For close to seven years, I worked in a job that slowly emptied me out.

On the surface, it was respectable. It paid the bills. There was no great pain, no great villain, no dramatic moment where everything fell apart. Just a slow, rolling ennui that seemed to gather momentum over time. 

The days were filled with repetitive tasks, reports that seemed to disappear into the ether, meetings that existed because meetings existed, and the growing sense that I was becoming a small, replaceable part in a large machine. I would do the work, tick the box, move the thing along, then come back the next day and do some version of it again.

The work was manageable, but it had very little life in it. I could not see what it was in service of. I could not see who it helped. I could not see how my judgment, care, imagination, or effort made any real difference.

Then one day, at a company-wide meeting, I looked at my boss, my boss’s boss, and my boss’s boss’s boss, and had a frighteningly clear thought: even if I climbed all the way up this ladder, I did not want the job waiting at the top

That was the beginning of the change.

Not because every job needs to feel like a calling. I do not believe that. We can get a bit precious about meaningful work, as if every hour of every day should feel like a thunderbolt from the heavens. Most work contains admin, repetition, compromise, boredom, and the occasional nonsense meeting where you question your life choices. But there is a difference between ordinary repetition and soul-deadening futility.

Practice is repetitive. Craft is repetitive. Parenting is repetitive. Teaching is repetitive. Writing is repetitive. Farming is repetitive. Training your body is repetitive. A good life may contain a great deal of repetition.

The trouble begins when the repetition feels severed from progress, purpose, agency, or acknowledgement. When you are pushing the same boulder up the same hill and nobody can tell you why the boulder matters.

Which brings us to Sisyphus.

In Greek mythology, mortals do not mess with the gods. Sisyphus did. He was a mischief-maker, a trickster, a Greek myth version of Bart Simpson. He lied, cheated, stole divine secrets, and at one point even managed to outfox and chain up Hades, the god of the underworld.

When he died, he tricked the gods into letting him return to earth. His excuse was that he needed to chastise his wife for failing to give him a proper burial. But once he was back among the living, he remembered what made life beautiful: the sea, the sun on his back, the pleasures of the earth. So he refused to return.

Zeus eventually had enough. Sisyphus was dragged back to the underworld and given a punishment worse than death. He had to push a boulder up a mountain. Every time the boulder reached the top, it rolled back down. So he had to begin again. Same boulder. Same mountain. Forever. It is hard to think of a better image for meaningless work.

The cruelty is not the effort. Human beings can endure enormous effort when the effort matters. The cruelty is that nothing accumulates. Nothing is built. Nothing is learned. Nothing is received. Nothing changes.

The boulder goes up. The boulder rolls down. Begin again.

The behavioural economist Dan Ariely once ran an experiment that gave this old myth a modern workplace twist. He asked participants to build Lego Bionicles. They were paid $3 to build the first one, $2.70 for the second, $2.40 for the third, and so on, until they decided it was no longer worth continuing.

In one condition, when participants finished building a Bionicle, it was placed on the table in front of them. They were told it would be disassembled later for the next participant, but for the time being they could see the thing they had made. On average, people built eleven Bionicles.

In the second condition, as soon as participants finished one Bionicle and started the next, the experimenter began disassembling their completed work right in front of them. Same task. Same pay. Same Lego. But this time, the work was undone before their eyes.

Those participants built only seven on average.

The experiment was called the “Sisyphic” condition, because what crushed people was not only the task. It was seeing the task made pointless.

Some people loved building Lego and some people did not. You would assume the Lego lovers would keep going regardless. But in the Sisyphic condition, their love of Lego made little difference. When their completed work was destroyed in front of them, the inner enjoyment of the task stopped mattering as much.

We often tell people to bring passion to their work. Bring a better attitude. Be more resilient. Find joy in the process. And yes, there is truth in that. But there are also conditions that can flatten even genuine interest. There are systems that can take a person’s energy, intelligence, care, and goodwill, and slowly teach them not to bother.

You see this in workplaces all the time. Someone spends hours writing a report that no one reads. A team builds a strategy document that disappears after the offsite. People attend meetings where no decision is made, then attend another meeting to discuss why no decision was made. Employees fill out engagement surveys and never hear what happened as a result. Leaders ask for ideas, then punish the people who offer inconvenient ones.

The work gets done, but something in the person begins to withdraw. 

This is where leaders often misunderstand meaning. Meaning is not a poster on the wall. It is not a values statement. It is not the CEO saying “we are changing the world” while everyone below them spends the week updating PowerPoint slides that will be obsolete by Friday.

Meaning has to be experienced in the work itself. People need to see the line between what they do and why it matters. They need some room to exercise judgment. They need to know that their effort is not disappearing into a corporate void. They need to be treated as people whose attention, care, and time are precious.

This does not mean every task can be made noble. Some work is just work. Some admin has to be done. Some forms need filling. Some meetings are necessary, even if they make the soul leave the body for a few minutes.

But if a task cannot be made meaningful, it can at least be acknowledged. That alone matters more than we think.

There is a world of difference between “just get it done” and “I know this is tedious, but it matters because of this.” There is a world of difference between silence and genuine thanks. There is a world of difference between asking someone to push a boulder and pretending there is no boulder.

Ray Anderson, the late CEO of Interface, the carpet manufacturer, understood something about this. He had an epiphany after realising that his company was damaging the environment. From there, he began changing what the company made, how it made it, and what it did with its waste.

What is interesting is not only the sustainability story. It is what happened to the people inside the company. Employees began to see their work as part of something larger than making carpet. They found ways to improve production, reduce waste, and solve problems because the work now carried a different charge. The task had not vanished. The factory had not become a meditation retreat. But the work had been connected to a purpose people could respect.

We all cannot be Ray Anderson. Most managers are not in a position to remake an entire company around an environmental mission. Most of us are dealing with smaller, more ordinary things: a team meeting, a weekly report, a grant application, a client proposal, a class to teach, a roster to manage, a hard conversation to have.

But this is exactly where the question of meaning lives. Not in the grand speech, but in the design of ordinary work.

Can people see who their work helps? Can they see progress? Can they make decisions? Can they bring some of themselves into the task? Can they tell the truth? Can they disagree without being punished? Can they look at the end of the week and feel that something, however small, has moved?

If the answer is no for long enough, something in them will begin to die.

The lesson of Sisyphus, at least for work, is not that repetition is bad. Repetition can be beautiful when it is attached to craft, care, progress, or love. The danger is repetition with no visible consequence. Work that consumes effort without returning meaning. Work where a person slowly learns that their judgment, care, and imagination are not really required.

That is what I wish I had understood during those seven years. I thought the problem was me. My attitude. My lack of resilience. My inability to be grateful for a respectable job. And of course, some of it probably was me. We always bring our own weather to the work. But it was not only me.

A human being needs more than a salary and a job description. They need to feel that their work meets the world somewhere. They need to feel that their effort is not being quietly disassembled in front of them.

The boulder does not have to disappear. Most of us will always have one.

But at the very least, we should know why we are pushing it.

NEW PODCAST ALERT

In this episode, of the Finding Meaning in Work Podcast, I speak with Suji Sanjeevan, the co founder of BrandScent and Light and Glow

We talked about…

About Suji

Suji Sanjeevan is a fragrance innovator, entrepreneur and co founder of Light and Glo and BrandScent, where science, psychology and storytelling collide to create brands people genuinely remember. With a clinical background and an instinct for consumer behaviour, she has built businesses that challenge the traditional idea of fragrance, transforming scent from a product into a strategic brand tool.

What began at a dining table evolved into national retail, global conversations and partnerships spanning retail, sport, hospitality and corporate. From boardrooms to stadiums, Suji’s work sits at the intersection of emotion, memory and experience, proving that the most powerful brands are not always the loudest, they are the ones people feel.

Alongside entrepreneurship, Suji serves as Chair of the Victorian Small Business Ministerial Council, advocating for founders and the realities of modern business. She is passionate about helping early stage businesses think bigger, refine faster and build brands with real cut through