[apohn]

>How much time do you think you would need to find meaningful work?

Are you sure you can find work meaningful? I think lots of people eventually reach a point in their job/career where they stop trying to find meaning in work and try to find meaning elsewhere.

I've got a PhD and have worked in some different types of jobs inside and outside Academia. Instead of meaning, I try to understand if I can feel useful in my job. And by "useful" I don't mean curing cancer, feeding starving children, etc. If a person works in a huge company and builds a simple dashboard that saves people hundreds of hours of manual work, they can feel really useful. Maybe some parts of the job are actually interesting as well as useful.

I feel places like HN massively over-represents people who find or claim to find "meaning" in their work. It's hard to really evaluate what people are saying without knowing their age, career progression, the opportunities they did and did not have, etc.