I respectfully disagree. I remember hearing that phrase when discussing career options in the late 90's. It probably goes back further. People rarely mean it li

I respectfully disagree. I remember hearing that phrase when discussing career options in the late 90's. It probably goes back further. People rarely mean it literally. It's typically shorthand for the idea of making the world a better place, often as a contrast to focusing solely on material compensation. Also, if you do an ngram search on Google Books, you'll see similar phrases spiking in use in the early 90's. To your point though, you do see an awful lot of articles about how millennials are placing more emphasis on "personal fulfillment" than previous generations. I don't know how true that actually is, but I think it supports your point of people now talking more about doing good, not just building something valuable. I don't think that's entirely bad though. If you have the luxury of choice, it's good to think about how you and your career focus impact the world. It's good to want to leave the world better than you found it. However, my problem with the idea is that people approach it at such a shallow level. For example, I did a chunk of consulting work for a major vendor to pharmaceutical companies. My team helped them streamline a bunch of business processes and optimize software systems, saving them (low) millions of dollars per year. On the one hand, you could describe that as us just helping a giant corporation improve its bottom line. On the other hand, our improvements had a direct impact on clinical trials getting bid out and approved significantly faster with better end-to-end reporting and more automated safety checks during the trial. So, was that "saving the world"? Meh, not really. I was doing it for the money and joy of working on a solid team. But I did like the fact that in a small way our work was improving the efficiency of a global system that creates new live-improving, life-saving treatments (and admittedly some bad ones too). I think I kind of lost the thread of my argument. :) My point is just that people have been considering the personal fulfillment part of their careers for a very long time, e.g., see Maslow's 1943 hierarchy of needs, and I think talk of saving the world is just a specific flavor of that general idea.