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If you aim low enough you will find meaning at work At a party last week, I met a man who until recently was a government minister. We chatted about this and that, and he said how much he was enjoying his assortment of sinecures – non-executive directorships, speaking engagements and so on. He had both more money and more spare time than he used to have; in all, life was good. I asked him if he was missing the power. He looked at me as if I were a simpleton. Government ministers dont have any power, he said. As an agony aunt, I am used to people telling me that their jobs are meaningless. In fact, this is the most popular problem that readers submit. Lawyers, bankers, fund managers and all sorts of people with grand jobs write in with the same complaint: the money may be good but where is the meaning? How can I make a difference, they wail. I always tell them to stop looking for meaning at once. If they go out looking, they are most unlikely to find anything. It is the same thing with happiness: the more you search, the less you find. No one takes the tiniest shred of notice of this excellent advice. The search for meaning at work not only goes on unabated but it also seems to be getting more urgent all the time. When government ministers join City professionals in fretting that their work doesnt amount to a row of beans, we are really in trouble. This crisis of meaningless is a relatively new thing. A report from the Work Foundation published last week argues that looking for meaning at work would have seemed outlandish even a generation ago. But now, as a joint result of affluence and our general leaning towards introspection, it has become the norm. We all insist that our jobs should mean something. The author of the report, Stephen Overell, points out that meaning is a subjective thing: what counts as meaningful work to one person wont to another. This means that companies, for all their insistence on “employee engagement programmes”, cant create meaning a