Part One:

Meaningful Work Is a Modern Invention

One of Joel's most striking starting points is also one of his simplest: the personal question "what is my meaning in life?" is a product of a specific historical moment, and a relatively recent one at that.

For most of human history, meaning was assigned. If you were born the son of a peasant, your work and your meaning were the same thing, and neither was up for negotiation. Joel describes this as the "traditional conformist approach," a worldview in which meaning flowed downward from God, king, and community, and personal deviation carried real social and legal consequences.

That began to shift around the 16th and 17th centuries, when Enlightenment thinkers encouraged ordinary people to think for themselves. For the first time in history, people started asking what their work meant to them personally, and whether they might find something better. The idea that you could change jobs, pursue your own goals, or leave an employer whose values didn't align with yours is, by historical standards, a very recent development.

Understanding this matters because it reframes the pressure many people feel today. The expectation that work should be personally meaningful emerged under particular conditions and has since been shaped, and sometimes manipulated, by the same economic forces it was supposed to liberate us from.

Six Types of Meaning at Work

To make sense of what people actually seek in their working lives, Joel conducted a large-scale systematic review of studies on meaning in life and synthesized the findings into six distinct types.

Most people draw on several of these at once, and the mix shifts over time and across cultures.

Research suggests that people who focus primarily on the first three types tend to report lower life satisfaction and more mental and physical health struggles. The types that correlate most strongly with genuine fulfillment are the social and large types, those oriented toward community, contribution, and something larger than individual gain.

Joel also offers a useful reframe for anyone whose job falls short of meaningful.

"Sometimes there are periods in a job when we cannot have so much meaning in it. Your job can just give you that salary. But a salary may enable you to find meaning outside of your job."

The expectation that all meaning must come from work is itself a product of the historical moment he traces throughout the conversation, and releasing it can be its own form of freedom.

The Machinery Behind "Purpose-Driven" Work

Joel is direct about something many workplace conversations prefer to leave implicit: much of what gets called meaningful work is shaped by deliberate manipulation.

He traces this back to a 1938 gathering of economists and intellectuals known as the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, where the concern among elites was that ordinary people were thinking too independently. The response, which became a foundational current in neoliberal thinking, was to use psychology, advertising, and education to align individual meanings with the goals of employers and markets. Joel connects this directly to the rise of modern advertising, the transformation of HR, and the proliferation of corporate purpose statements.

He is equally clear that some organizations are genuinely authentic in how they create conditions for meaning, and that the broader shift toward a meaning-oriented economy is real and significant. The World Economic Forum identified it as one of the largest transitions in modern society. Workers and consumers alike are increasingly asking what a job or product stands for, and some employers are responding honestly. The challenge is developing the critical awareness to tell the difference between those organizations and the ones simply selling self-worth back to people who already have it.

Part Two:

Three Responses to a Meaningful Life Out of Reach

Joel opens this part of the conversation with Albert Camus, whose framework for responding to an absurd or hopeless situation gives shape to something Joel sees playing out across society today.

Camus identified three responses available to people who feel stuck, who sense that the meaningful life they want is simply out of reach.

The first is physical suicide.

The second is what Camus called philosophical suicide: giving up on your own authentic sense of what matters, conforming to whatever goals your employer, community, or political environment hands you, and going along. Joel describes this as genuinely costly, a quieting of something real inside a person.

The third response is rebellion, which Camus presents as the only honest alternative, a commitment to staying connected to what is truly meaningful while remaining critical of the conditions that make it hard to achieve.

Joel maps all three responses onto what he observes in young people today. Rising mental health struggles and rates of suicide on one end. Disengagement, job hopping, and quiet conformity in the middle. And on the other end, a growing cohort of young workers who refuse to stay with employers whose values conflict with their own, a form of rebellion that Joel sees as genuinely powerful.

How Unrealized Meaning Becomes Radicalization

The most distinctive part of Joel's research is the connection he draws between unfulfilled meaning and radicalization. His argument, grounded in a review of over 600 studies on meaning in life and extremism, is that radicalization follows a recognizable pattern rooted in the same dynamics that drive disengagement and burnout.

When people cannot realize the meanings that matter most to them, and when repeated attempts through conventional means fail, they begin looking elsewhere for explanations and solutions. Joel describes this process in physical terms, meaning lives in the body first, and the sense that what matters to you is under threat triggers a real physiological response. Under that kind of sustained pressure, the brain's capacity for nuanced, critical thinking narrows. Complex storytelling gives way to goal-oriented action, and people become more susceptible to simple narratives that identify a clear threat and a clear enemy.

Joel describes conversations he has had with people involved in anti-immigrant protests in the UK, approaching them with what he calls "existential compassion," genuine curiosity about what they actually want from their lives rather than immediate engagement with their political positions. What he consistently finds underneath the anger is a straightforward desire: a house, a job, enough stability to enjoy time with friends and family. The radicalization, in his reading, is a response to a society that has made those things feel increasingly out of reach.

"In a nutshell, if you cannot live the meaningful life you want and you cannot achieve that with non-extremist beliefs or ideas, you try to look for alternatives."

That search, combined with echo chambers and political figures skilled at triggering a sense of threat, is how ordinary frustration becomes something more dangerous.

The MOSAIC Framework

To address this dynamic practically, Joel developed the MOSAIC framework: Meaning-Oriented Social and Individual Changes. The framework maps how people appraise and respond to situations where their meaningful lives feel blocked, and offers a structure for coaches, leaders, and organizations to work with rather than against those responses.

At its core, MOSAIC recognizes that when people cannot realize their meanings, they have a few options: find new strategies to achieve what they want, revise what they consider meaningful, reappraise the situation from a different angle, or suppress how they feel about it. Radicalization, in this model, is one pathway through that process, and understanding it as such opens up the possibility of intervening earlier and more humanely.

For leaders and organizations, Joel's practical starting point is the same one he uses in his own encounters with people whose views he strongly opposes: listen first. Ask what people actually want from their working lives before moving to solutions, policies, or programs. David Graeber's concept of "bullshit jobs," work that the people doing it recognize as pointless, surfaces here as a concrete example of what happens when that conversation never takes place.

Meaning as a Human Right

Joel closes the conversation with an argument that may be his most provocative: that living a meaningful life, including in work, should be enshrined as a legal right, with real protections against the manipulation and exploitation of people's need for meaning.

He sees the current moment as one of genuine possibility. Young people in particular are driving a shift in what they expect from work, and from the institutions and leaders around them. The change is slow and uneven, but Joel's read of the research leaves him with real hope that the economic and cultural transition he traced in part one is still underway, and that individuals, organizations, and eventually policy can all play a role in making it more durable.

Closing Reflection

Taken together, these conversations with Joel offer something unusual: a way of looking at the pressures of working life that neither minimizes them nor treats them as purely personal problems to be optimized away. The search for meaningful work is real, historically shaped, politically contested, and, in Joel's view, worth protecting with the same seriousness we bring to other fundamental human rights.

About Our Guest

Dr. Joel Vos is a Senior Lecturer (Research) in the Doctorate in Counselling Psychology at the Metanoia Institute in London. His work sits at the intersection of meaning in life research, existential psychology, and socioeconomic history, and he brings both rigorous empirical grounding and decades of clinical practice to this conversation. His book The Economics of Meaning in Life draws on a systematic review of thousands of studies on meaning, economics, and wellbeing.

Visit joelvos.com to explore his research and resources.