Also, many people are genuinely burnt out from overwork, not just existential malaise. When you're juggling demanding work, family responsibilities, and barely have time for basic self-care, the problem isn't finding your "highest purpose" - it's structural.

That said, I agree that meaning matters. But meaning doesn't always come from work. Sometimes the healthiest thing is treating work as necessary fuel for a meaningful life outside of it - relationships, hobbies, community involvement.

The "go into politics" solution is fascinating though. Zero-sum games as existential fulfillment feels counterintuitive.

I think its OK if some people don't get to live their dream jobs, some dreams have no equivalent in real life, and some people need to do the mundane, boring underground jobs that keep things together.

Be kind to yourselves, people.

We're humans and no matter what you're pursuing, you'll hit a point where your brain will adjust to the new reality and things will start feeling mundane. This is called the hedonic treadmill.

To me, what has helped is developing hobbies and relationships outside of work. We're social animals and need connection with others to feel fulfilled. Personally, my own life feels way more fulfilled right now than when I was just working on interesting projects at work or on my startup (that went nowhere).

You work to earn, you earn to buy.

But buying is not meaning. It's a momentary sugar high that's lost to the wind the moment the transaction is over. No deeper life meaning can be derived from this.

When your culture is based around constant self satisfaction, there's nothing bigger than the self.

Community is dead, culture over generations is dead, building and making is dead, even cooking your own food is dead - "just order it". There's nothing for us to do except our individual parts, and our individual parts often feel like we're just putting a quarter into a machine that spits out a paycheck.

Etc etc

If your problem could be fixed with a raise or a nice vacation, that’s overwork. 996 schedules, crunch time, and a high cost of living make overwork.

Burnout is when you stat asking yourself “what’s the point of doing any of this?” and your life is overwhelmed with apathy and anhedonia. Closer to a career-induced bout of major depression.

- what is it that I want there to be more of in the world, even after I'm gone?

- what am I doing right now that is trying to help there be more of it?

From memory most people don't have answers to them - and that's fine, but it is handy to reflect on them and perhaps work toward finding answers if you don't have them - and the people who do have answers to these questions typically have higher life satisfaction then the people who don't.

I decided to step away from my job as an engineering VP and try something I actually wanted to do. It's terrifying, especially in this economy, but I wake up and feel excitement in the morning instead of dread for the first time in as long as I can remember.

I also wonder about the "now it's time to lift everyone else into abundance" earlier in the article. I don't disagree that this is valuable, but it doesn't solve the existential "why", it just puts it off for a few decades until the poorest humans are as rich as wealthy Americans are now. "What a problem to have!" one might say, but literally that is the problem that the article is about, right? Going back to power-level everyone else doesn't actually solve the problem of what to do when someone reaches the level cap.

Ultimately there is nothing that is obviously and provably more important than the individual reading or writing this, as there kinda was in previous eras. Some candidates include religion, panhuman expansion or thriving (Musk), building a successor entity or entities (Altman), and the State or politics (the OP). I don't know of any argument better than personal preference, at the moment.

The older generations have everything and still feel burnt out and unhappy? Cool. Cool cool cool. That will certainly help with the nihilism.

https://kemendo.com/CohesionMatrix.html

I have been looking for meaningful work since I was 18, started in sales went on to marketing and ended up in engineering as a data scientist.

Even though I feel closer than ever I still feel that I am not where I am suppose to be. One of my biggest problem is having to many options, to many callings. And they constantly keep changing, and perhaps that’s normal.

It’s easy and dangerous to get stuck in the idea or quest of finding the ultimate purpose and try to translate that into actual work.

Oh that and that the dog will miss me. But as we all know they don't live for long.

In the past two months I've been on two 4-6 hour incident management calls due to failures in our service providers and it's been quite some time since I felt that good about a day's work. No meetings, no planning, no bullshit...just raw collaboration and tactical problem solving. Even got to flex some of the skills that have been dormant for far too long.

Feelsgoodman.

What worked is:

- Realize that not loving my work is fine, as long as I have something else that I love and want to do.

- YouTube channel “Napoleon Hill Notes”. Yeah, it is AI voiced and I have no idea whether what it says makes sense or not. But it works for me, tremendously. Whenever I fell into a low mood, I boot up a session and I felt better afterwards. Now I use it to brainwash myself into a better version.

Because you weren’t suffering from too much work, you were suffering from too little truly important work.

>You got the great job. You built the startup. You took the vacations. But that’s not what you really needed.

I had none of these. I strive for them, but right now the market is rough and I have no time to rest. I think a lot of us are genuinely burnt out from losing the essentials these past few years.

Gave up on greatness a long time ago, I'd settle for an "ordinary", where people just kind of try to NOT make bad things worse, or good things less enjoyable.

I haven't been lucky enough that startups I got in on early panned out so I don't have the ability to take a sabbatical.

1. I'm intelligent enough to raise questions about the point of life.

2. I've always been an outcast, having it extremely difficult to build meaningful relationships, which are number one predictor of quality of life.

3. I live in a dirty, noisy, overcrowded city full of people who don't share my culture and work for a company that has no morality.

There is nothing for me to look forward to, and no straightforward way to build anything. I'll never have a group of friends to do things with, I'll never feel loved, and I'll never be important in any sense of this word. I'm an autistic ant in an anthill.

The core insight it, if you start to feel the need to stop caring, instead of changing your character and values, treat it as a strong signal to change your environment.

[1]: https://anandprashant.com/posts/i-want-to-give-a-lot-of-fuck...

The whole higher purpose narrative is bs to keep sell more books or courses or whatever author is selling. And what's with random yellow highlights and bold formatting on every second sentence?

Cleaning a mind of random grievances and addictions is good. Letting a body be weird, dance wrong, move in funny ways, sing poorly: this is good too.

The whole "purpose" thing is a side-effect. It can't be sought directly, I think.

Safety, convenience, infrastructure, everything around you isn't solely designed to price gouge you and exploit you, and all of that was just a minor benefit. The biggest thing I felt was an immense existential dread lifting from me. It's like the world millennials were promised when we were young actually exists - working on meaningful things with mental space to breath.

There's too much that can possibly be said of this, but up until now I genuinely thought there was only one way left and we were all doomed to fail, trying to pound sand into intractable problems. I somehow have hope in my life again.

> The information contained in this communication is confidential, may be attorney-client privileged, may constitute inside information, and is intended only for the use of the addressee. It is the property of JEE

> Unauthorized use, disclosure or copying of this communication or any part thereof is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by return e-mail or by e-mail to jeevacation@gmail.com, and destroy this communication and all copies thereof, including all attachments. copyright -all rights reserved

OR from someone called Philip Barden, here is a part of it:

> This email is intended for the addressee named within only. It may contain legally privileged or confidential information. If you are not the named individual you should not read this email and if you do so, you must not under any circumstances make use of the information therein. If you have read this email and it is not addressed to you, please notify IT@devonshires.co.uk and confirm that it has been deleted from your system and no copies made.

I really want to understand how binding and enforceable these annoying fucking notices at the bottom of emails are that was sent to me without me even asking for or knowing why and sometimes not even fucking certainly knowing whether I was the intended recipient or not.

So if someone fucked up and sent me a so called or really confidential email then not only I have the legal responsibility to delete that I am supposed to inform them that "hey yeah you sent it to me and I deleted it.. hope I was not the intended recipient.." or so.

I mean how does this thing work?

(I had received a couple of bank statements on one of my common Indian first name Gmail emails. I later realised those belonged to a lawyer who was probably informed by his bank that this happened because I had complained to the bank and had asked them to remove my email from that account. I received an email from that lawyer from another address I do not recall the domain of, but it was very angry and entitled and said shit like (paraphrasing) "By revealing this to a third party.. you have broken the law... you must hand over the email address without further delay…". I was younger and stupider, so I had just replied "Go fuck yourself" because I was really pissed. Luckily, I never heard from him again or any court because when I Googled him later he seemed to be a decently pedigreed lawyer from another city. Later, the bank replied saying it had been rectified - not before they wanted my phone number and KYC info and account details even though I had begun my communication to them saying it was not my account.)

This idea of optimizing for less suffering is logical. A boring corporate life is by all accounts sensible.

Is it boring on Monday? Yeah. But not knowing where your next meal is coming from isn’t boring and not in a good way.

And then this site’s message is clouded by the amount it’s trying to push a book. It’s hard to feel like any source like this is doing fact-based work when the main goal is to convince you to buy their stuff.

I would argue that content should never highlight anything. Highlighting should be reserved for the reader to highlight the parts they find important or relevant. Authors have plenty of other tools at their disposal - all of which this article uses - and the preemptive highlighting is distracting and almost.....offensive in a sense that the author thinks I can't determine the relevant parts simply based on the fact that they are also in bold.

The high level of visual distraction detracts from the article as 20 elements on screen are all screaming for my attention and making it significantly harder to read the content in its entirety. It's like the text-only version of a mobile website filled with ads popping in and out.