The purpose problem

This is only my second time doing a video essay, but I’m surprised how much I enjoy working in this format.

This one’s about something I know intimately:

• the psychic pain of doing work that doesn’t fit

• the conditioning that keeps us stuck

• the courage it takes to leap—or moonlight—into the unknown

• the limits of “follow your bliss” (or its modern cousin: “follow your aliveness”)

• the soul’s hunger for meaningful work in a world coming undone

• and how, with time, the question of purpose dissolves altogether into presence

I might turn this into a series. We’ll see.

The full transcript is below. Thanks for reading, listening, or just lurking. I hope something in it finds you.

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The purpose problem

Bullshit jobs, lost purpose, and the urgency of soul-aligned work in the AI age (TRANSCRIPT)

I. The ache: defining the "purpose problem"

If you've ever felt hollowed out by your job with the sense that this can't be it, you're definitely not alone.

I call this the purpose problem.

It's a quiet, persistent sense that your work doesn't fundamentally reflect who you are, that you're spending your life on tasks that don't feed your soul.

And it's definitely not rare. Millions of people feel this way. We spend over 40 hours a week doing things that we ultimately often don't believe in. And I think that this has to mean something.

I'm certainly not the only one to point this out. Many others have explored this. One of my favorite voices is the anthropologist David Graeber, who defined a bullshit job as:

“A form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.”

That one always stings a bit to revisit. But for me, the purpose problem goes deeper. It's not just about meaningless jobs. It's about a soul misalignment, which creates a painful tension between the life that you're living and the one that you know or that you sense that you're meant for.

It's disturbingly easy to end up here living someone else's dream and calling it your own. I know this because it happened to me, and it was something that I lived inside for many years.

II. My wake-up moment

I'll never forget the moment when I was in early recovery and after going through something that was really quite devastating, I had finally landed back on my feet and I was at a new tech job. I had been in leadership roles throughout my whole career and I was back in an office with a nice view of Market Street and on paper everything looked great.

But in that very first week, I think it was something like the third day, and I was going through the motions in Gmail, Google Calendar, and Salesforce, plus one-on-ones. And I just felt something in my gut that said this cannot be it.

I knew then that something was off. I could go through the motions. I knew how to do the job. I could certainly earn a lot of money doing it. But I knew that something was no longer cohering for me.