America's crisis of meaningless work

American workers are not all right.

While news about "quiet quitters" spread like wildfire in 2022, things have actually gotten worse in America's workplaces since that viral trend lost steam. Engagement at work has hit an 11-year low, Gallup's long-running survey of US employees found — in February only 30% of US workers reported being fully engaged with their jobs. Plenty of ink has been spilled trying to understand the causes of this growing crisis. Is it remote work? Layoffs? An increasing lack of loyalty among employers?

One possibility that hasn't been as widely discussed is a fundamental problem with the work that people are being asked to do. For some people, their job can be a source of meaning and fulfillment, but for others, it's simply the thing that pays the bills. In a 2021 YouGov survey, only about half of Americans said they felt that their job made "a meaningful contribution to the world" — and the feeling was lowest among millennials and Gen Zers.

A 2021 survey by Pew Research looked at the question another way: It asked people from around the world what made their lives meaningful. In countries such as Italy, Spain, and Sweden, work ranked highly as a source of meaning. In Italy, work was the No. 1 source of meaning, with 43% saying they drew meaning from work. Spaniards ranked work higher than family. But in the US, only 17% mentioned work as a source of meaning. That was a sharp decline from when Pew asked the same question four years prior — a full one-third of Americans mentioned their jobs as a source of meaning in 2017, double the 2021 rate. Increasingly, it seems that more people feel like their jobs don't matter.

And when people feel like their jobs don't matter, they tend to feel unfulfilled by them. In the YouGov survey, 56% of people who said they found no meaning in their job also said they felt unfulfilled by it. By contrast, 88% of people who believed their job was meaningful said they felt fulfilled by it.

In other words, the work-engagement crisis might actually be a crisis of meaning.

Research has for decades found that job satisfaction and engagement track with whether someone can find meaning in their work. The American Psychological Association highlights findings that people who find their jobs meaningful are more engaged, show up to work more, and are healthier. A 2022 survey by Great Place To Work, a workplace-culture firm that measures employee well-being, found that staff retention and job satisfaction were higher at companies where employees felt their jobs had meaning. In particular, the survey found that millennials and women were three times as likely to stay at a job that they considered "more than just a job." Other research has found that employees, especially Gen Zers, are more likely to quit jobs they don't find meaningful.

Some jobs naturally lend themselves to a sense of meaning: In the YouGov survey, those who worked in healthcare, social assistance, or education were the most likely to say that their work was meaningful. In those fields, day-to-day tasks bear a significant impact on other people and the world at large. But other sectors struggle to instill in their staff that what they do all day matters: People in sales, media, communications, and real estate rated their jobs among the least meaningful.

Many in those industries have begun to refer to their work as "fake email jobs" — office jobs that largely involve sending emails without producing anything. One anonymous worker recently told the online news site Bustle about his "fake email job" as a video producer. "I've gone weeks doing nothing to see how far I could push it," he told the site. "The only reason I stopped is that I got bored, not because someone asked me to do something."

Other people have managed to juggle multiple full-time remote jobs thanks to the limited amount of work each job actually required. In some cases, people say the low effort required is a positive — who wouldn't want a steady paycheck with minimal work requirements? But others end up feeling frustrated and wish they could be doing something more productive.

The idea of meaningless work extends back much further than the fake-email-jobs meme. The academic David Graeber coined the term "bullshit jobs" in 2013 to describe jobs where, he wrote, "the person doing it believes it pointless, and if the job didn't exist it would either make no difference whatsoever or it would make the world a better place." In his 2018 book, Graeber outlined 21 occupational groups that he believed were useless based on surveys he conducted on how people felt about their jobs. The roles included positions in administrative support, sales, business and finance, and management. Working a useless job is a "profound psychological violence," Graeber wrote, one that removes any sense of dignity and fosters "deep rage and resentment."

Last year, Simon Walo, a postdoctoral student at the University of Zurich, looked deeper into Graeber's theory — did people who worked these "bullshit jobs" really feel worse about them than those in other occupations? He analyzed data from a 2015 American Working Conditions Survey and found that people working in certain positions did tend to feel worse about their jobs.

"Working in one of Graeber's occupations significantly increases the probability that workers perceive their job as socially useless (compared with all others)," Walo said.

But other researchers don't think that means those jobs are actually useless — the negative feelings stem more from a problem with the work environment than from the work itself, they argue. Brendan Burchell, a professor of social sciences at the University of Cambridge, coauthored a study in 2021 that critiqued Graeber's theory.

"We looked at that small number of people who felt that their job was useless, and we looked at what was causing it or what correlated," Burchell told me.

The study found that factors such as bad managers, how connected you are to coworkers, and whether your employer is providing a public good significantly influence whether your job feels meaningful. And Walo's study agreed: A poor work environment comes to bear on whether work feels useful.

Often, a lack of meaning on the job simply comes down to bad management. In Burchell's study, he and his coauthors compiled several years of survey results that focused on whether people felt they were doing useful work. They found that those who felt "respected and encouraged by management" were less likely to report their work as useless and that those who felt their jobs were useful said that they were able to contribute their own ideas at work. Other factors, like having enough time to get things done, being able to influence important decisions, and approving of the direction of the company also correlated with the feeling that a job was meaningful. On the flip side, people felt their jobs were useless when they didn't get the chance to use and develop their skills.

"People expressed the feeling that they were disrespected or not listened to by their manager," Burchell said. "We also found this response from people who are working under a lot of time pressure or in stressful jobs."

A UK biopharmaceutical worker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his job oversees the safety of clinical trials at his company. His job is not meaningless — his work directly protects patients involved in clinical trials. However, there are many aspects of how the job is managed that cause him to feel that it's "pointless" and a "waste of time," he said.

"The company is out there to make money," he said, "and no matter what the people at the top of the pyramid say about patient safety, they are ultimately profit-driven."

Bureaucracy and paperwork eat up a large amount of his time, which he said often dilutes the meaning of his job or, on bad days, strips it away completely. Spending more time looking at data and less time looking at how his work is impacting patients takes away much of the meaning he wishes he could find in his job.

Clay Routledge, an existential psychologist and director at the Human Flourishing Lab, said that an employer's top priority should be making the work itself more meaningful for its staff, whatever their role or level. "A notable strategy for doing this is recognizing people's contribution to the company at every level. Managers should think about how their team members serve their customers or clients, and they can do that explicitly in job descriptions, company communications, and evaluations," he said.

When nothing changes, people start looking for the exits. A 2019 study found self-employed workers — who get to be more in control of their time and work — viewed their work as more useful to society than traditionally employed workers did. That could explain why more people are setting out on their own. From 2020 to 2023, the number of self-employed workers in the US rose by about 400,000. And Americans are filing 59% more applications to start businesses than before 2020.

"If you look at the paths people go down to pursue meaning, some of it relates to differences in personality: Some people are really career-ambitious, and their sense of self is very much tied to that," Routledge said. For others, their ambitions may lie elsewhere: creative endeavors, family, or community work, for instance. Working for yourself gives you more flexibility to pursue the things you actually find meaningful, Routledge said. It also allows you to ditch a toxic office environment.

Short of everyone quitting to become their own CEO, employers will need to figure out how to make work feel meaningful for their staff. As the Burchell study summarized, "If managers are respectful, supportive and listen to workers, and if workers have the opportunities for participation, to use their own ideas and have time to do a good job, they are less likely to feel that their work is useless." Without this kind of improvement, America seems doomed to a slow spiral of declining engagement.

Molly Lipson is a freelance writer and an organizer from the UK.