Why Meaning Matters More Than Ever

Scroll LinkedIn for ten minutes and you'll find no shortage of people who have The Answer. A framework. A hot take. A hard-won lesson, packaged and ready for you to apply to your own life, your own team, your own leadership. It's relentless, and lately I've found myself asking: why does it feel so hollow?

I think it's because most of it is really about accomplishment, dressed up as wisdom. And accomplishment and meaning are not the same thing — even though we treat them as interchangeable almost constantly.

In coaching, I use the PERMAH model — Positive emotions, Meaning, Relationships, Engagement, Accomplishment, Health — as a way to look at wellbeing in the round. Of the six, Meaning is the one people struggle with most. Not because they can't name an accomplishment. Most people can rattle off a list: the promotion, the project delivered, the qualification finished. But ask what any of it means, and the room goes quiet.

That's not a coincidence. Accomplishment is countable. Meaning isn't. And when something resists being counted, we tend to either ignore it or quietly swap it out for something that can be — usually the nearest achievement sitting on our desk.

So what actually is meaning?

It's a genuinely broad, subjective idea, and most advice on "finding meaningful work" leaves it exactly that vague — as if meaning were a feeling you either have or don't, rather than something with actual structure. The research on this is more specific than the LinkedIn version suggests. Meaning tends to rest on three pillars:

• Coherence — does my life make sense to me? Do the pieces fit together into something I can follow, rather than a series of disconnected events?

• Purpose — do I have a direction I'm moving toward, something beyond the next task on the list?

• Significance — does what I do actually matter, to me or to anyone else?

  
  

Think of those three as a compass. When they're working, you don't necessarily notice them — you just have a sense of knowing where you are, even in the middle of something hard. When they're not working, that's when things get disorienting. You can be accomplishing plenty and still feel completely lost, because accomplishment was never what the compass was measuring.

Why this matters for work, specifically

Our working lives take up an enormous share of our living time — arguably the majority of our waking hours, for most of our adult lives. If meaning is absent from that share, it's not a small gap. It's a compass that isn't working for most of the time we're awake.

So the questions worth sitting with aren't "am I accomplishing enough" or "am I doing meaningful activities" — that framing is still too broad, too subjective, too easy to tick off with a list. The sharper questions are closer to:

• Does this make sense — do I understand why I'm doing it, not just what I'm doing?

• Does it matter — to me, to the people around me, to something bigger than the task itself?

• Is it helping me grow into the person I actually want to become?

Those questions don't resolve in a weekend, and they're not the kind of thing you can answer once and file away. But they're a genuinely different inquiry to "what did I accomplish this quarter" — and I'd argue a far more important one, especially now, when so much of what we're asked to lead through is disruption, uncertainty, and change that doesn't come with a clear finish line.

A confession

I notice this in myself too. I can get so focused on reaching the finish line of a project that I forget why it mattered in the first place — I'm heads-down, moving, ticking off milestones, and the why quietly falls out of view. And then the project ends, and there's this strange flatness. Something's missing, even though I did the thing I set out to do.

That's usually my cue to stop and deliberately check in with myself. I ask three questions, plainly, and I try not to let myself off the hook on any of them:

• Does my life make sense right now? If not, why not?

• Am I aiming for something bigger than now? If not, why not?

• Am I doing what actually matters to me? If not, why not?

They're simple questions. They're not always comfortable to sit with. But they do the job the compass is meant to do — they tell me whether I've drifted from coherence, purpose, and significance, or whether I'm still roughly on course.

Maybe that's the real reason so much of what shows up in my feed feels hollow. It's answers, when what most of us are actually short on is a working compass.