Unless you are curing cancer, fighting companies doing bad things, etc many jobs are very far removed from any meaning. But does life have meaning, you need to answer that yourself first
Thus, fighting cancer is really just making a small correction to a fundamentally unsustainable system to allow the unsustainable system to appear less harmful, but in reality it becomes just less harmful per unit time so that the harm accumulates in later generations. (Lower risk of cancer means lower perceived risk of polluting and hence less backlash against polluting that eventually accumulates so high that the risk becomes even greater than before the medical amelioration of cancer rates.)
Thus, I think one must go beyond mere cut-and-dried solutions to find meaning in life. One must figure out what is right and go towards that as best as you can, even if in reality one may never reach that point.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12940-020-00670-2
Maybe there is just a lot of bullshit in communications-based work, including IT
One works on increasing clicks, or rather driving traffic to an admittedly important website.
One is a librarian, and does Kids Storytime.
One keeps streaming infrastructure for a major broadcaster alive.
One works at a famous zoo.
One is a nurse.
Out of all of them, only the first could really be meaningless.
Religious people are actually very good at this and can be learned from. For example I’ve learned about all the plants in my area and now taking a walk is very rich in meaning. How are the birches doing this year? Which roses bloom first? When will the fig tree on 23rd and main be ripe? These are only interesting questions to someone who values plant life.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a book that outlines how “quality” and “caring” are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have anything of quality including your existence unless you care about it. A Maserati is just another car if you don’t know how to drive.
Wrt/ work, having a “meaningless” job is one in which your actions aren’t tied to any of your value structures. Maybe the answer is to make more values. But jobs today seem more disconnected, remote, isolated, fungible, and temporary than in the recent past. This is likely to make us as a culture more anxious, closed off, cynical, and defeated. And that is a tragedy.
But, there are other kinds of jobs, and many are far from meaningless. There are still many millions of people working everyday to make sure basic services are available to people.