Barriers to Meaning
The other day my boss’ boss and I had our quarterly “1:1”, a term also used in The Bachelor to refer to the more intimate dates between the season’s featured pursuit object and the two or so dozen suitors they make out with over the course of any given season.
While these meetings typically involve fewer “just-hot-enough-for-TV” make outs than the Bachelor, they do employ a similar convenience-rooted superficiality, following some variation of the “Hey, how’s the weather in blah-blah-blah > ok everything’s good, right? > No problems? > Well great, always good chatting, I’ll let you go then, and keep up the good work” format. In this case, the religiously devout lean six sigmatist seeks to efficiently ascertain whether the number of employees currently contemplating suicide at the moment is enough to be concerned about, all while minimizing small talk or anything else that might result in an unwanted human connection. It has the impersonal tenor of a visit to a doctor’s office, which is understandable given that every quarter, I imagine he has about three days blocked off entirely for these 1:1’s and that it probably gets difficult keeping everybody straight.
Sensing the approach of the halfway point in our 30 minute 1:1 and seeking to maximize Bloomberg headline skimming time between his subsequent call with next make-out victim, he waved the symbolic flag of early dismissal with a “well, hey I know you’re busy, anything else you want to talk about?”, which, of course, is 99.8% statement and 0.02% question, and whose descending tonal modulation strongly implies a desired answer of “nope, I’m good. Talk to you next quarter.” At the risk of being perceived as dense(r) than he already thinks I am, I paused and said… “well, there is one thing I’ve been kicking around… lemme just throw it up against the wall here.”
What Would You Say… You Do Here?
Knowing that most bosses’ bosses don’t want to hear about how meaningless and empty an employee considers their pointless job to be, I decided to dispense with the why and go straight to the what, which was to say that I thought it would be “kind of cool and may boost morale” if there was a role that functioned as sort of an… “existential corporate forensics specialist” whose task it could be to check in on our customers a few months, a year, whatever, following the completion of a project, after my indistinguishable colleagues and I in the Operations Department have moved on to performing the same tasks on the next indistinguishable project and for the next indistinguishable customer, ideally in hopes that, post-delivery, they could provide the team with some tangible evidence that we were there, that whatever we did and whoever we did it for actually served some benefit, that it mattered to and touched real human lives, even if in some small way. Basically just provide some evidence that something was accomplished as a result of our toil, and that it didn’t just happen in a vacuum.
To illuminate the what/why a little more clearly, I work at a consulting firm that provides outsourced “expertise” in contract negotiations to support Supply Chain departments of large institutions. Typically this entails negotiating contracts with one or more suppliers for a particular service, like copier/print repair or something. The idea is that, they have to contract for these services anyway, and, as subject matter experts, we can help them get better value for their money. So I’ll work with somebody in their Supply Chain / Contracting office, and some of the Department Heads (IT, or whomever is relevant), to make sure that we understand the scope and needs, and then help support the contracting process, but typically our engagement is over once a contract is signed with the chosen supplier.
At this point we can see on paper if they will potentially save money or get a better contract as a result of our efforts, but beyond that we typically have no idea if the incoming supplier does a good job, or if the whole projects implodes following a botched implementation, or whatever. It’s out of sight, out of mind, and we’re already long working on the next contract for the next customer.
In darker and doubtful Matrix-y moments, it is tempting to question whether there actually is a customer, actually are suppliers, actually is a contract that results in actual services being performed in a way that is better for actual people who provide and receive them than it was prior to our intervention, or if we are just firing emails and spreadsheets out into the void as part of some twisted simulation to see how many termination for convenience clauses human beings can negotiate before they lose their minds and the ability to recognize themselves or their loved ones. Even pre-covid, we’d “complete” a project almost entirely virtually - through emails, spreadsheets and phone calls with strangers who remain strangers, collect a paycheck, and move on to the next one, the only validation of having performed the previous one with any competency or satisfaction being the fact that there is a next one.
Concrete Evidence
As lame and insignificant as it may sound in the grand scheme of man’s accomplishments, one of the most “meaningful” projects I’ve worked on at this job was a competitive bid on behalf of customer in New York City to hire a contractor to install concrete bollards for a perimeter hardening effort (bollards = short, verticle posts, in this case those pillars erected in front of buildings to prevent people from driving trucks full of explosives into other people’s buildings; the picture below is an example, but not the one I worked on (ours were nicer)).
After the completion of the project, I remember walking through midtown Manhattan one day and seeing the property following the installation of the bollards. Just the sight of them struck me with a sudden and alien sensation: I had the distinct sense that, “even if in the most infinitesimally smallest of ways, those things are here in part because of me.” And I can’t stress the “infinitesimally smallest of ways” part enough here. Nobody else walking past those things in a million years will ever associate my name with their construction, but, nonetheless, the sight of those stupid concrete pillars was tangible evidence of my toil and resulted in tangible feeling. In the banal glory of all of their physical reality, no more or less physically “real” than any of the other billions of tons of concrete and steel surrounding them, I actually had the thought that I was a part of midtown Manhattan.
Perhaps it is telling, that, even the tiniest scrap of physical proof of existence provides a sensation of connection and accomplishment. It suggests to me that, in a world where so much of our “productivity” takes place in a) the digital realm, where the only trace of effort is the transmission of electrons through emails, spreadsheets, power points, conference calls, visible but insubstantial, saved forever but stale and ephemeral, existing in multiplicity, and/or b) within the confines of the corporate environment, in which so much “work” feels fake, needlessly urgent, and completely pointless, and where it it is an open question as to whether we are just paid to be frustrated than “productive”, that there is a tremendous paucity of purpose and meaning. Many examples of this abound.
So it was out of that feeling of connection that the suggestion to my boss’ boss was conceived, and my vision for the role was that this person would simply follow up with customers, and try to get photos, testimonials, some evidence that the work we did resulted in a material reality that made people’s lives better. Just give us some proof, some sign that what we’re doing here actually yields fruit, accomplishes some goal. And as you can see, the bar is set very low.
Meaning Is A Positivist/Relativist’s Market
Part of me is deeply saddened that I feel moved at the sight of concrete bollards. In hindsight, it is with a keen awareness of compromise that I found “meaning” in the bollard project. In this age of [relative] material abundance, we do not go unfed, unclothed, unsheltered, but we are deeply untethered. To experience a “crisis of meaning” while holding a very-comfortable-on-paper cushy corporate job that many people would kill for seems paradoxical - by all standards of the western bourgeois trajectory I’ve “made it” - and unlikely to elicit much sympathy by complaining about it. In reality, I have it very good.
Despite that, I want to marinate in the sad stew of the negative for a moment, if only in light of the seeming prevalence of this type of work in the west, and how when it comes to meaning, the phrase “beggars can’t be choosers” comes to mind. There are a number of reasons why the bollard installation which moved me so much is actually a terrible project, as it reflects a world in which:
Driving vehicles full of explosives into buildings is a worry (frankly an outsized one, virtually statistically nil; while it is good they will never be put to the test, it is not good that they exist in the first place).
A de facto HOA environment pressures everyone to implement such things, as if you’re the only building on the block without them, then your building is by default the most vulnerable to the type of attack the are “designed” to prevent, (which does not go unnoticed by insurance companies).
Construction companies, manufacturers of the bollards, and consulting companies like the one I work for become the primary beneficiaries of Federally (ie taxpayer) funded set-asides that encourage buildings to erect these structures as “deterrents”, raking in outsized fees for work of dubious value; there is a distinct sense that there are better uses for the money.
Visible reminders of paranoia, fear, destruction, and death are woven into the fabric of our urban environments, and therefore our subconscious.
Other examples that anything I did existed are so few and far between that this one resonates.
So another phrase comes to mind then: “winning the battle but losing the war”. The project’s very existence is grounded within ideological parameters that I find largely detestable. It is making lemonade out of aids. It is a “good” outcome in the context of a larger frame which is deeply troublesome. The “victory” is only relative, and becomes grounds for cynicism when considered in the zoomed-out context. Zoomed in on the local, it is a “job well-done” and something to take pride in. It provides some proof that “I was here”, but is at best ambiguous as to whether the world is a “better place” as a result. Funny how that works.
Obviously there is a slippery slope argument here about accomplishing misguided results/goals that I’m not going to make a wide detour on; is it on the same level as taking pride in the fact that the USAF successfully used an artisinally-built JDAM that I helped make at the McDonnell Douglas factory to annihilate a gathering of “military age males” with a minimum of civilian casualties? No, but perhaps it is more of a difference in degree rather than in kind.
Eenie Meaning Miney Mo
Without blaming the author, how did we get this far into an essay about meaning without defining “meaning”? It’s a fuzzy term. Depending on your perspective, you might be tempted to say that meaning is subjective, that it is simply where you find it, and perhaps up to you to make and define your own. That is a popular definition. Or you might say that it is a feeling of making progress towards some greater goal, a north star or guiding principle that is held up as an ideal existing beyond the self, and which [hopefully] leads towards a better world. I think both versions think they are contributing to a better world, but that is a tangent perhaps for another time. You might say that the former is more circumstantial, and the other more absolute. Untethered vs tethered. Individual vs shared/collective.
Meaning is often entangled with building and the concept of posterity, although they are all obviously very different things. Posterity is just the generations of the future, whether one’s own progeny or not. Building something today with the intention of benefiting posterity may provide a feeling of doing something meaningful, but ultimately just because we can build something more durable than ourselves doesn’t necessarily confer any benefit to posterity in and of itself. Rather, it is the bedrock guiding principles encoded into what is built, that is important. Otherwise, what exactly are you providing for posterity besides an artifact, a structure? In the absence of conveying some virtue, some lesson, it is as meaningless as initials carved in a tree.
It is in that sense that “providing for posterity” gets confused with ego, with vanity. It becomes more about the “I was here”, about the builder who expresses a need to feel remembered, or encoded into the world, than about the world in which the thing is built. Wanting to be remembered and providing nothing to be remembered for is not a compelling proposition. It resorts to the graffiti concept of posterity and, I think, comes from a perception of an eternal present, of an inability to picture a world before, after, or beyond ourselves. It is clutter. The initials in the tree show that somebody was there, and that they cared they cared more about showing they were there than they did about the tree. Who is JC, and why should anybody care? No example has been set, no principle besides vanity has been communicated. In this light, bollards, while potentially serving a purpose, don’t do much for posterity, per se.
We all want to feel we made a difference, but our jobs are too pointless, our resources and opportunities too limited; if only we had more ____, maybe we could make such a difference. Actual posterity is hard to effect. Or is it? We’re probably overthinking it.
(Or maybe not:)
Maybe think about it this way: if we’re feeling too busy to make time for even the people in our lives whom we love, if we take even them for granted, why is some stranger going to remember us? What values are we communicating in the present by being so distracted by work we feel is pointless, that we fall into the cycle of endless deference - let’s hang out, but tomorrow; I’d love to get together, but next week is better; I miss you too, but I can’t talk right now, but let’s catch up soon. Are we really thinking about the future at all, or just the present? In taking these actions ourselves, we send that signal that they are what we want to perpetuate
There are too many people to be remembered. Time will divide us all into the two categories that really mean anything: the living and the dead, and the latter in particular are simply congealed into a formless, nameless mass (though very much the former as well). Some people can afford to, and do, dedicate their lives to what they think will be really big-impact projects, arguably moonshots, that they are passionate about, solely for making the world a better place. This is awesome, and I [mostly] applaud such efforts and dedication. Not everybody has the resources to do that, obviously, and there are smaller scale alternatives, though realistically, not everybody can (or should) do those either.
Never Mind The Bollards
Real meaning that confers benefit to posterity can be achieved in the present in the present, in the here and now. It consists in the simple action of not taking friends and loved ones for granted, of putting in the work to build nourishing relationships, not letting them grow fallow and decay. Something we can all do is just put in the “small work” of maintaining relationships, of keeping the threads of the communal fabric strong so that those values remain enmeshed for the future. It is constant work. We need to do repetitions of these exercises. They are anti-fragile goods.
If meaning and posterity are on our minds, as arguably they should be, one of the ultimate goods we can have a hand in creating is the cultivation of communities that understand and value their connection to the world and the history they are born into. Instilling a recognition that the "glue" that brought all this stuff into existence was people giving a shit about it and each other, and trusting and caring about each other enough to cooperate and build it in the first place. That, future generations are not just "inheriting" a pre-made world that has been, and will always be, and that they are custodians of these values and need to recognize the social value of keeping those connections active and healthy. As societies get bigger, they increasingly rely on informal networks of trust and incentives - sort of like government - in that, if you can’t depend on having good people in charge, you need to create a built-in mechanism of making sure self-interested people cooperate in ways that benefit as many people as possible. That is (maybe…) working for keeping the lights on, but at the same time has consequences for people feeling invested in communities, promotes a paradigm of narrow specialization and of spending more time at work, and seems very detrimental to our mental health and long-term connections. By actively working at making meaningful connections now, even if outside the confines of our otherwise pointless jobs (which we can change), we can simultaneously invest in a better future.
I’ll Look Into It
The 1:1, and this short essay, concluded with my boss’ boss responding that he thought this was “actually a good idea” (ah, how not to love that casually backhanded version of “actually” thrown about so prevalently) and one that he would talk to my boss about and look into.
Hooray! Did you hear that, my spiritually beleaguered colleagues? The meaning cavalry is riding to the rescue! How thrilling! How validating! to end a 1:1 with a feeling of being heard, of contributing, of being a valued member of the organization! Satisfaction runs high.
For like an hour or two. Of course, he will never talk to anyone about this. The paradigm of corporate work is everyone wants to be the ideas guy; nobody wants to be the doer of the actual work. Like anything, if anything is to ever come of this, one needs to take ownership, and do it guerilla style, not trying to make it somebody else’ problem, but by just. fucking. doing. it. Asking for forgiveness, rather than permission, as they say. Usually this presents a dilemma, as, if the idea actually takes off, people are rightly afraid of being the victims of their own success in which the reward for their initiative becomes more work, the honor of getting to do the new thing in addition to their regular responsibilities. It is the same critique of capitalism generally, in that ideas (ie technology & innovation) were supposed to lead to people doing less work, but instead we find ourselves somehow doing more (debatable; more on that another time). This is of course a horrible mindset, and one that leads to the paradox of people hating their jobs, but being reluctant to do anything to change them for fear of enlarging them. When the work is bullshit and meaningless, the incentive is to minimize it to the extent possible, which means never taking on more work, even if it may provide some actual meaning (also debatable).
Alas, we [I] did not solve the problem of finding meaning at work. For many people it remains a sinkhole rather than a wellspring in the meaning department. The flipside of the phantom appeal of the physical is, what, exactly, is so unfulfilling about the phantom nature of the digital? While a bollard can provoke a feeling simply by being real, I doubt very much that, if I were to drive by an AWS data center, that I would excitedly point and exclaim, “my kick-off call slide deck is in there!” And then stop for an Instagram story.
As suggested above, however, meaning is derived from work, just maybe not the work we’re professionally doing. We have only established that you cannot outsource the finding of meaning. Ah… a disappointing dodge. I wish I had the answer.
What we can do, however, is buoy ourselves not by deferring, but by putting in the work to establish and maintain the connections that do matter to us, and then try to anchor those to guiding principles that future generations can rely on to see not only where they came from, but that it was born of people caring about where they were headed. That is something we all, myself included, would do well to work towards, even if we ourselves are forgotten in the process.
And forgetting ourselves, in fact, primarily those aspects of our lives which we perceive to be so undeniable and relentless in constituting our immediate obligations and the totality of our attention, those curious, perhaps self-imposed demands from the jobs which we confusedly swear we hate, receive no fulfillment from, and long to be rid of, but which yet nonetheless seem to exert such mastery and immediacy over our lives, and instead to focus on what is real and precious and worth dedicating our time to, is a great place to start. Nobody will find meaning for us; we must do that ourselves. And if nobody will remember us for the spreadsheets that are done, nor will the world end if they wait another day.