March
18
,
2026
The Meaning-Oriented Economy
Lessons from Dr. Joel Vos (Part One)
Eudaimonic Resources
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Increasing Engagement
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Meaningful Work
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n this episode of Meaningful Work Matters, Andrew is joined by Dr. Joel Vos, researcher, philosopher, and psychotherapist, to explore where our ideas about meaningful work actually come from, and how the broader economic and historical context shapes what people seek from their jobs today.
Joel approaches the topic from the outside in, starting not with the workplace but with evolutionary psychology, social history, and centuries of philosophical thought. That vantage point leads to a question that rarely gets asked directly: is the pressure to find meaning in work a timeless human need, or is it something more historically specific, and more politically shaped, than we tend to assume?
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.
Type of Meaning | What It Involves |
|---|---|
Material | Work as a source of income, security, and stability. Valuing salary, benefits, and job security as the foundation of what a job provides. |
Hedonistic | Work as a source of pleasure, enjoyment, and personal satisfaction. Finding genuine enjoyment in the tasks, environment, or people that make up your day. |
Self-oriented | Work as a path to personal growth, identity, and self-expression. Finding meaning in developing your skills, realizing your potential, or doing work that feels authentically yours. |
Social | Work as a source of connection, belonging, and contribution. Finding meaning through relationships with colleagues, the people you serve, or the communities your work touches. |
Large / Ethical | Work as a way to act with integrity and contribute to something larger. Finding meaning in organizations, roles, or decisions that align with your values and make a positive difference. |
Existential | Work as a site of deeper reflection on freedom, responsibility, and what it means to be human. Finding meaning in questions that go beyond the job itself and connect to how you want to live. |
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.
Closing Reflection
Joel's historical and philosophical lens offers something that most workplace conversations skip over: a genuine reckoning with why we want meaningful work in the first place, and what has shaped that desire before we ever walk through an employer's door.
That shift in perspective deepens the search rather than diminishing it. When we understand where the question came from, we are better positioned to ask it on our own terms, and to recognize when someone else is trying to answer it for us.
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.