Someone close to me reached out with the following: > You're connected to the effective altruism space, do you have any ideas where someone looking for employment that doesn't just fuel the meat grinding machine might be able to find ideas? > > One of my American friends is really struggling to find a job he won't hate himself for. I thought if I could find something a bit more meaningful it might help. > > My friend really wants to have meaning in his work. He doesn't have a tertiary education\[...\] and he's also been diagnosed neurodivergent. Let me work through my thinking here from kinda first principles. ##### Having some kind of meaning in your work seems psychologically important. I think there's a lot of evidence backing this up, but it's also important to unpack what 'meaning' is. A lot of discussions about things like minimum wages, universal basic incomes, careers, and so on have a tendency to focus on things like (funnily enough) income or status (either immediate, or the trajectory - ilke building these up over time). For some people I think that's genuinely sufficient! I would be surprised if, over the long run, people doing the "rat race" didn't have some internal narrative or values that made sense of that. Like for some people, the game or the money or the status is actually what's psychologically sustaining. Some caveats: some people don't, and they burn out and do something else; some people probably back-form these narratives/values in ways they might not have wanted to at the outset (or that we might not like from the outside). ##### "Even" McDonald's can be psychologically sustaining. Also in some of these conversations, things like McDonald's or being a barista get pooh-poohed. They're "dead ends" or they're not "dignified". This is why I say 'even McDonald's'. But I drop 'even' into quotes because (a) these jobs seem valuable - people want other people to be doing them! - and (b) focusing just on rat race criteria misses some really key aspects. Top among those is, I think, community and dignity. Maybe I should throw this into one of the AI providers' Deep Research functions, but I'm pretty sure this is what a lot of the literature finds: people get a lot of sustenance from their work when they have a sense of community and they feel valued. I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of McDonald's recruitment focuses on "team" aspects. I expect that for some people, focusing on "what" the work is might be a slight mistake. The wrong McDonald's might be terrible, but the right one might be great. Hard to tell and hard to action - top recommendation for acting on this would probably be asking people who work somewhere what it's like, and asking certain questions in interviews (like "when people leave this job, what are the reasons" - you do have to be a bit subtle though). ##### But one might also want the work itself to be "meaningful". In addition to finding a work environment that fulfills your values, I think there's a lot of advice out there oriented around finding a kind of work where the core of the work itself is fulfilling a value. Super common example: social work - it's tough, but it can make a really clear, immediate, and "near" impact. Someone might not work with that many people, but the impact can be deep - you can have a really positively transformative impact on the life of someone you see every day. In a similar bucket - other classic recommendations, like - Teaching - Something rooted in your local community - TODO: flesh out this list The other perk of these kinds of things is that there are very well-established paths into them, and often the bar isn't too high. There's still some minimum training to do, but it doesn't necessarily have to be university - it can be through a trade. Again, though, you need to be careful to distinguish what kind of meaning you're talking about. You want to be a {lawyer, politician, ...} because it's "meaningful"? Where did you learn that, and how does it play out? People certainly seem to *respect* them and they're very prominent in big, important parts of our society - but that sounds a lot like status. ##### I care about *impact*. And this is where the core ideas of effective altruism come in. > You have 80,000 hours in your career. > > That makes it your best opportunity to have a positive impact on the world. -- https://80000hours.org/ For me, the logic has both descriptive (claims about the facts of the world) and normative (claims about what you *should* do) components: - Positive impact is good - You should seek to have positive impact - Your career is a big opportunity to have positive impact - You can and in fact *should* get meaning from doing good - Individual and collective interests are therefore aligned! ##### But: this can be a hard road. One of the big criticisms and personal complaints people have for this is that it's very *demanding*. Often advice is very ambitious: the biggest opportunities to do good often are often hard and complex, so they have a high bar to success, and a high chance of failing, so it can be - intimidating to even start (even for people who look very impressive!) - hard to get a foothold - hard to turn a foothold into success - really depressing and demotivating when you probably fail Related ideas: - Process vs outcome. We're really thinking about *expected value* here; outcomes are an important part of that, but so is process - what *strategy* has the best *expected* outcome? There's a tendency in most contexts/environments/communities to award status to winners - but what we really need to do is define winners as those who played the best strategies, even if the strategies didn't pay off in the end. A good example of this is https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/sarah-eustis-guthrie-founding-shutting-down-charity/ - Ambition. Big opportunities require big ambition. It's tough! Even "objectively" impressive people in this space struggle with [impostor syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome). See, e.g., https://80000hours.org/2025/02/ask-a-career-advisor-switching-to-ai-and-surviving-job-hunt/ ##### And what about neurodivergence? Effective altruism actually tends to select for this a bit on average, I think / in my experience. Generally it's approaching problems with an analytical mindset in ways that other communities don't - so it often "[nerd snipes](https://xkcd.com/356/)" people. (This is certainly not to say that all people who are neurodivergent are the same, or that people who *aren't* can't be analytical, and so on.) ##### Practical resources The [80,000 Hours career guide](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/) and if it resonates, you might check out the [80,000 Hours job board](https://jobs.80000hours.org/) (but beware - I personally find I can get demotivated scrolling it!) https://probablygood.org/ For Australia in particular: https://www.ethicaljobs.com.au/