I think a lot of the day-to-day feelings of fulfillment in high-impact jobs come from either: 1) being part of a workplace community of people who really believe in the value of the work, or 2) seeing first-hand the way in which your work directly helped someone. I don’t really think the feelings of fulfillment typically come from the particular functional category of your role or the set of tasks that you perform during the workday, so I wonder how informative your experiments with data science, for instance, would be with respect to the question of identifying the thing that you feel you “must do,” as you put it. If I had to guess, I’d speculate that the feeling you’re looking for will be more specific to a particular organization or organizational mission than to the role you’d be filling for organizations generally.
This rings true to me. I’ve been struggling a lot with the same sentiments that shicky44 expressed in the original post. I’m 35 and live in the US working in data science/machine learning (recently promoted to team lead, but was doing hands-on technical work before that). The problem that I’m facing is exactly that I don’t find my company’s work compelling or the culture that exciting. I don’t think the company does anything to make the world better and so I have trouble getting excited about it. Sure, there are days where I feel like I accomplished things and enjoyed addressing a particular issue with my team, but the positive feeling tends to wear off quickly.
The question that I’m trying to work out for myself is: would I be satisfied if I found a new job where I can earn-to-give, but at least at a company where there is a strong community culture even if the work isn’t directly impactful. Or, will I really only be happy in a job where the work is directly impactful. The second path feels trickier for me since my initial research on companies and jobs in this direction has suggested that I probably need a background in a field like economics or public policy. Is there a third way that I’m not considering?
I’m glad that the 80000 Hours team started this thread as it’s great to hear from others thinking about the same questions on a personal level.
I think a lot of the day-to-day feelings of fulfillment in high-impact jobs come from either: 1) being part of a workplace community of people who really believe in the value of the work, or 2) seeing first-hand the way in which your work directly helped someone. I don’t really think the feelings of fulfillment typically come from the particular functional category of your role or the set of tasks that you perform during the workday, so I wonder how informative your experiments with data science, for instance, would be with respect to the question of identifying the thing that you feel you “must do,” as you put it. If I had to guess, I’d speculate that the feeling you’re looking for will be more specific to a particular organization or organizational mission than to the role you’d be filling for organizations generally.
This rings true to me. I’ve been struggling a lot with the same sentiments that shicky44 expressed in the original post. I’m 35 and live in the US working in data science/machine learning (recently promoted to team lead, but was doing hands-on technical work before that). The problem that I’m facing is exactly that I don’t find my company’s work compelling or the culture that exciting. I don’t think the company does anything to make the world better and so I have trouble getting excited about it. Sure, there are days where I feel like I accomplished things and enjoyed addressing a particular issue with my team, but the positive feeling tends to wear off quickly.
The question that I’m trying to work out for myself is: would I be satisfied if I found a new job where I can earn-to-give, but at least at a company where there is a strong community culture even if the work isn’t directly impactful. Or, will I really only be happy in a job where the work is directly impactful. The second path feels trickier for me since my initial research on companies and jobs in this direction has suggested that I probably need a background in a field like economics or public policy. Is there a third way that I’m not considering?
I’m glad that the 80000 Hours team started this thread as it’s great to hear from others thinking about the same questions on a personal level.