Work, meaning, and blessing

[T]he longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status and money [...] The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives and half a dozen different manufacturing sites. [...] It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers. They are shopkeepers, builders, cooks or farmers — people whose labour can easily be linked to the visible betterment of human life. As creatures innately aware of balance and proportion, we cannot help but sense that something is awry in a job title like 'Brand Supervision Co-ordinator, Sweet Biscuits' (Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, pages 79–80).

The world was created rich with potential, and part of our design as humans is to order the world in such a way as to bring out its potential. While part of God's curse on Adam is a frustration in the arena of work, I can't help but think that Botton is right that the kind of work we do, with no tangible link to being a blessing through our good ordering of the world, exacerbates the problem. More on this in this intriguing article from The New York Times.