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I recently started a new role at a company I am genuinely excited by. What preceded this change were months of questioning, researching, and overthinking: Would I find a role I was truly excited by? One aligned with my values? That I would be proud to mention at a dinner party? And, dramatically, that gave my life meaning?
The internal turbulence I felt was fed by headline after headline on company layoffs, reports on which jobs would be most affected by AI (my expertise clearly replaceable, according to most charts), and rising unemployment especially among recent graduates. The Future of Jobs Report 2025 states that the world needs more farmworkers, nursing professionals, social workers, and teachers — not marketing managers or accountants; a shift that was also clear in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the celebration of frontline workers. The job search itself has changed too: candidates now apply with AI-generated résumés and cover letters, while companies filter responses through automated bots — a process that manages to feel both impersonal and slightly absurd (here is a good satirical piece on these practices). Friends and peers working in “white-collar”, creative, strategic, and corporate jobs were equally restless, yet equally stuck.
Media outlets have named it quiet quitting, the Great Resignation, a generational crisis of engagement. Underneath those labels is something messier and more personal: for many, work has become a primary marker of identity, not just a means of financing our lives. This is evident by the ever-present, standard question when meeting someone new: “So, what do you do?”.
With that on the line, the search for meaningful work felt less like a job hunt and more like an existential quest. I found myself reading about frameworks for navigating it — IKIGAI and the Stanford design school's Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. For a clean working definition, I like the three-part framework offered by Dr Caleb Althorpe, philosopher at Trinity College Dublin: meaningful work must be aligned with your personal characteristics and strengths; it must carry some degree of complexity; and it must contribute to some form of good beyond itself. Those may seem like simple criteria, yet they’re surprisingly hard to satisfy in today’s rapidly evolving landscape. It is, fair to say, a privileged problem to be asking what does one’s work mean; but it is also an increasingly widespread one.
Workplace research estimates we spend around 80,000 to 90,000 hours working over the course of a lifetime. But the number is also increasingly imprecise: work has leaked into private life — the email checked while the pasta boils, the Teams notification that arrives while you are out with friends. And life has leaked into work: Spotify and WhatsApp open on every work screen, the company extra-curricular wellbeing retreats, “workations” in Lisbon. What remains is the vastness of this time and the question of what we do with it.
Work sits at the foundation of how societies organize themselves — not just economically, but culturally and psychologically. And right now, that foundation is shifting. New technology, new generational priorities, new definitions of success and stability are all bearing down on an idea of work that was already showing its cracks. This edition of NOC tries to understand how the meaning of work is changing, why, and what might come next.
I would love to hear about your relationship to work — if you want to have a chat, reply to this email. I’ll be reading all answers!
Sanjna
PS: In this edition, I did not go into gender politics at work, the #girlboss era or “tradwives” as that topic merits its own space. Stay tuned.
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