Over brunch a few weeks ago, a friend recounted to me how he thought about his upcoming job search. He was looking for an early stage gig under a high slope founder with mission alignment as a “cherry on top”. It got me thinking about the importance of working somewhere spiritually fulfilling. How difficult is it? What does it even mean to find meaning from work?
My first job out of college was in investment banking. It featured long hours, minimal autonomy, and a handful of sadistic coworkers. I would joke to my friends that work was a Faustian bargain we make with capitalism - drudgery during work hours in return for the material comforts made possible by the system.
Since then I’ve bounced around, exploring different opportunities. I’ve worked at the largest and fastest growing food delivery platform in the country, a real estate startup building walkable neighborhoods, and a sketchy software company mired in controversy.
The Japanese way to find a raison d'être is via ikigai. It is the intersection of (1) what you love, (2) what you are good at, (3) what you can be paid for, and (4) what the world needs. The first two require introspection and will wildly vary depending on the person in question. The third is a function of market forces. The fourth is tricky - what does the world need?
The capitalist response is that if you produce something which someone else demands, you are fulfilling what the world needs. That seems too permissive to me though. I find it hard to believe that payday loan providers, tobacco manufacturers, and child porn producers are in the business of producing things the world needs. Maximally satisfying human desire seems like a road to catering to the ugliest parts of human nature.
Alright so maybe we add an additional condition here. What if we make the assertion that what the world needs not only satisfies human desire, but is also good for people. None of the examples provided above are good because there is an essence of exploitation involved - either for the end user or through the means of production.
But what if a product is good for the end user but the means of production are exploitative? Take for example a phone. Most people would agree that we have collectively extracted a lot of utility from phones. Yet there are safety nets to prevent suicides at Foxconn and the cobalt mines in the Congo have working conditions akin to slavery. Do the means necessarily have to be clean?
This line of reasoning can go on and on; trying to figure out answers to these type of questions from first principles is valiant, yet often falls flat. When I was in college I took a philosophy course on ethics, where we read Kant, Locke, Mill, and Rawls. I remember being fascinated by all of the ethical systems they conjured up, yet finished the course even more confused about how to act in a moral way.
The way out is through intuition. The 80/20 around if you’re working on something the world actually needs can be mediated by vibes - if you’ve managed to successfully grow up in society you probably have a tacit understanding about right and wrong, so what your gut tells you is directionally going to be correct here.
My intuition around what work the world needs has expanded over time. I used to be more dogmatic about this, with all of these strict conditions on the types of problems that “really mattered”. Does the world really need another boring B2B SaaS company?
After working for a few years I’ve realized B2B SaaS is the lifeblood of modern businesses, much to my initial chagrin. You can build more with fewer people because you’re able to outsource out any of the internal tooling you would otherwise need to build. Efficiency is enhanced through these force multipliers of business. I’m infinitely grateful to Stripe, AWS, and Slack for what they afford me the ability to do.
In general, we’ve built an enormous, complex, global civilization through the fruits of labor of all the people on the planet. Everyone is contributing in their own unique way to support the life we can collectively enjoy. Teachers educate us, policemen and the military keep us safe, construction workers build our physical environment, farmers feed us, doctors take care of our health, financiers provide leverage, and technologists reimagine the status quo.
In I, Pencil, Leonard Read goes through the entire process required in the creation of something as simple as a lead pencil. The raw materials, tools, transportation, energy, and manufacturing required to make one mere pencil is astounding. And not a single person in the world has the know-how or the ability to create one even when given all of the physical substrates!
Human coordination is magical - and it’s only possible if every person does something within their own domain that can seem ostensibly trivial. Yet on a grander stage it contributes to the hum and whir of civilization.
It’s akin to a biological system - each cell in your body is doing one rote task, over and over - should the individual cell feel worthless when it is involved in the coalescence of consciousness? We can think of ourselves as cells part of a societal superorganism and can derive meaning knowing that what little we do and contribute weaves together a grander tapestry and is responsible for a community level emergence.
In this vein, often what matters more is not what you are specifically doing but your framing of why it matters. I work at Posh. One way to think about what I do is that I look at a computer screen all day indoors in a sedentary position, crunching numbers and writing documents, sacrificing 5-6 days of my week doing this just so some arbitrary event ticketing company can make a little bit more money.
Another interpretation is that I’m helping solve human loneliness, one of the most important building blocks for a psychologically healthy life, by building a platform that facilitates connection, one that allows people to find their tribe and connect with them in person through the tap of a button in world where connection is evermore mediated through screens which is a mere facsimile of meeting IRL, and I’m doing all of this work with a group of fun and empathetic people who want to make the world a better place.
I’ll take the latter. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.