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. 

 
在最近的一个宴会上，我遇到一位刚刚卸任政府部长的先生。我们聊了很多，他谈到自己是多么喜爱现在各种各样的闲差——担任非执行董事，应邀演讲等等。与以前相比，不仅钱挣得多，空闲时间也更多；一句话，生活真美好。我问他是否怀念权力在握的感觉。他看着我的样子就好像我是个傻子。他说，政府部长没有任何权力。

作为一个读者来信专栏的作者，我见惯了人们向我诉说他们的工作毫无意义。事实上，这是读者提的最多的问题。律师、银行家、基金经理以及各种各样有着风光工作的人都来信抱怨同一个问题：钱倒不少，但意义在哪儿？他们哀叹：我怎样才能改变。

我总是告诉他们：立刻停止追寻什么意义，如果他们出去找寻么意义，最有可能的结果是什么都找不到。这与幸福一样：你搜寻得越多，找到的也就越少。

如此高明的建议，人们却一点都听不进去。对于工作意义的追寻不仅丝毫未减，而且似乎变得越来越迫切。当政府部长也加入金融城专业人士的行列，抱怨工作毫无价值时，我们真的有麻烦了。

相对而言，这场意义缺失危机是新事物。Work Foundation上周发表的一份报告称，即便是一代人之前，追寻工作的意义也显得比较古怪。但现在，在社会富裕与我们普遍自省倾向的共同作用下，这已成为常事。我们都坚信，自己的工作应该有一定意义。

这份报告的作者斯蒂芬•奥弗雷尔(Stephen Overell)指出，意义是一种主观上的东西，对一个人有意义的工作，未必对另一个人也有意义。这意味着尽管公司都热衷于“员工参与项目”，但它们并不能创造意义，也不应去尝试。

它们应该把精力集中在不要摧毁意义上——通过恶劣地对待员工，许多公司轻而易举地做到了这一点。

有两样东西能给工作赋予意义。一是来自于工作本身的满足感。在这一点上我是幸运的。（通常）我很享受码字的乐趣，对我来说这意义就足够了。然而，大多数人并不能感受到工作中这种简单的快乐：大多数工作不是无聊透顶就是令人憎恶，要么就是两者兼而有之。

第二点更为危险。有意义的工作肯定是多少有些价值的；在从事那份工作时，我们一定要觉得自己在做一件重要的事。这种思维方式只能带来失望。如果你开始问自己的工作是否有价值，你不得不做出否定的结论。以这种方式来思考的话，所有工作都很没意义，无论你是记者、银行家、接头艺人抑或政府部长。

事实上，无论是谁想出了“起到重要作用”这个说法，他就已经与众不同了，尽管这不是一个积极的想法。这个短语用以表示的宏伟成就，是几乎所有人都无法达到的。我们中的多数人归根到底几乎没有什么影响——这是显而易见的，如果你想想看有3000万工人，这就使得某些人要有重大影响几乎不可能，除了对那些与我们直接共事的人以外。

但这究竟又什么问题？为什么这还不够呢？事实上，YouGov上周发布的一项调查显示，在说服员工留在自己工作岗位上方面，拥有好同事与金钱同样重要。这就意味着，只要同事喜欢你，你就已经有了重要的影响，即便这只是一种不大的影响。

事实上，只要我们的眼光放得足够低，我们所有人都能在工作中发挥作用。通过完成我们应该完成的任务，我们对自己的雇主产生影响。如果我们没有做到这点的话，他们早就把我们解雇了。

不过，仍有许多聪明、体面的经理觉得这还不够。一位就职于一家大型狗粮公司的朋友前几天对我说，如果不尽快在工作中做一些有价值的事情，她就要疯了。因此，她向公司提出在非洲发起一项慈善活动，并且突然声称自己的工作又有意义了。

这种倒置的看待事物的方式，让我深受触动。如果我们将“有意义”定义为帮助远方的人，我们已经不知不觉地把实际工作中的意义给减去了。帮助非洲人是一件好事，但卖狗粮也是。毕竟，狗也是需要吃饭的。

有一道微弱的希望之光：我们很快就会开始不那么计较工作的理由。这一道希望之光来自于信贷危机。如果看看我那些苦恼的专栏读者，最苦恼的是那些在金融城担任要职的人。我猜想，这是由于他们的薪酬远远高于他们心目中自己努力的真正价值——这种想法让他们落入了“一切都毫无意义”的深渊。但当这些人感觉到，随着他们加入成千上万的失业大军，他们的薪酬可能会完全停止时，他们可能会突然发现：自己的工作其实并不是那么没意义。或更好一点，他们会停止问自己这个问题。