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 don't 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 doesn't 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 won't to another. This means that companies, for all their insistence on “employee engagement programmes”, can't create meaning and should not try.

Instead they should concentrate on not destroying it – which many of them manage to do effortlessly enough through treating their employees badly.

There are two things that give work meaning. First is the satisfaction that comes from the work itself. I am lucky in this way: I (mostly) enjoy putting one word in front of another, and that is meaning enough for me. Yet this sort of simple pleasure in the job is not open to most people: the majority of jobs are either boring or beastly or both.

The second strand is the more dangerous one. That meaningful work must be somehow worthwhile; that in doing it we must feel that we are making a difference. This way of thinking can only lead to despair. If you start asking if your job is worthwhile, you have to conclude it isn't. Viewed this way, all work is pretty meaningless, whether you are journalist, banker, busker or government minister.

In fact, whoever coined the phrase “making a difference” has made a difference, though not a positive one. The phrase gestures towards grandiose achievement that is out of reach for almost everybody. Most of us make very little difference at all – which stands to reason if you think there are 30m workers making it almost impossible that any of us will make a difference, except to the people we work directly with.

But what is the matter with that? Why isn't that enough? Indeed, according to a survey published last week by YouGov, having nice colleagues is as important as money in persuading employees to stay in their jobs. This means that simply by being liked by your colleagues you are making a difference, even if only a modest one.

In fact, as long as we set our sights low enough we all do make a difference at work. By performing the tasks we are supposed to perform, we are making a difference to our employers. If we weren't, they would have fired us long ago.

Yet many clever, decent managers don't find this enough. A friend who works for a large company that sells dog food said to me the other day that, if she didn't do something worthwhile at work soon, she was going to go mad. So she has come up with a charity for her company to sponsor in Africa, and suddenly claimed that the meaning was back in her job.

This strikes me as an upside-down way of looking at things. If we define meaning as helping people in faraway places, we implicitly subtract meaning from the actual work we are doing. Helping Africa is a good thing but, then, so is selling dog food. A dog has to eat, after all.

There is a tiny glimmer of hope that we will all soon start to be less unreasonable in demanding reason from work. And that glimmer comes, of all places, from the credit crunch. If my agony customers are anything to go by, the people who worry most are in grand City jobs. My hunch is that this is because they are paid so much more than they feel their efforts are really worth – a thought that tips them straight into the it's-all-meaningless abyss. But when these people feel that their pay may cease altogether as they join the other thousands who have just been fired, they may suddenly find that their jobs aren't quite so meaningless after all. Or, better still, they will stop asking themselves the question. 

 
在最近的一個宴會上，我遇到一位剛剛卸任政府部長的先生。我們聊了很多，他談到自己是多么喜愛現在各種各樣的閑差——擔任非執行董事，應邀演講等等。與以前相比，不僅錢掙得多，空閑時間也更多；一句話，生活真美好。我問他是否懷念權力在握的感覺。他看著我的樣子就好像我是個傻子。他說，政府部長沒有任何權力。

作為一個讀者來信專欄的作者，我見慣了人們向我訴說他們的工作毫無意義。事實上，這是讀者提的最多的問題。律師、銀行家、基金經理以及各種各樣有著風光工作的人都來信抱怨同一個問題：錢倒不少，但意義在哪兒？他們哀嘆：我怎樣才能改變。

我總是告訴他們：立刻停止追尋什么意義，如果他們出去找尋么意義，最有可能的結果是什么都找不到。這與幸福一樣：你搜尋得越多，找到的也就越少。

如此高明的建議，人們卻一點都聽不進去。對于工作意義的追尋不僅絲毫未減，而且似乎變得越來越迫切。當政府部長也加入金融城專業人士的行列，抱怨工作毫無價值時，我們真的有麻煩了。

相對而言，這場意義缺失危機是新事物。Work Foundation上周發表的一份報告稱，即便是一代人之前，追尋工作的意義也顯得比較古怪。但現在，在社會富裕與我們普遍自省傾向的共同作用下，這已成為常事。我們都堅信，自己的工作應該有一定意義。

這份報告的作者斯蒂芬•奧弗雷爾(Stephen Overell)指出，意義是一種主觀上的東西，對一個人有意義的工作，未必對另一個人也有意義。這意味著盡管公司都熱衷于“員工參與項目”，但它們并不能創造意義，也不應去嘗試。

它們應該把精力集中在不要摧毀意義上——通過惡劣地對待員工，許多公司輕而易舉地做到了這一點。

有兩樣東西能給工作賦予意義。一是來自于工作本身的滿足感。在這一點上我是幸運的。（通常）我很享受碼字的樂趣，對我來說這意義就足夠了。然而，大多數人并不能感受到工作中這種簡單的快樂：大多數工作不是無聊透頂就是令人憎惡，要么就是兩者兼而有之。

第二點更為危險。有意義的工作肯定是多少有些價值的；在從事那份工作時，我們一定要覺得自己在做一件重要的事。這種思維方式只能帶來失望。如果你開始問自己的工作是否有價值，你不得不做出否定的結論。以這種方式來思考的話，所有工作都很沒意義，無論你是記者、銀行家、接頭藝人抑或政府部長。

事實上，無論是誰想出了“起到重要作用”這個說法，他就已經與眾不同了，盡管這不是一個積極的想法。這個短語用以表示的宏偉成就，是幾乎所有人都無法達到的。我們中的多數人歸根到底幾乎沒有什么影響——這是顯而易見的，如果你想想看有3000萬工人，這就使得某些人要有重大影響幾乎不可能，除了對那些與我們直接共事的人以外。

但這究竟又什么問題？為什么這還不夠呢？事實上，YouGov上周發布的一項調查顯示，在說服員工留在自己工作崗位上方面，擁有好同事與金錢同樣重要。這就意味著，只要同事喜歡你，你就已經有了重要的影響，即便這只是一種不大的影響。

事實上，只要我們的眼光放得足夠低，我們所有人都能在工作中發揮作用。通過完成我們應該完成的任務，我們對自己的雇主產生影響。如果我們沒有做到這點的話，他們早就把我們解雇了。

不過，仍有許多聰明、體面的經理覺得這還不夠。一位就職于一家大型狗糧公司的朋友前幾天對我說，如果不盡快在工作中做一些有價值的事情，她就要瘋了。因此，她向公司提出在非洲發起一項慈善活動，并且突然聲稱自己的工作又有意義了。

這種倒置的看待事物的方式，讓我深受觸動。如果我們將“有意義”定義為幫助遠方的人，我們已經不知不覺地把實際工作中的意義給減去了。幫助非洲人是一件好事，但賣狗糧也是。畢竟，狗也是需要吃飯的。

有一道微弱的希望之光：我們很快就會開始不那么計較工作的理由。這一道希望之光來自于信貸危機。如果看看我那些苦惱的專欄讀者，最苦惱的是那些在金融城擔任要職的人。我猜想，這是由于他們的薪酬遠遠高于他們心目中自己努力的真正價值——這種想法讓他們落入了“一切都毫無意義”的深淵。但當這些人感覺到，隨著他們加入成千上萬的失業大軍，他們的薪酬可能會完全停止時，他們可能會突然發現：自己的工作其實并不是那么沒意義。或更好一點，他們會停止問自己這個問題。