Did You Do Something Meaningful Today?

In Johann Hari’s book, Lost Connections, Hari reports that about 83% of us do not find our jobs to be meaningful. If we had a choice to not work because money would no longer be a factor in our lives, 83% of us would walk away from our jobs or careers and find something else to do that we are passionate about.

The other 17% of us would continue to do the work that we do or stay in the same career that we are in whether we won the lottery or not.

Hari contends that any job or career can depress us if we are subject to the mechanism or routines that make us feel that what we are doing is meaningless. In other words, when we feel connected to our work or feel that we are making an impact on others, we feel better about what we do and as a result, we feel good about ourselves. This is where our jobs or careers intersect with our identity-in-the-making (which is always changing).

Let’s take a brief look at education. We are in the business of helping children and adult learners and professionals. Most educators would say that their career in education is, indeed, meaningful. We feel good because we are working hard to enrich students’ lives. As a result, our identity is shaped in a positive way because of the belief that we are helping others—which is very meaningful to most of us.

But, even in education, there are widgits and assembly-line mechanisms that don’t make us feel that we are doing meaningful work to help children. There are automated tasks and responsibilities that prevent us from having a good day, sometimes, especially when we usually have pretty good days, for the most part, working in the greatest profession on earth.

Right now, you could be thinking of a few things that you find to be meaningless tasks even in your meaningful career. If you wrote these things down right now, what would they be? If you had to list 3 meaningless tasks or duties that you, as a teacher or school leader do each year, what would they be and how happy (or unhappy) do these tasks make you?

Hari’s work about depression and my recent extrapolation of his work into the field of education intrigues me. There are tasks that we all do not enjoy and there are tasks that we love.

In what ways can we leverage Hari’s social science analysis to re-design the things we do not like doing in order to increase our happiness in what we do?