1d (edited) • Musings & Thoughts
When The Work Stops Meaning Anything
I was driving to the gym the other morning, not thinking about anything in particular, when it hit me.
I quit an industry years ago, before I ever got into tech, and I never really sat with the reason why. I told myself it wasn't for me. That I wanted something different. But driving along, I realised the actual reason was simpler and more uncomfortable than that.
I didn't find meaning in it.
And that bothered me more than the work itself ever did.
Here's the thing that got me thinking though. There are people in that exact industry, doing that exact job, who are absolutely fine. Some of them are thriving. Some of them have built careers they're proud of, families off the back of it, a life they're happy with. The work didn't break them. It didn't hollow them out.
So what was different about me?
Why did I need the work to mean something? And why, when it didn't, did I start to deteriorate?
I think a lot of people in this community will recognise this feeling, even if they haven't put words to it yet. You start a job or a career with energy. Maybe even excitement. Then the repetition sets in. The same tasks. The same conversations. The same Monday. And somewhere in that loop, something inside you starts to switch off.
We call it burnout. But I wonder if burnout, at its core, is actually just what happens when the gap between what you're doing and what you believe matters becomes too wide to ignore.
The research broadly defines burnout as emotional exhaustion caused by prolonged stress. But stress from what, exactly? Because I've seen people work brutal hours in physically demanding jobs and not burn out. And I've seen people in comfortable, well-paid office roles completely fall apart. The hours alone don't explain it.
Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived Nazi concentration camps and went on to write one of the most important books of the 20th century, argued that human beings can endure almost any suffering if they have a reason for it. His observation wasn't about working conditions. It was about meaning. Remove the meaning, and even comfort becomes unbearable.
I think that's closer to what's actually happening in a lot of burnout cases. It's not always the workload. It's the emptiness underneath the workload.
But here's the question I keep coming back to, and I don't have a clean answer to it.
Should meaning come from your work at all?
Because that assumption, that work should be the place where we find purpose, that it should fulfil us, that we should feel passionate about what we do for money, is actually a fairly modern idea. And it might be doing a lot of damage.
The guy in that industry I left, the one who stayed and built a good life, maybe he never asked the work to carry that weight. Maybe he found meaning somewhere else. In his family, his community, his Saturday mornings, his faith. The job was just the job. It funded the life that mattered.
I loaded the work with an expectation it was never designed to meet. And when it couldn't deliver, I called it a dead end and left.
Was I right to leave? Probably. But the lesson I'm taking from that drive to the gym isn't that I made the wrong call. It's that I need to be more honest about where I'm looking for meaning, and whether I'm setting myself up to be let down by things that were never supposed to carry that.
This is where breathwork comes in for me, and not as a cure for a broken career.
When I sit with my breath for 30 minutes, something settles. The noise of what I should be doing, what my work should be giving me, what success is supposed to look like, it gets quieter. And in that space, I start to notice what actually matters to me when nobody's watching and nothing's being measured.
That's not a small thing. Most of us spend so little time in that kind of silence that we genuinely don't know the answer.
Maybe burnout isn't just about doing too much. Maybe it's about looking for something in the wrong place for too long, and eventually running out of road.
I don't have the full answer. But I think the question is worth sitting with.
What are you asking your work to give you? And is that fair?
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When The Work Stops Meaning Anything
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