In a meditation forum, someone recently wrote:

I’m comfortably numb, working in an office job I don’t particularly enjoy but which pays too well to leave. I have a million hobbies but none I could see potentially turning into a full-time job I would be willing to take a massive pay cut for. I noticed that from this “spiritual” perspective, I’ve used meditation more to silence that voice in my head screaming “This sucks!” than to find the courage to do something else. I’m curious if anyone else has been in a similar boat and how they dealt with it.

At the end of the day, I lack the feeling of deeper purpose and drive at work (but maybe that’s just part of the overall human condition, and why I’m on this meditation path to find answers)

And I swear if someone asks me “who is this I who doesn’t enjoy his job” I will find you! 😄

The post resonated with me, so I wrote my own response, shared below (with minor edits).

This is something I struggled with more heavily when I was younger (I’m 31 now), and in some degree still struggle with. I’ll share my story as another perspective to consider in addition to some of the great answers above.

From about age 10-21 I poured all of my hours into video games (LoL, WoW). My parents never went to college, but they knew that receiving an education was important, so they pushed me to do well. I did, but I could never connect my efforts to anything particularly meaningful. I could never answer the “why” question, nor could my parents. What felt important was right in front of me: spending time with my friends, and playing video games. The world beyond suburbia simply didn’t exist, in my younger view.

I tried to go pro (in LoL) during my 3rd year of college but lost in the qualifying tournament. This prompted me to quit video games entirely. I knew that it wasn’t adding anything to my life anymore, but quitting felt like losing a limb. It was the world where I felt most at home. My studies (psychology) continued to bore me, and I didn’t have friends who understood my situation. Life was suddenly lonely. Or maybe it always had been, and I was becoming more aware of it.

Later I found an ad for a program claiming that it could change my life. It was a six-week research study aiming to measure the impact of mindfulness-based meditation and other lifestyle interventions on various brain and cognitive measures. I wasn’t sure what meditation was, but I did want to fill the void in my life. So I signed up.

There were 17 of us, mostly aged 19-22. Some of these people became my friends. They expanded my naive world, sometimes quite literally, as when I tried MDMA for the first time with them. It may have been the first time in my life that I felt a pure, deep, unconditional love. The program ended at the end of summer, I resumed my studies, and life slowly began to feel meaningless again.

After college I bounced from job to job, basically seeking the sort of depth, meaning, and connection I felt during the research study. What I hadn’t realized was that I simply didn’t know how to build a life. I didn’t know what was important to me, what was worth personally working towards, what it felt like to do so, struggles and all involved, day after day. Everything had always come easily to me, and I didn’t know how to work towards things that didn’t immediately feel good (video games, meditation) or involved uncertainty and risk (life beyond school and suburbia). Meditation, self-help, spirituality became its own kind of void that enabled me to avoid living my life.

Sometimes the desire to seek meaning from work is the result of a life that is empty. You mentioned having hobbies, which is great, but hobbies on their own are often not enough to lead a meaningful life, at least it wasn’t for me, and it seems for you as well (hence the millions of them!). I developed a lot of hobbies after college ranging from fingerstyle guitar, slacklining, writing poetry, running, and so on. I had a lot of fun learning and doing them, and still engage in them to some extent, but they got old over time. They remained hobbies I practiced in the comfort of my room, alone, free of risk. They remained relationless, disconnected from any sort of purpose or value system.

Meaning emerges more easily once your activities involve the corporality of others. Put another way, at a mechanistic level, activity becomes meaningful when it exists in relation to something else. For example, my hobby of playing guitar becomes something more when it’s linked to my desire to perform for my friends, to soothe a loved one, to become a musician. It can retain its meaning as simply a hobby, and/or take on new meanings as it connects to other purposes. (Note: I’m not saying that one form of engagement is necessarily better than another. I’m just pointing to the mechanics of meaning.)

You didn’t mention friends, family, or community involvement. Generally people who have these things can more easily put their job in perspective, which de-centers it as the sole locus of meaning. This can give the job more meaning, funnily enough, since it hangs in relation to other things. Meaning: something can only be more or less meaningful in context! Things have their place, not in some absolutist sense, but when held against one another. Knowing this you can make better decisions about what you want work to mean to you. It can be the whole, or simply play its part.

Meditation, too, takes on more/a different meaning when it’s practiced in relation to other things. I meditate now because it improves my day-to-day happiness and relationships. Some people meditate for its own sake (like a hobby, to discover awakened states, etc), but when it’s connected to something else, other meanings can emerge.

I don’t know the details of your life, but maybe the purpose and drive you seek from your work will arise when you have other things in your life that feel meaningful. Sometimes, too, the expectation that your hobbies should turn into a financially feasible pursuit overshadows the meanings that might already be there, waiting to emerge, once you truly “accept the suck” rather than try to silence it.