You're more than 'just a cog in the wheel'

Why are we here? What's the point? Funnily enough, these existential questions are tied to our work, and that's something I think about more than I care to admit.

Admittedly, this is all perhaps a bit "meta" - particularly if you've just woken up and are reading this with your early morning coffee - but it's something worth spending some time on. Perhaps go and check out the sport section for a while if you're not ready yet. I'll wait.

I've been thinking about the role work plays in our lives, and how we draw purpose and value from what we do, which ultimately shapes who we are.

Feeling disconnected from a greater purpose can leave us searching for the point of everything. Why would I spend each of my days packing boxes, so that others in a different place can unpack them, so that others can put the contents on shelves, salespeople can sell them, customers can buy them and then go to work themselves to pay for them? The endless loop feels void of any great sense of achievement. Are KPIs manufactured accomplishments so we feel like we are succeeding in our lives, when all we are really doing is making someone else rich while we scrape by?

We all have a role to play to keep our society ticking over. Politicians create laws, law enforcement enforces them, lawyers defend and prosecute to maintain order, judges facilitate justice (or try to), business creates an economy that drives "growth" (which really means profits), profits lead to tech and science advancements (sometimes), which shapes education (hence the push towards STEM), and blah, blah, blah. Our society is cyclical, and those cycles are self-perpetuating. And throughout each stage of the process, we, the cogs in the wheel, are told that we are working towards a greater purpose. And I, for one, am failing to see what that could possibly be, beyond making already rich people rich and already powerful people more powerful.

When we engage with science fiction about time travel, the number one rule is always not to change anything that could splinter timelines or change the course of history: one tiny flutter of a butterfly's wings could cause a hurricane, sort of thing. But do we ever stop to think that we don't need time travel to affect such change? That one small change today could cause us to change the course of our future? It's challenging to think about this when we are locked into the mindless sub-cycle of "get up, go to work, come home, sleep". We are so busy surviving, ourselves, that we pay no heed to the fact that the survival of our species actually doesn't depend on the survival of us individually. Our individual cycles have nothing to do with the survival of our species, just the survival of our status quo.

But we do actually have the right to have an individual purpose ourselves. We can feel something beyond social obligation to be a cog in the wheel.

I've come to the conclusion that we create our own purpose. Some of us find a passion and pursue it at all costs, while others work purely to fund the pursuit our passion outside of the daily grind. For others, how we feel is our purpose, and we drive towards creating a sense of success, happiness, and contentment for ourselves, however that is achieved.

It's easy to feel lost if we can't put our finger on the purpose to our lives. This can happen especially when we identify our purpose with what we think it should be, based others' expectations that don't gel with us personally. We can't fit ourselves into the purpose of others. We have to find our own way, our own goals, our own raison d'être.

The work that we do is inherently important to us as it forms part of our identity. If you pack boxes for a crust, do you enjoy the fast-paced environment? The pressure? The challenge? Think about the work you do and how you really feel about it.

Remember, you don't have to be in your dream job to feel fulfilled in your life. As Dostoyevsky said, "The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for."