Here's your first essential realization: the thing that you do for money does not define you as a person. Imagine that tomorrow your job changes. All your old

Here's your first essential realization: the thing that you do for money does not define you as a person. Imagine that tomorrow your job changes. All your old projects are cancelled, and your new project requires you to remotely supervise an automated sawmill. You have a dozen camera views, five ways to unjam the machine, and something that needs a little bit of attention from you once every five minutes or so. Your pay and benefits remain the same. The hours are fixed: if you do the job competently, you get a five minute break once an hour, an hour for lunch, and a 15 minute break in mid-morning and mid-afternoon. After a day or two, there is nothing of intellectual interest here. Nothing will change. Your work is necessary, but it does not march towards any goal other than the total wood sawn at the end of the day. How does this change you? You are definitely without useful autonomy. You are a cog in a machine. You don't work with anyone, really. It is not going to be fulfilling. But this is so different, because you don't have the expectation that somehow, this remote wood-cutting work is supposed to fulfill you. You will need to define yourself in other terms: as a person who is part of their community, who has interests and hobbies outside of work. The hard part is the deep understanding that work is not life, and that your feeling that work is supposed to address your non-material needs is orthogonal to the reality of work. There are jobs that connect you more deeply to your community, or try to fix the world as a whole. But on a daily basis, they still involve tasks that are not intrinsically fulfilling. The meaning is what you put into it.