About fifteen years ago, I found myself sitting around a conference table with my manager, his manager, his manager’s manager, and, at the head of the table, the managing director. I remember looking at him and thinking: I do not want your job in ten years.

I remember at the time being puzzled by that feeling. There was nothing obviously wrong with the company. The pay was decent. The people were mostly decent. I was a few years into my first proper job and, from the outside, my life appeared to be moving in the right direction. Inside, though, something was missing.

Around me, work seemed to be something people endured. “Thank God it’s Friday” was followed a few days later by “I can’t believe it’s Monday.” The weeks rolled into one another. Each Monday began a process of waiting for Friday, while each Friday offered a brief reprieve before the process began again.

I felt it too: a low hum of ennui, a sense of drift, the suspicion that my working life was happening without my active participation.

It was around then that Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning came into my life. The book did not tell me what to do. It did something more unsettling: it made me realise I had never properly asked.

I had moved from school to university and from university into work. Each step had seemed like the natural consequence of the one before it. Looking back, I can see how little choosing was involved. I had been swept along by momentum.

The question Frankl left me with was enormous: Who am I, and what am I called to do? I am still answering it.

We talk about meaningful work as if we all mean the same thing by it. But what are we actually asking for?

Perhaps we want autonomy: some say over how we use our time and how the work gets done. Perhaps we want mastery: the pleasure of becoming good at something difficult. Perhaps we want to use our strengths, act according to our values, belong to a group, respect the people leading us, feel recognised, continue growing or see that our effort has made a difference to someone. Perhaps we want to feel called. Perhaps..

“Meaningful work” becomes a container for all these desires. We ask work to hold purpose and identity, belonging and autonomy, contribution and recognition, friendship and financial security. We may even ask it to tell us who we are. That is a great deal for one container to carry. When something is missing, we often reach for the largest possible explanation: This is not my meaningful work. My meaningful work must exist somewhere else.

Sometimes leaving is exactly what is required. Looking back, I believe I should have left that first job sooner. But I also think I was asking the wrong question. I was searching for meaningful work as though it were something to be discovered. A hidden vocation. A distant country. A job with my name already written on it.

What if meaningful work is sometimes less about discovery than recovery?

From where you sit now, what is absent? Is it agency? Recognition? Growth? Good leadership? A sense of belonging? The chance to exercise abilities that have gone dormant? Different absences ask for different responses.

A lack of autonomy may be addressed by changing how a role is designed. A lack of mastery may require a harder problem. A lack of recognition may need an honest conversation. Belonging might be found through different colleagues, a professional community or somewhere outside work altogether.

But some absences cannot be repaired from within the role. The work may be fundamentally at odds with your values. The organisation may be unwilling to change. The destination offered by the career may be one you already know you do not want.

My moment around that conference table was evidence of this. I could see the path ahead and felt no desire to follow it. Yet I stayed because I could imagine only two choices: remain where I was or leave for some fully formed alternative.

Leaving felt impossible because, in my mind, that job represented the limits of what I was good for. I did not yet have another professional identity. I had no compelling answer to the question, “What would you do instead?” Staying required no answer at all. Momentum answered for me.

A genuine pause might have revealed a third possibility: exploration.

I had always been interested in growth. I was constantly reading and attending self-development courses etc There was energy there, but it had no channel. I could have followed those interests with greater seriousness. Not every interest needed to become a career. Not every hobby needed to be monetised. Their value may simply have been that they made my life larger and weakened the belief that my job was all I was good for.

Exploration would have given me evidence. It might have shown me that I could teach, facilitate, write, build communities or work with ideas. More importantly, it could have helped me stop mistaking the familiar for the inevitable.

I find it useful now to distinguish between meaning in work, meaning through work, and meaning beyond work.

Meaning in work comes from the activity itself. A carpenter may find deep satisfaction in making something well. A teacher may feel it in the moment a student understands. A designer may lose themselves in the act of bringing form to an idea. The work has a felt value while it is being done.

Meaning through work comes from what the work allows us to develop or contribute. We grow in mastery. We serve others. We belong to a team. We exercise judgement. We become someone through the demands placed upon us.

Then there is meaning beyond work.

Frankl wrote about three avenues to meaning: what we create, what we experience, and the attitude we take towards circumstances we cannot change. Work may be one expression of the first, but it cannot own the whole territory.

Meaning may also be found in love, friendship, community, beauty, service, faith, play or the way we meet suffering. Some parts of us may come alive only after the working day has ended.

This is not an argument for tolerating deadening work because we have hobbies. Work takes too much of our finite lives to be dismissed as merely a way to pay the bills. But nor should a job be expected to meet every human need. The question is whether work holds enough of what matters, and whether the parts of us it cannot hold have somewhere else to live.

Looking back, at my time at the first job, in a sea of should’ves, would’ves, could’ves.. the one definite “should have” is this: I should have paused.

A pause is not a weekend away or a few hours spent making lists. It is more a refusal to let momentum keep making our decisions. It creates enough distance to ask: What is genuinely available to me here? What is missing? What might be recovered? What could change if I asked? What will remain impossible for as long as I stay?

The pause does not tell us to stay or leave. It may show us that we are demanding from work something better found elsewhere. It may reveal that one missing ingredient can be restored. It may give us permission to experiment before we are ready to make a leap.

Or it may confirm what we already know. I knew, sitting around that conference table, that I did not want the life at the end of the path I was on. What I lacked was not the answer. It was the space, courage and imagination to take that feeling seriously.

We often begin by asking, What is my meaningful work? Perhaps there is a smaller and more honest question that comes first:

What am I asking work to contain?