OK then, here's the first post on meaning and purpose in late capitalism.
During the late '90's (I swallowed the Kool-aid too, although curiously I refused to move to Silicon Valley then - it was too much), we had Po Bronson chronicling the contagious excitement of the mass migration to Silicon Valley in Nudist on the Late Shift. The same author's most recent best-seller, a more reflective work What Should I Do With My Life? seems to capture the questions and quest of the times. Although the title says, What Should I Do With My Life? -- ostensively about life, it's really mostly about lifework.
Is the search for meaning and purpose at work just a post-Boom, post-Enron reaction? Do we just have more time to reflect on the lovely box? Is all the downsizing and offshoring tugging at us? Or have we realized we've been on a huge life-deferment plan (maybe even a life-derailment plan!) as per The Monk and The Riddle (a book that gently rustled me out of my trance when I read it in 2000). (Note that the sub-title "The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living" was inserted after the bubble burst.)
Maybe sometimes there seems to be a cognitive split or dissonance rather than alignment in the workplace. A cognitive dissonance between what we perceive the external world values and what we value. We're unsure of how to resolve this. But we go on. But has anything really changed in the external workplace, or is it your awareness that has changed?
Lately I'm reading Ageless Marketing: Strategies for Reaching the Hearts and Minds of the New Customer Majority (highly recommended) which states that the current "Psychological Center of Gravity" (+/- 5 years of the adult median age) "exerts a disproportionate influence on the ethos of society." The PCG in the U.S. heads 4 out of 10 households today and comprises 40 million people, between the ages of 39 and 49.
"...As midlife approaches or soon after its arrival, innate forces incline people to begin changing from a social and vocational development track to a self-actualizing development track." They care less about upholding what Jung calls our "social mask". -- Ageless Marketing
"People don't generate their self-actualization needs. They are no more created by the willful mind than are hunger pangs that signal a need for feeding an empty stomach. Self-actualization needs are primal; we have no say in what our primal needs are -- only in how we address them." -- AM
"Abraham Maslow summed up the course of human life by saying every infant enters the world with one overriding task: to become ever more human. He didn't mean that infants are not biologically fully human, but rather that they are far from the beingness state that distinguishes us most from othe animals: self-actualization, the most complete expression of humanness." --AM
The PCG influence is felt in other generations too. According to studies, Gen Y is more concerned about work life quality than income, are more responsible, independent and skeptical than their age group in previous generations, has a weaker loyalty to designer labels, is less influenced by celebrity endorsements, and is more apt to volunteer or "give back".
Basically it is pretty normal from an adult development point of view that there is a lot of collective soul-searching and yearning for self-actualization. Another development psychologist, Dan McAdams, says the development of identity "is the central task of adulthood." The $64,000 question we grapple with is, Can you self-actualize and be true to yourself at work?
The downturned economy only gave us less places to thwart our attention and, for those underemployed, plenty of time to look in the mirror.
"Nothing seemed more brave to me than facing up to one's own identity, and filtering out the chatter that tells us to be someone we're not." -- Po Bronson, What Should I Do With My Life?
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