[edw]

Meaning and purpose are not things that you find in work; they are things that you make. As a CTO in a small adtech company, my standard pitch to hungry young talent went something like this: You're not going to be curing cancer or putting people on Mars, and we don't have daily catered lunches or a foosball table, but I will give you A) more responsibility than you would have elsewhere, B) more opportunity to make an out-size contribution to the company, C) more freedom to choose the tools and methods you want to use, and D) lots of data to play with. And then I would point out people who honed their crafts and made money in adtech and then went on to work on curing cancer, sending people to Mars, etc.

I am reminded of a story about a janitor. Being a janitor doesn't seem like an obviously meaningful and fulfilling job, but if you work as a janitor to provide for your daughter so she can go to college, then that job indeed can be profoundly meaningful.