I started out from a very young age focused mostly on finding sources of interesting/purposeful work that provide enough wage to afford a comfortable life, but

I started out from a very young age focused mostly on finding sources of interesting/purposeful work that provide enough wage to afford a comfortable life, but not luxury. I have not been able to find meaningful/purposeful work in any organization. The life lessons I've learned can basically be summarized as: there is no such thing as purposeful work for which you are paid a wage, and businesses rarely extract meaningful labor out of you. Businesses are rarely punished for being unproductive, and most effort within any organization is spent intensely focused on politics, both internal and external, to ensure the business can create Dutch books and survive any possible outcome without needing to actually be productive. The closer you get to pure knowledge work, the worse all of these effects become. In my field, machine learning and statistics, it is about as bad as it can possibly be. Because policy is ostensibly supposed to be based on evidence and sound, statistical reasoning, and it's very fashionable right now to try to characterize all aspects of business planning as if they are "data driven", all that it means is that the corporate politicians now hawkishly focus on statistics/machine learning and "science" as the means by which they control politics. It unequivocally does not mean that businesses are actually shifting to truly be more scientific in their decision making, nor are they less wasteful, less driven by prestige or politics, less hyper-focused on short-term thinking, etc. If anything, firms are worse on all of these dimensions, and waste vast sums of money setting up big data infrastructure than truly does nothing but give glossy data visualization facades that decisions are somehow being made based on hard data. What it has taught me is somewhat of the inverse of what you say. I agree that pursuit of material wealth and power is uninteresting and highly unfulfilling. The problem is that pursuit of meaningful work turns out to be even more uninteresting and even more unfulfilling and you simply end up poorer and sounding like a burnt out crank. You are probably better off (if you can; I unfortunately cannot) sublimating away any desire for creative, autonomous, meaningful, purposeful, or interesting work -- simply delete that from your genome with hardcore unhealthy repression. Then try to amass enough wealth doing horrible, horrible politics as you can to retire early, start your own small business, or something else where you are personally in charge of what you do and where you don't have a need for anyone else to pay you for your labor output. The one part I will agree with you on is to definitely value relationships. Whether you are burning yourself out chasing the carrot of so-called meaningful work, or you are killing yourself slowly playing political games to get promotions and money, do not allow either toxin to infiltrate your personal life, and really try to slow your brain down and savor the moments you have with family, friends, and loved ones.