I’m new to the lesswrong community, but I’ll share my 2 cents. First, my sense of meaning has always come from an appreciation of beauty in the world. This includes a fascination with the natural world, mathematics, music, sunsets, food, etc. (Occasionally even people!) Second, my life became much more interesting (read: meaningful) when I left silicon valley. I think there is something soul crushing about building over-engineered solutions to first-world problems of dubious relevance to anyone. I quit my job working for a Blockchain startup in 2018 and switched careers—now I’m still coding a lot, but I do it in the context of medicine and cancer biology, and my skillset is now much broader than code. I don’t think this is the only way to increase a sense of meaning, but I think it’s about finding ideas that genuinely excite you, and choosing what is interesting over what is easy (my life sucks in a lot of ways, but it is more meaningful now). I don’t know how much this is helpful or answers your question, but this is what I have found so far.
Yup, learning on the job about microsatellite instabilities, that E2/E6/E7 are gene names and not color dye names, and being able to dive deeper was fun. Politics in a big pharma IT division less so—I didn’t feel my daily activities sufficiently add up to the big picture :( I talked with former colleagues recently and a new project sounded interesting, but it’s another round of stupid hiring freeze at the moment, so not re-joining them at this time.
Probably will end up choosing a job that’s more interesting than easy and settle for a couple of small-meaning items in my life instead of futile search for the one big-meaning thing.
I’m new to the lesswrong community, but I’ll share my 2 cents. First, my sense of meaning has always come from an appreciation of beauty in the world. This includes a fascination with the natural world, mathematics, music, sunsets, food, etc. (Occasionally even people!) Second, my life became much more interesting (read: meaningful) when I left silicon valley. I think there is something soul crushing about building over-engineered solutions to first-world problems of dubious relevance to anyone. I quit my job working for a Blockchain startup in 2018 and switched careers—now I’m still coding a lot, but I do it in the context of medicine and cancer biology, and my skillset is now much broader than code. I don’t think this is the only way to increase a sense of meaning, but I think it’s about finding ideas that genuinely excite you, and choosing what is interesting over what is easy (my life sucks in a lot of ways, but it is more meaningful now). I don’t know how much this is helpful or answers your question, but this is what I have found so far.
Yup, learning on the job about microsatellite instabilities, that E2/E6/E7 are gene names and not color dye names, and being able to dive deeper was fun. Politics in a big pharma IT division less so—I didn’t feel my daily activities sufficiently add up to the big picture :( I talked with former colleagues recently and a new project sounded interesting, but it’s another round of stupid hiring freeze at the moment, so not re-joining them at this time.
Probably will end up choosing a job that’s more interesting than easy and settle for a couple of small-meaning items in my life instead of futile search for the one big-meaning thing.