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Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

Would you describe your problem as a lack of fulfillment?

Personally, I find my day job technically challenging, fun, and often rewarding, but I don't really find it fulfilling in some deep meaningful sense. I feel useful but not meaningful.

It took me a while to realize that this was the problem I was having -- and that just switching from software engineering job to software engineering job wasn't going to change it -- and I am still at a crossroads as to what to do about it. I'm not sure if I should seek fulfillment from outside my career -- family, community, a craft, a cause -- or if I should change my career to one I (think I might) find more fulfilling.

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There are a lot of kind of people in the world. With regard to life fulfillment (in the sense of "doing good things"), I think there are two broad categories: people who require their work to be personally fulfilling or who require life outside of work to be so.

From personal experience, if you're the kind of person who tends to be more invested at work (seeks out challenges, takes pride in your work, feels pleasure at a job well done), I'd hazard you might not be happy doing work you don't find at least somewhat fulfilling.

My thought process being that personal_investment_in_work + fulfillment_only_outside_of_work = eventually resenting time spent at work as unfulfilling.

Everyone can't work on cancer-curing, economy-stabilizing, poverty-eliminating, food-scarcity-solving, gender-equalizing, minority-protecting, free-speech-supporting things.

But we can at least move a little closer to working on something about which we can honestly say "Yeah, that does make the world a slightly better place."

In my case, my job isn't a drain -- it's useful, good work, not evil, good coworkers, fat paycheck, good hours, lots of flexibility. From a practical standpoint, I'm willing to wager that most people don't find fulfillment in their day job, and my job puts me in a pretty good place to find fulfillment outside of work.

On the other hand, at the moment I'm still young enough to start a second career -- it wouldn't be completely crazy for me to go back to school, learn a completely new skill set, grind up through the ranks, and try to have an impact in some other field.

On the gripping hand, I'm not so young as to be in an impatient rush about everything. I don't need to completely upset my entire life just yet. So I'm carefully researching alternate careers to decide if I'd actually find them fulfilling and have an aptitude for them (it'd be a shame to spend ten years and realize I'm not fulfilled by my second career either). And I'm trying to expand myself a little bit more outside my day job, so that my happiness doesn't rest on a one-legged stool.

I think you have hit the nail on the head. I have a successful (very successful, bootstrapped) startup which basically enables marketers to optimize their ad spend and I dont think I realized that this would become my life.

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