Chapter 28: Finding Meaning and Purpose in Work

The Question Behind the Question

Jordan was eating lunch alone at his desk — not because he had to, but because it was quieter there — when the thought arrived uninvited:

Is this it?

Not a crisis. Not despair. Just a question that surfaced between one task and the next, in the particular silence of a Tuesday at one in the afternoon with a half-eaten sandwich and a calendar that showed three more meetings and nothing that resembled a reason.

The team was performing well. The Customer Journey Council had been approved and was showing early results. Rivera had said "you've done something real here" — which, Jordan had learned to recognize, was as close to effusive as Rivera got. Priya was flourishing. The methodology sessions were changing how the team worked. By every external measure, Jordan was succeeding.

And yet the question returned: Is this it?

He didn't mention it to Dev that night. He wrote it in his journal and then closed the journal, as if putting a lid on something he wasn't ready to examine yet.

What Jordan was encountering was not ingratitude, burnout, or a warning sign. It was something more fundamental: the human capacity to ask whether what we're doing matters — and the particular restlessness that arrives when we can't answer that question with confidence.

This chapter is about that question. Not how to silence it — it cannot and should not be silenced — but how to engage it honestly, and what psychology tells us about the conditions under which work becomes meaningful.

1. What Meaning Is — and Why It Matters

Pleasure, Meaning, and the Two Faces of Wellbeing

Psychologists distinguish between two forms of wellbeing that are related but not identical.

Hedonic wellbeing is the experience of positive emotion, pleasure, and the absence of pain. It corresponds to what most people mean when they say they want to be happy — feeling good, enjoying life, finding satisfactions in food and rest and leisure and connection.

Eudaimonic wellbeing is harder to translate. Derived from Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia — often translated as flourishing — it captures something closer to living well and doing well; realizing potential, engaging in activities that matter, contributing to something beyond oneself.

These two forms of wellbeing are not the same, and they do not always coincide. A life of pure pleasure-seeking can feel hollow over time. A life of deeply meaningful work can contain significant suffering. Research by Roy Baumeister and colleagues found that meaning and happiness are related but dissociable: people who give a lot (to others, to causes, to roles that demand more than they return in pleasure) tend to score higher on meaning but not necessarily on positive affect. Parents report lower moment-to-moment happiness but higher sense of meaning than non-parents. A life of meaning is not the same as a life of pleasure — and for most people, both matter.

Why does meaning matter for wellbeing? The research is clear on this:

• Psychological health: People who report higher sense of meaning and purpose show lower rates of depression and anxiety, greater life satisfaction, and better cognitive functioning in older age.
• Physical health: Purpose predicts lower all-cause mortality, lower risk of cardiovascular disease, and better immune function — effects that persist after controlling for socioeconomic status, health behaviors, and social support.
• Resilience: A sense of purpose buffers against trauma, loss, and adversity. Viktor Frankl observed in Auschwitz that those who found a reason to survive — a person to return to, a work to complete, a meaning to bear — were more likely to survive than those who had lost all sense of purpose. His observation was not merely anecdotal; it has been corroborated by research on war prisoners, concentration camp survivors, and disaster survivors.
• Motivation: Meaningful work sustains engagement and effort in ways that extrinsic incentives cannot over time.

This is not an argument for martyrdom — for doing work that is meaningful but miserable. The fullest life is one in which pleasure and meaning reinforce each other. But when they conflict, meaning tends to win in the long run. The pleasures that feel most satisfying in retrospect are typically those that cost something — that required difficulty, commitment, or sacrifice in the service of something that mattered.

Three Sources of Meaning

Viktor Frankl — psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and founder of logotherapy — proposed that meaning can be found through three sources:

1. Creative values — what we give to the world; the work we do, the things we make, the contributions we offer
2. Experiential values — what we receive from the world; beauty, love, truth, the full experience of being alive
3. Attitudinal values — the stance we take toward unavoidable suffering; the meaning we find in or assign to what cannot be changed

Frankl's insight — derived from extreme circumstances most of us will never encounter — is that meaning is always available, even when creative and experiential sources are closed. The person who can no longer work, who has lost their health, who is facing death, can still choose their attitude toward that suffering. This is not optimism; it is defiance of the view that circumstances alone determine meaning.

For most people in most circumstances, all three sources are accessible. The question is which we prioritize and whether we have cultivated enough awareness to notice when meaning is present.

The Components of Meaningful Work

Research by Michael Steger, Amy Wrzesniewski, and others has identified the psychological components of meaningful work experience:

Significance: the sense that the work matters — that it has value beyond simply occupying time or generating income. This can be significance to oneself, to others, or to a larger cause.

Purpose: a sense that the work contributes to a broader life goal or direction; that it is part of something larger than the immediate task.

Coherence: the sense that the work makes sense in the context of one's life — that it fits with one's values, identity, and story.

These three components are related but not identical. Work can feel significant without feeling purposive (it matters, but it doesn't feel like it's going somewhere). Work can feel purposive without feeling coherent (the direction is clear but it doesn't fit who I am). The fullest experience of meaningful work involves all three.

2. Calling, Career, Job — Three Orientations Toward Work

Amy Wrzesniewski, now at Yale, conducted a series of studies asking how people relate to their work. She identified three distinct orientations that are not determined by occupation, income, or status — they are psychological stances that can be held toward almost any kind of work.

The Job Orientation

People with a job orientation relate to their work primarily as a means to an end. The work itself is not inherently engaging or meaningful; it is a way to obtain the money, security, or time that enables the life they actually want. This is not cynicism or moral failure. For many people, work is genuinely not the primary source of meaning — family, creative pursuits, community, or spiritual life are. The job orientation is a rational response to work that is not intrinsically engaging.

The risk of the job orientation: if the means to an end becomes the whole of life — if the remainder of life shrinks to the point where the job is everything without being meaningful — the holder of this orientation is left with neither the meaning of a calling nor the satisfaction of the life the job was supposed to enable.

The Career Orientation

People with a career orientation relate to their work primarily through advancement, achievement, and status. The work matters because it is the medium through which success is pursued. Career-oriented individuals invest deeply in their work, seek recognition, pursue promotion, and derive significant satisfaction from markers of achievement.

The risk of the career orientation: it is future-dependent. Career satisfaction lives in the next level, the next promotion, the next achievement. The plateau — when advancement slows or stops — can produce the particular disorientation of people who have achieved what they sought and find the satisfaction smaller than anticipated. Jordan's hedonic treadmill observation about post-achievement anticlimax (Chapter 22) is recognizable to most career-oriented individuals at some point.

The Calling Orientation

People with a calling orientation experience their work as inseparable from their sense of identity and purpose. The work matters intrinsically — it is what they are "supposed to be doing," whether or not it came to them through revelation, gradual discovery, or deliberate cultivation. The calling orientation is associated with higher job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and psychological wellbeing — and with overwork, boundary difficulty, and the collapse of identity when the work is threatened.

Important qualification: research has complicated the romantic notion of a "calling" as something found through dramatic insight or innate talent. Wrzesniewski and her colleagues found that the calling orientation is:

• Not correlated with occupation prestige. Hospital cleaners with a calling orientation reported levels of meaning and engagement equal to or exceeding physicians with a job orientation.
• Not innate. Calling orientations develop through cultivation — through finding ways to connect work to larger values, through relationship and craft and the sense of contribution.
• Not uniformly positive. A calling without conditions that support it — adequate compensation, psychological safety, manageable demands — can become exploitation. People with strong callings are more vulnerable to overwork and employer abuse precisely because their intrinsic motivation makes them willing to tolerate conditions they should not tolerate.

Which orientation is "best"? Wrzesniewski resists this framing. What matters is alignment between the orientation and the conditions of your life. The person who genuinely derives meaning primarily from outside work, and who has structured a life that reflects this, is not deficient. The person who has a job orientation toward work that they experience as a calling is in the most painful position: invested and unrewarded. The person who holds a calling orientation toward work that exploits that calling is in a dangerous one.

3. Job Crafting — Building Meaning Where You Are

What do you do when your current work doesn't feel meaningful — but leaving isn't an option, or isn't yet the right option?

Wrzesniewski and Justin Berg developed the concept of job crafting: the proactive process by which individuals reshape the boundaries, relationships, and meaning of their work without necessarily changing roles or organizations.

Job crafting operates through three mechanisms:

Task Crafting

Changing what you actually do — the tasks you take on, drop, expand, or modify within the scope of your role. This might mean seeking out projects that use skills you care about developing, delegating tasks you find meaningless if possible, volunteering for work at the edges of your role that connects to your larger interests.

Jordan's methodology project — converting the CFO gap into a deliberate practice program for himself and then into a team institution — was task crafting. He didn't change roles. He changed the nature of what his role contained by expanding its meaning-relevant boundaries.

Relational Crafting

Changing with whom you interact at work, and how. The research on meaningful work consistently finds that relationships are a primary source of meaning — not in the abstract, but in the specific: having colleagues who know you, mentors who invest in you, clients or customers whose wellbeing your work affects.

Relational crafting involves seeking relationships that bring meaning, deepening existing relationships in meaning-relevant ways, and — where the role allows — increasing visibility to the people whose lives the work affects.

Cognitive Crafting

Changing how you perceive your work — reconceiving the scope, purpose, or significance of what you do without changing the tasks or relationships themselves. The hospital cleaner who understands their work as contributing to patient recovery and comfort — not just mopping — is engaging in cognitive crafting. The teacher who frames their role as "developing the next generation" rather than "delivering a curriculum" is crafting the meaning of the same set of tasks.

Cognitive crafting is not denial or rationalization. It requires genuine connection between the reframing and the actual effects of the work. Empty positive thinking — telling yourself the work is meaningful when you can see no evidence that it is — is not crafting; it is suppression. Effective cognitive crafting zooms out to see the real larger picture, not an imagined one.

The Limits of Job Crafting

Job crafting has real limits. Research shows it is most effective when workers have sufficient autonomy, when the work has genuine impact on others, and when the organization supports rather than punishes proactive boundary modification. In highly rigid, surveilled, or toxic work environments, job crafting may be impossible. And some work, crafted or not, is genuinely not a good match for the person doing it.

The answer to "should I stay and craft or should I leave?" is not resolvable by a framework alone — it requires honest assessment of what can be changed and what cannot, and clear-eyed judgment about whether the conditions will ever support the meaning you need.

4. Purpose — Transcending the Task

Meaning in work is partly about the task itself (is it engaging, significant, and coherent with my identity?) and partly about what the task is for — the larger purpose it serves.

Purpose as Motivational Resource

Research by William Damon, Kendall Cotton Bronk, and others on purpose — particularly in adolescence and emerging adulthood, but with findings that extend across the lifespan — defines purpose as a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something meaningful and at the same time of consequence to the world beyond the self.

The key elements: stability (purpose sustains motivation across time), generalization (it applies across situations, not just to one role or project), and beyond-the-self (purpose is inherently other-directed — it involves contributing to something larger than personal welfare).

This other-directedness is important. Research consistently finds that purpose that is purely self-focused — concerned only with personal success, achievement, or pleasure — provides weaker motivational sustenance than purpose that includes genuine contribution to others. This may explain why accomplishment without impact so often feels hollow: the achievement was real, but the purpose was self-contained.

Mortality and the Urgency of Meaning

Terror management theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon) proposes that awareness of mortality is a fundamental driver of human behavior. When mortality salience is heightened — when we are reminded that we will die — we engage in behaviors that bolster self-esteem and worldview confidence, affiliating with in-groups and defending cultural values that offer symbolic immortality.

The implication for meaning and work: existential challenges — serious illness, loss, aging, the death of peers — often precipitate renewed engagement with questions of purpose and meaning. This is not pathological; it is adaptive. The question "what matters, really?" becomes urgent when the finite nature of life is felt rather than merely known abstractly.

You don't have to wait for a mortality encounter to engage the question. But it is worth noting that many of the most significant redirections in people's work lives are precipitated by exactly these kinds of events.

Finding Purpose When It Isn't Clear

Many people experience a "purpose gap" — they believe they should have a clear sense of purpose, they observe that some people apparently do, and they cannot identify their own with confidence. This produces its own anxiety, and the anxiety compounds the problem.

A few things research suggests about purpose gaps:

Purpose is discovered through action, not introspection alone. Waiting to find your purpose before acting is like waiting to find your appetite before cooking. Research by Wrzesniewski and others finds that purpose is more often cultivated through engagement — through trying things, noticing what produces the felt sense of significance, and pursuing more of it — than through extended self-examination in the absence of action.

Purpose is not a single destination. For most people, purpose evolves over time. The meaning Jordan finds in his current work is different from the meaning he found in earlier work, and different again from the meaning he might find in a decade. A single, fixed "purpose" that anchors an entire life is rare; a living, developing sense of what matters is more typical.

The search for purpose can itself become an obstacle. Research by Erin Westgate and Timothy Wilson suggests that excessive self-focus and rumination about one's life purpose can produce lower wellbeing than engaging in purposeful activity without sustained meta-level analysis. The question "what is my purpose?" is generative when it opens action; it becomes problematic when it substitutes for action.

5. Flow, Craft, and the Experience of Meaningful Work

One of the most reliably meaningful experiences in work is flow — the state of complete absorption in a challenging task where time distorts, self-consciousness recedes, and the activity itself becomes intrinsically rewarding. Csikszentmihalyi's decades of research on flow consistently find it to be among the most positive experiences people report.

Flow requires a specific balance: the challenge of the task should be at or slightly beyond the edge of current skill. Too easy: boredom. Too difficult: anxiety. In the channel between: flow.

The relevance to meaningful work: people who regularly experience flow in their work report substantially higher meaning and engagement than those who do not, even when other factors (pay, status, autonomy) are controlled. Flow appears to be both a consequence and a partial cause of meaningful engagement: work that you care about is more likely to produce flow, and work in which you experience flow is more likely to feel meaningful.

The Ethics of Craft

The philosopher Matthew Crawford, in Shop Class as Soulcraft, makes a philosophical case for skilled manual work as a source of meaning that intellectual work often cannot provide: the direct feedback of physical reality, the resistance of material, the tangible completion of a made thing.

Crawford's argument is not that manual work is superior to knowledge work, but that something important about meaning is accessed through craft — through the development of genuine skill, through the encounter with a reality that is not simply a construction of our own making, through the specific satisfaction of getting it right against a standard that the work itself provides.

The craft dimension of meaningful work is available in virtually any domain. The analyst who develops genuine methodological skill, the therapist who refines clinical precision, the teacher who cultivates pedagogical craft — each has access to the craft-based satisfaction that Crawford describes, regardless of whether the work is physical.

Jordan's deliberate practice project — developing depth of understanding across twelve metrics, not because someone required it but because the gap mattered — was a craft pursuit. The methodology sessions were not just team learning; they were the cultivation of a shared craft standard.

6. The Dark Side of Purpose

Purpose is a motivational resource of remarkable power. It is also, like all powerful forces, capable of damage when misapplied.

Overidentification and the Collapse of Self

When work is the primary or sole source of identity and meaning, its loss — through job loss, retirement, role change, or failure — is experienced as an existential threat rather than a practical problem. Research on retirement transitions finds that individuals whose sense of self was most narrowly defined by their professional role show the steepest decline in wellbeing after leaving work, even when the retirement is chosen and financially secure.

Amara is learning this risk from the other side: she has seen clients whose sense of purpose was so concentrated in a role — caregiver, professional, parent — that role changes produced identity dissolution. She is also, quietly, aware of this risk in herself. The question of whether her vocation is genuinely chosen or whether it is the caretaker role legitimized by credentialing is one she has not fully resolved.

The Exploitation of Calling

Organizations have learned, more or less explicitly, that workers with strong callings will accept worse conditions. The "do it for the passion" norm in creative fields, the volunteerism expected of academics, the normalization of unsustainable hours in mission-driven nonprofits — these are partly the result of employers knowing that workers who believe deeply in the work will absorb costs that purely economic actors would refuse.

Philosopher Anca Gheaus and sociologist Lisa Herzog have analyzed what they call the "paradox of meaningful work": that meaningful work is frequently undervalued and poorly compensated precisely because workers derive non-financial value from it. The person who would do this work for less money is structurally vulnerable to being paid less money.

The individual response: hold purpose and material self-interest in dialogue, not opposition. Loving your work is not an argument for accepting conditions you should not accept.

Martyrdom and Mission Drift

Purpose can produce an orientation toward sacrifice that crosses from generative into harmful. The person who gives everything to the work — neglecting health, relationships, rest, and the other sources of meaning in their life — may sustain the mission for years, but is building on an unsustainable foundation. Research on physician and therapist burnout consistently finds that those with the strongest sense of mission are not protected from burnout — in some studies, they are more vulnerable, because their sense of purpose elevates their willingness to endure conditions that accelerate burnout.

The sustainable relationship with meaningful work is not exhaustion. It is a long one — decades, not sprints. The work that matters deserves a practitioner who will be present for it at seventy, not burned out at forty.

7. Meaning Under Adverse Conditions

When Work Doesn't Offer Meaning — And Why It Might Anyway

Not all work is intrinsically meaningful. Much human labor is repetitive, unrecognized, poorly compensated, or structurally disconnected from the people it affects. What does the psychology of meaningful work say to people in these conditions?

A few findings are sobering and important:

The context of work matters enormously. Research consistently finds that relationships with colleagues and supervisors, the experience of being recognized and treated with dignity, and the sense of contribution to visible outcomes are strong predictors of meaning — and these can be present in objectively unrewarding work. The hospital cleaner in Wrzesniewski's research who experienced calling-level meaning was not engaged in glamorous work. She was engaged in work that she had connected to the lives of patients in the building.

Autonomy is a proximate driver of meaning. Work that permits some degree of control over how, when, and what — even within significant constraints — is experienced as more meaningful than equivalent work without autonomy. Organizational structures that treat workers as machines rather than agents undermine meaning independently of the work's content.

Recognition of the person, not just the output. Being seen as a person — not only a producer — is a consistent predictor of work meaning. This is partly why small acts of recognition from managers and colleagues have effects on meaning and engagement that seem disproportionate to their apparent cost.

Frankl's Contribution: Meaning in Suffering

Frankl's logotherapy — the therapeutic approach he developed from his concentration camp experience and the philosophy of meaning it produced — rests on what he called the "defiant power of the human spirit": the capacity to maintain or find meaning even in conditions from which meaning appears to have been stripped.

This is not a claim that suffering is good, or that adverse conditions should be accepted. It is a claim that the human orientation toward meaning is remarkably resilient — that people can find and maintain meaning in conditions of extreme adversity if they are supported in doing so.

The practical application for people in difficult work conditions: the search for meaning is not futile just because conditions are adverse. It may be harder. It may require more deliberate work. It may require looking for meaning outside work, in the relationships and contributions that exist alongside it. But the capacity is present.

The Role of Contribution and Legacy

Research by Laura Carstensen (Stanford) on socioemotional selectivity theory finds that as time horizons shorten — as people age or become aware of finitude — they orient increasingly toward relationships that have emotional depth and activities that feel significant and contributory. Legacy — what we leave behind, what we have built and passed on — becomes more salient.

This shift in orientation is not only a phenomenon of aging. It appears wherever subjective time horizons become shorter — under conditions of serious illness, periods of crisis, or deliberate reflection on one's finite time. The exercise of asking "what would I want to have built, in ten years?" is a way of importing this orientation voluntarily, before events impose it.

8. Designing a Meaningful Work Life

The research on meaningful work, combined with the frameworks in this chapter, suggests a set of questions that are more generative than the generic "what is my purpose?"

Questions Worth Carrying

What work consistently produces the felt experience of significance in me? Not "what should matter to me" but "what actually produces the feeling, however briefly, that what I'm doing is worth doing?" This is an empirical question about your experience, not a normative question about your values — though the two often align.

Who are the people my work affects, and how visible is that effect to me? Research on meaningful work is consistent on this: the more visible the human impact of work — the more the worker can see, hear, and know the people whose lives the work touches — the more meaningful the work feels. This is actionable: can you increase your proximity to the people your work serves?

What is the most important thing my work could contribute in the next five years? Damon's research on purpose finds that clarity about contribution direction — the specific form in which you want to make a difference — is more motivationally powerful than vague aspiration.

Where am I in the job/career/calling spectrum, and is that where I want to be? This is not a one-time question. Orientations shift over time, and the right orientation for a given stage of life is not fixed.

What would I need to change — about the work, about the conditions, about my orientation to it — to experience it as more meaningful? Job crafting starts with honest assessment of what can be changed.

The Long-Arc View

The philosopher Charles Taylor, in Sources of the Self, argues that a human life requires what he calls a "horizon of significance" — a framework of what matters within which choices have weight and meaning. Without such a horizon, choice feels arbitrary, and achievement loses its point.

For most people, the horizon of significance is not a single articulated purpose but an emergent structure — built from values, relationships, commitments, and the accumulated experience of what has felt meaningful. It is developed over time, not discovered all at once.

The practical implication: the question "what is my purpose?" is better approached as an ongoing project than a puzzle to be solved. The most meaningful lives are not necessarily those with the clearest initial purpose; they are often those in which meaning was cultivated deliberately and revised honestly across decades.

From the Field — Dr. Reyes on Meaning and Work

"I worked as a clinical psychologist for thirty-five years. In the last decade, as I saw retirement approaching, I began to wonder what meaning I had found in the work — and what I would keep when I stopped.

What surprised me was how much of the meaning I had found in relationship rather than in role. Not the 'therapist' identity, though I had carried that for a long time. The actual conversations. The particular moments with particular people. The client who, twenty years after our work together, called to tell me they were okay.

When I was young in the profession, I thought meaning came from theory — from getting the framework right, from understanding the mechanisms. Later I thought it came from craft — from becoming genuinely skilled. Both were part of it. But what I couldn't have told my younger self is that most of the meaning, in the end, came from witnessing. From being the person who was present when something difficult became something different. That doesn't require a sophisticated theoretical framework. It requires showing up consistently over a long time.

The patients who taught me most about meaning were the ones who were dying. What they wanted — what almost universally came to matter most as time shortened — was not achievement or recognition. It was connection, completion, and the sense that their presence had mattered to someone specific. Not to the world. To one person.

If I could give one piece of advice about meaningful work, it would be this: don't wait for the meaning to come to you. The feeling of significance is a consequence of engagement, not a prerequisite. Show up. Do the work. The meaning accumulates in the doing, not in the deciding."

Research Spotlight: Job Crafting in Practice

Amy Wrzesniewski and Justin Berg (then both at Yale and Michigan, respectively) developed a structured exercise called the "job crafting exercise" to facilitate the proactive redesign of work. In controlled studies, participants who completed the job crafting exercise — which involves visual mapping of current tasks and relationships, identifying which are most engaging and meaningful, and planning changes — showed significant improvements in job satisfaction, engagement, and meaning compared to control groups.

Key findings from the job crafting research:

The baseline: Most people, when asked to describe their jobs, describe the formal role. When asked to describe what they actually find meaningful and energizing in their work, they describe something narrower and often quite different from the formal role.

The gap: This gap between formal role and actual meaning experience is universal — but its size varies enormously. People with narrow gaps (what they do is largely what they find meaningful) show dramatically higher engagement and wellbeing. People with wide gaps (the meaningful parts are small fractions of the role) show lower engagement regardless of role prestige or compensation.

The intervention: The crafting exercise narrows the gap not by changing the role but by changing where the person's attention, energy, and initiative go within the role — expanding the meaningful tasks, deepening the meaningful relationships, and reconceiving the purpose of the whole.

The limit: Job crafting is not infinitely elastic. In highly constrained, monitored, or misaligned roles, the gap cannot be narrowed enough through crafting alone. The exercise's greatest value may be in clarifying when crafting is insufficient — when leaving is actually the right answer.

Chapter Summary

Meaningful work is not a luxury or a privilege available only to those with the right occupation, income, or circumstance. It is a psychological experience — shaped by orientation, context, relationship, and attention — that is available across a remarkably wide range of conditions, and that contributes to wellbeing in ways that neither pleasure alone nor achievement alone can replicate.

The key variables:

• Orientation: whether you approach work as a job (means to an end), career (achievement medium), or calling (identity and purpose expression) — and whether that orientation is genuinely yours or an inherited one
• Crafting: the proactive reshaping of tasks, relationships, and meaning within whatever role you currently hold
• Purpose: a sense that the work contributes to something beyond yourself — that it has consequence in the lives of real people
• Flow and craft: the engagement with genuinely challenging work, developed toward genuine skill, producing the satisfaction of getting it right
• Visibility of impact: proximity to the people whose lives the work affects

And the essential corrective: purpose has a dark side. Overidentification with work, exploitation of calling, and the martyrdom of over-sacrifice are as real as the benefits of meaningful work. The sustainable relationship with work is one that includes, alongside purpose, the other sources of meaning — relationship, creative life, physical existence, rest, play — that make the long arc of a working life viable.

Key Terms

Eudaimonic wellbeing — wellbeing through engagement, contribution, and the realization of potential; distinguished from hedonic (pleasure-based) wellbeing.

Logotherapy — Viktor Frankl's existential therapeutic approach centered on the human drive to find meaning; the claim that suffering can be endured and life affirmed when meaning is found.

Job orientation — relating to work primarily as a means to external ends (income, security, time for other activities).

Career orientation — relating to work primarily through advancement, achievement, and status.

Calling orientation — relating to work as inseparable from identity and purpose; experiencing the work as what one is "supposed to be doing."

Job crafting — the proactive process of redesigning work tasks, relationships, and meaning from within a role, without necessarily changing the role itself.

Task crafting — job crafting through modification of work tasks.

Relational crafting — job crafting through modification of work relationships.

Cognitive crafting — job crafting through reframing the purpose or significance of one's work.

Purpose — a stable, generalized intention to accomplish something meaningful and of consequence to the world beyond the self (Damon).

Mortality salience — the psychological state of heightened awareness of one's own death; a trigger for meaning-seeking and existential engagement (Terror Management Theory).

Flow — a state of complete absorption in a challenging task at the edge of current skill, with reduced self-consciousness and intrinsic reward; described by Csikszentmihalyi.

Socioemotional selectivity theory — Carstensen's theory that as perceived time horizons shorten, people orient toward emotionally meaningful goals and relationships over achievement or information-seeking goals.

Horizon of significance — Taylor's concept of the framework of what matters within which choices have weight and meaning.