, the result is incomplete. You do something you love and are good at, but nobody will pay for it? That is passion without a livelihood. You earn good money for something the world needs, but you get no joy from it? That is the emptiness Frankl wrote about.
Researcher Hasegawa from Toyo Eiwa University found in 2001 that Japanese adults over 65 who reported a strong sense of ikigai had lower rates of depression and higher subjective health. This aligns with Frankl's thesis that meaning protects against psychological distress.
But be careful about one thing. The ikigai diagram is a useful tool for reflection, not a recipe for happiness. Japanese psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya, who systematically studied ikigai in the 1960s, emphasized that ikigai does not have to be one grand vocation. For most people, it is a mosaic of several activities, relationships, and values that together create the feeling that their life is worth living.
Job crafting: when you cannot change the job, change the approach
This brings us back to Amy Wrzesniewski. In 2001, together with Jane Dutton, she introduced the concept of job crafting: actively reshaping your own work so that it better fits your values and strengths. You do not need to quit. You do not need to wait for a new boss or a shift in company culture. You can start on your own, right now, in three ways.
Task crafting
You change what you do. You add tasks that fulfill you or reshape the ones you already have. An accountant who enjoys teaching takes a new colleague under her wing and becomes a mentor. A developer tired of writing documentation designs an automated system that generates it. You do not need permission for this kind of change. Most of the time, initiative is enough.
Relational crafting
You change who you interact with and how. You deliberately reach out to people in other departments. You start asking coworkers about their work. You offer help where it genuinely interests you. A 2010 study found that employees who actively built relationships outside their own team rated their work as more meaningful, even when their tasks stayed exactly the same.
Cognitive crafting
You change how you think about your work. This might sound simplistic, but it is precisely what those hospital janitors were doing. They did not convince themselves that cleaning was wonderful. They changed the frame. Instead of "I mop floors," they told themselves "I help patients recover in a clean environment." The content of the work stayed the same. The experience changed profoundly.
Job crafting is not self-manipulation. It is a conscious decision to focus on aspects of your work that carry value, and to actively strengthen those that give you a sense of purpose. A meta-analysis by Rudolph et al. (2017), spanning over 120 studies, confirmed that job crafting is positively associated with job satisfaction, engagement, and performance. It works across industries and levels of hierarchy.
Values as a compass for meaning
Psychologist Shalom Schwartz developed a model of ten universal human values in the 1990s, tested across 82 countries. His research showed that people differ fundamentally in which values they prioritize. And the degree of alignment between personal values and the work environment is a strong predictor of job satisfaction.
A study by Sagiv and Schwartz (2000) found that congruence between your values and your environment matters more than absolute income or prestige. In other words: someone who values helping others and works at a nonprofit for average pay will likely be more satisfied than the same person working in finance for three times the salary.
That is why it helps to know which values are truly important to you. Not the ones you think should be important, but the ones you actually use when making decisions. The Career Values Test can show you whether your work is primarily about security, autonomy, relationships, influence, or achievement, and how well your current job matches those priorities.
Personality and the search for meaning
Not everyone searches for meaning the same way or with the same intensity. Research based on the Big Five model shows that Openness to Experience correlates most strongly with the tendency to seek deeper significance in work and life. People high in Openness are more curious, more reflective, and more likely to ask themselves existential questions like "why am I doing this?"
But that does not mean people low in Openness have no need for meaning. They need it too. They simply look for it in different places. Someone high in Conscientiousness may find meaning in precisely executed work. An Extravert may find it in helping specific people through their job. Someone high in Agreeableness may find it in caring for others.
The same applies to RIASEC types: the Social type (S) finds meaning in helping, the Artistic type (A) in creating, the Investigative type (I) in understanding the world. No type is "more meaningful" than any other. The difference lies in where you look for meaning, not in whether you have it.
The relationship between Neuroticism and meaning is also worth noting. People higher in Neuroticism more frequently experience existential doubt: "does what I do even matter?" But that very sensitivity can drive them toward a deeper search and a more authentic outcome. Frankl's patients who had gone through the hardest crises often found the clearest answers.
Four exercises that work
Theory is fine, but what do you do with it? Here are four practical techniques grounded in research that you can try today.
1. Values sorting
Write down ten things that matter to you at work on separate slips of paper. For example: salary, freedom, creativity, recognition, helping others, learning new things, stability, relationships with coworkers, the ability to travel, work-life balance. Then rank them. Keep eliminating the least important one. The last three that remain are your core values. Does your current job match them?
2. The eulogy exercise
This sounds morbid, but it works. Stephen Covey popularized this exercise in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989). Imagine your own funeral. What would you want a coworker to say about you? Not "worked overtime" or "never showed up late." Something more like "always made time for junior colleagues" or "her ideas changed how the company thinks about customers." This exercise reveals what you truly care about, not what you think you should care about.
3. The ideal day
Describe your ideal workday from morning to evening. Not a fantasy about lying on a beach, but a realistic day when you are working and feeling good. Where are you? Who are you with? What do you do in the first hour? What fills your afternoon? How do you feel on the way home? Details matter. When you compare your ideal day with a typical one, you will see a gap. In that gap lies a guide to what needs changing.
4. Frankl's question
Frankl asked his patients one simple question: "What does life expect from you?" Not what you expect from life, but what life expects from you. A reversal of perspective. Try answering it in the context of your work. What contribution do your clients, colleagues, or customers expect from you? Sometimes you will discover that your real contribution is in a completely different place than where you have been looking for it.
When work simply has no meaning
Now for the important part that most articles about meaning at work leave out. Not every job has to be your calling. Not everyone has to love Mondays. And not everyone who goes to work mainly for the paycheck is doing something wrong.
Philosopher Andrew Chamberlain distinguishes two approaches: instrumental (work is a means to other goals) and non-instrumental (work is a goal in itself). Both are legitimate. A mail carrier who works to support his family so he can spend afternoons coaching a youth soccer team has his meaning. He just does not find it in the work itself, but in what the work makes possible.
Problems arise in two cases. First: you want to find meaning in your work, but you cannot. Second: you tell yourself meaning does not matter to you, yet you dread getting out of bed in the morning. The first situation calls for action: job crafting, reevaluating your values, or changing jobs. The second calls for honesty with yourself.
David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, published Bullshit Jobs in 2018, describing the phenomenon of pointless jobs: positions whose holders themselves say they produce no meaningful contribution. By his estimate, 20 to 30 percent of jobs in advanced economies fall into this category. Graeber argued that people in these positions suffer not only from boredom, but from the psychological harm of feeling useless.
If that resonates with you, there is nothing wrong with you. And the solution does not have to be as drastic as it seems. Sometimes it is enough to find meaning outside of work and accept that the job is a means to an end. Sometimes it is enough to reshape a few aspects of your current role through job crafting. And sometimes it truly is time to move on.
What to take away
Frankl, ikigai, and Wrzesniewski are essentially saying the same thing, just in different words and from different continents. Meaning is not something you either have or do not have. It is something you actively build through how you approach your work, which values you bring to it, and how you see your own contribution.
Your meaning might lie in a different job. It might lie in the one you already have, just hidden from view for now. And it might lie entirely outside of work, and that is perfectly fine too. The only thing truly not worth doing is pretending that meaning does not matter. It does. And Martin from the beginning of this article? After a year of reflection, he moved from the finance department to internal training. He now teaches new employees financial literacy. He still works with numbers, but now he can see who they help.