Meaningful Work Matters

This is the first in a new kind of episode for Meaningful Work Matters: a mashup. It weaves together three conversations from the show's archive around a single idea. It’s a great place to start if you're new here, or a new way to hear past conversations if you've been listening a while.

The idea holding it together is a picture host Andrew Soren keeps coming back to: getting meaningful work right is a lot like sailing a boat. There's a hull that keeps you afloat (whether or not you ever go anywhere) with fair pay, reasonable hours, basic safety, being treated like a person and not a resource. And there are sails of purpose, meaning, and growth which catch the wind and actually move you somewhere. The problem is that sails don't fix a hull. A bigger sail on a sinking boat just gets you further from shore before you go under.

Three researchers explore what that means from three different directions. Carrie Oelberger studies international aid workers and has found that people often inhibit their own boundaries, believing they can grit their way past structural problems that aren't theirs to solve alone. Sara Steffens, a longtime union organizer, argues that passion gets exploited when it isn't backed by collective power. Zeynep Ton, who studies business operations at MIT, makes the case that decent work isn't charity; it's just better arithmetic.

Key Takeaways

• The ship metaphor: a hull (pay, hours, safety, dignity) keeps you afloat; sails (purpose, meaning, growth) move you forward, but sails can't fix a hull that's taking on water.
• Carrie Oelberger's research shows people often inhibit their own boundaries around meaningful work, driven by what she calls the "myth of agency”: the false belief that individual effort can overcome structural barriers alone.
• Sara Steffens argues that passion becomes exploitable without collective power to back it up, and that gestures like a "pizza party" can't substitute for real structural fixes.
• Zeynep Ton's research shows that low pay and high turnover are far more expensive than most leaders assume. Decent work is a business case, not just a moral one.
• The three guests propose genuinely different fixes: individual awareness, collective organizing, and business strategy. Most organizations default to whichever one costs them the least.

Why This Episode Matters

Conversations about meaningful work often start from the assumption that finding purpose is the hard part. This episode starts somewhere else: even fully purposeful work can hollow someone out if the basic structure underneath it (via pay, hours, dignity, security) isn't sound. Bringing three researchers together who don't fully agree on the fix gives listeners a question worth asking about any workplace, including their own. When the culture is costing someone their boundaries, who's actually responsible for fixing that, and what would the fix cost the organization itself?

About This Episode

This mash-up draws from three previous conversations on Meaningful Work Matters.

Dr. Carrie Oelberger is an Associate Professor of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, where her research focuses on burnout, work-nonwork conflict, and the internal dynamics of prosocial organizations.

Listen to the full two-part conversation.

Sara Steffens spent years as a union organizer, rising to secretary-treasurer of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and leadership roles across the labor movement; she currently works on worker-power initiatives.

Listen to the full conversation.

Dr. Zeynep Ton is Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management and President of the Good Jobs Institute, which she co-founded. She is the author of The Good Jobs Strategy and The Case for Good Jobs.

Listen to the full conversation.

Mentioned in This Episode

• The ship metaphor, drawn from Scott Barry Kaufman's reading of Maslow's hierarchy of needs
• Carrie Oelberger's research on boundary inhibition and the myth of agency
• Sara Steffens and the Communications Workers of America (CWA); the PRO Act
• Zeynep Ton's books, The Good Jobs Strategy and The Case for Good Jobs; the Good Jobs Institute

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Special Thanks

Background music / theme song is "Zinc (after In C)" by Zoë Keating, generously shared with the show. Thanks to support from the production team at Palm Tree Pod Co.

In this episode, Sociologist Cindy L. Cain joins Andrew Soren to discuss her new book, Called to Care? Health Care, Burnout, and the Search for Meaningful Work, based on fifteen years of research with healthcare workers.

Cindy challenges a familiar assumption about burnout: that meaning is something individuals must find, or recover, on their own. Her research argues that meaningfulness is created through the interaction between workers, their colleagues, and the structures and cultures surrounding their work. When those conditions make it difficult for people to see progress or act on what they care about, their sense of purpose begins to erode.

That means burnout cannot be addressed through individual coping strategies alone. Organizations also need to examine how work is designed and where people have the freedom to make a difference. Based on a memory care facility in her research, Cindy shares how creating small, visible forms of progress can give workers a greater sense of control, even when the larger outcomes remain beyond their influence.

Andrew and Cindy also dig into the pivotal role of middle managers. These leaders may not control an organization's biggest decisions, but they help shape the everyday environments in which people either connect with, or become disconnected from, the meaning in their work.

This conversation offers a more systemic and hopeful way to think about burnout: meaningful work is neither an inherent quality of a job nor something each person must manufacture alone. It is something we create together.

Key Takeaways

• Burnout's standard definition includes a "loss of purpose or efficacy" component that many studies quietly stopped measuring. Cindy argues it's actually the root of the whole problem, not a minor piece of it.
• Because the root cause is structural, the fix has to be structural too: individual coping tools can help, but they leave the organizational obstacles untouched.
• "Progress" with visible forward motion, even in small amounts, functions as a locus of control: often the one lever workers can still pull when the bigger levers (hours, structure, outcomes) are out of reach.
• Care North, a memory care facility with unusually low turnover, delegated real autonomy down to CNAs and built its culture around small, specific rituals rather than top-down initiatives.
• Mid-level leaders may be the most pivotal people in the whole system: they rarely control the institution, but they have outsized control over the "microcultures" where real change actually happens.
• Healthcare organizations function as "status zoos," where professional, organizational, and social status intersect to shape who has access to meaningful work and who doesn't.
• Meaningfulness is neither purely individual nor a fixed property of a job; it emerges from the ongoing interaction between workers and the structures of their workplace.

Why This Episode Matters

Most conversations about burnout focus on what individuals can do to cope better. Cindy Cain's research points somewhere else: at the organizational structures that produce burnout in the first place, and at how much can change when leaders are willing to redistribute control rather than roll out another wellness initiative. One of the episode's sharpest implications is about who actually holds that power. It’s not necessarily senior leadership, but the mid-level managers who stay connected to what's happening on the ground and have real, underused control over their team's day-to-day culture. For anyone leading a team inside a system they don't fully control, which is most people, this episode offers a hopeful reframe: meaningful change is often smaller, more local, and more achievable than it looks from the top.

About Our Guest

Dr. Cindy L. Cain is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, specializing in organizations and workplaces within healthcare. Her research focuses on settings where care work is most emotionally and physically demanding, including end-of-life care and dementia care. She is the author of Called to Care? Health Care, Burnout, and the Search for Meaningful Work (Rutgers University Press, 2026), and has contributed to From Crisis to Catastrophe: Care, COVID-19, and Pathways to Change (2023) and Caring on the Clock (2015). Beyond her academic work, Cindy has direct experience as a care worker for children, adults at the end of life, and people with developmental disabilities.

Mentioned in This Episode

• Called to Care? Health Care, Burnout, and the Search for Meaningful Work by Cindy L. Cain
• Julie Haizlip, University of Virginia, and her research on "mattering" in healthcare
• Teresa Amabile's research on the progress principle
• Cindy Cain's Substack, featuring personal essays connecting these themes to her own work and creative life
• Additional academic articles by Cindy Cain

Content note: this episode discusses violent extremism and briefly references research on suicidal ideation.

In this episode, Andrew Soren is joined by researcher Dr. Jeremy "Jer" Clifton, Director of the Primals Project at the University of Pennsylvania, for a conversation that starts with the question “what do you believe about the world as a whole?” and ends up finding out what actually separates violent extremists from everyone else.

Jer's research centers on "primal world beliefs," the deep, often unexamined assumptions people carry about whether the world is fundamentally safe, enticing, and alive. Jer shares a surprising discovery from his latest research: it isn't a belief that the world is dangerous that predicts violent extremism, as he would have assumed, it's a belief that the world is largely empty of things that matter. They walk through a ten-day photography challenge Jer's team designed to shift that belief, and what happened when they tested it on those who supported the January 6, 2021, US Capitol insurrection. The conversation closes with a genuinely practical turn toward the workplace: what it might mean to treat your colleagues, your clients, and even your product as things that actually matter, and why that belief is harder to fake than most people think.

Key Takeaways

• Primal world beliefs are deep assumptions about the world as a whole (safe vs. dangerous, enticing vs. dull, alive vs. inert) that shape behavior without most people realizing they hold them.
• "Meaningful world belief" is the belief that the world contains many vs. few things that matter and is distinct from having meaning in your own life.
• Primal beliefs fluctuate day to day more than people expect, and can shape how you perceive the people closest to you, including romantic partners.
• At work, meaningful world belief may show up as believing your interactions with colleagues and clients genuinely matter, and that your product or service has real value.
• High meaningful world belief may act as a natural check against the kind of all-consuming, single-cause obsession that can lead to burnout, exploitation, or worse.

Why This Episode Matters

Most conversations about meaningful work focus on the individual's own sense of purpose. This episode asks a related but different question: what do you believe about the world beyond your own life, and how much is that belief silently shaping how you treat the people and work in front of you? Jer Clifton's research suggests that a belief most of us have never examined (whether the world at large is full of things that matter) has consequences ranging from workplace kindness to, in its most extreme form, political violence. For leaders and individuals alike, it's a reminder that some of the most consequential beliefs shaping our behavior are ones we didn't know we were carrying.

About Our Guest Dr. Jeremy D. W. Clifton received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, studying under advisor Martin Seligman with Angela Duckworth as committee chair and Rob DeRubeis on his committee. He is the Director of the Primals Project at the University of Pennsylvania, where his research centers on primal world beliefs and the challenges of measuring them well. His foundational 2019 paper introducing primal world beliefs was published in Psychological Assessment and featured in the Washington Post; his 2019 Psychological Methods paper addressed tradeoffs between validity and reliability in scale design. In 2024, the Association for Psychological Science named him a Rising Star.

Mentioned in This Episode

• The Primal World Beliefs Inventory and free assessment at myprimals.com
• Jer Clifton's 2019 Psychological Assessment paper introducing primal world beliefs
• Edward P. Lemay Jr., University of Maryland, on the day-to-day fluctuation of primal beliefs and their effect on relationships
• Jer's research team's study connecting meaningful world belief to violent extremism across multiple populations, including January 6th supporters and a sample of Kazakhstani prisoners

In this episode, Andrew Soren is joined by developmental psychologist Kaylin Ratner to talk about eudaimonic utility, a concept that flips a familiar question on its head. Instead of asking whether an activity feels personally meaningful, Kaylin asks whether the environment around that activity is actually built to help someone become who they're meant to be.

The idea grew out of Kaylin's research on GripTape, a youth program that hands participants ten weeks, a small stipend, and full ownership over something they want to learn: no curriculum, no grades, no adult steering the outcome. Andrew and Kaylin dig into what the research found, why traditional measures of success can completely miss a young person who's actually thriving, and how the same four-part framework might apply just as easily to adult workplaces. They also talk candidly about the dark side of getting this right: what happens when a person becomes so fused with a meaningful role or organization that they lose any sense of who they are outside it.

Key Takeaways

• Eudaimonic utility is the perception that an environment (a school, a program, a job) actually supports someone's growth into who they're trying to become.
• A young person disengaging from an unsupportive environment isn't necessarily failing; they may be correctly sensing that the environment has little to offer their development.
• Four things people check for in an environment: whether it lets them pursue personally significant goals, act authentically, grow, and work toward their own excellence.
• Self-determination theory's three basic needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) sit underneath eudaimonic utility, though the two concepts aren't identical.
• In GripTape's research, day-to-day sense of purpose and day-to-day progress toward a goal reinforced each other, giving empirical support to a long-assumed but rarely tested link.
• The eudaimonic utility scale was built to be adapted across contexts, including workplaces, though workplace-specific research is still early.
• The risk Kaylin worries about most is "engulfment," or losing your sense of self entirely inside a role, job, or organization that feels deeply meaningful.

Why This Episode Matters Most conversations about meaningful work focus on finding the right role or the right purpose. This episode asks a less common question: is the environment around you actually capable of supporting that purpose once you've found it? Kaylin Ratner's research suggests that a lot of disengagement, at school and possibly at work, isn't a motivation problem. It's an environment that isn't built to help someone grow into who they're trying to be. For leaders shaping teams and cultures, and for anyone evaluating their own workplace, this conversation offers a concrete, four-part way to ask whether a given environment deserves the time being spent in it, and a clear-eyed warning about what happens when that environment starts asking for too much of someone's identity in return.

About Our Guest Dr. Kaylin Ratner is an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she advises doctoral students across the divisions of counseling psychology and developmental science and leads the Self and Psychological Well-Being Lab. Her research focuses on adolescent and young adult well-being, particularly the transition to adulthood and the role that identity, purpose, and meaning play in it. She earned her Ph.D. in Human Development from Cornell University in 2020, working with developmental psychologist Anthony Burrow, with whom she later completed a postdoctoral fellowship. Her research on eudaimonic utility, developed in partnership with the youth program GripTape, is the focus of this conversation.

Mentioned in This Episode

• GripTape, the youth learning program at the center of Kaylin's research
• Kaylin Ratner's research on eudaimonic utility
• Self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan
• Anne Brafford on self-determination theory
• Veronica Huta and Alan Waterman's review of the core components of eudaimonia
• Erik Erikson's stages of psychosocial development, including identity, generativity, and integrity vs. despair
• Dr. Anthony Burrow, Cornell University

In this episode, Andrew Soren of Eudaimonic by Design sits down with personality psychologist Brian Little for a conversation that moves from a mishelved library book to a hockey metaphor for performance reviews, and lands, more than once, on the difference between well-being and well-doing.

Brian's research looks past personality traits and into the personal projects that actually organize a life: the things we're trying to sustain, repair, protect, or build, whether that's taking out the garbage or trying to shift an entire field of thought. What makes a project worth studying, in his framework, is that it's personally salient. It reveals what someone actually cares about, not just how they compare to everyone else on a trait scale.

Andrew and Brian dig into why meaningful work can be harder to sustain than it looks: a project can matter enormously and still become unmanageable, especially when the surrounding environment isn't built to support it. Brian also introduces free traits and restorative niches. He closes with a definition of flourishing that reframes the whole conversation: not a feeling, but the sustainable pursuit of the core projects in our lives.

Key Takeaways

• Personality can be understood at three levels (how we're like all people, like some people, and like no one else) and traits really only describe the middle level.
• Personal projects reveal what someone is actually working on beneath their visible role or behaviour.
• A project can be highly meaningful and still contribute to burnout if it isn't manageable. Meaning and manageability are separate dimensions, and both matter.
• Standard performance conversations tend to reward "goals" and miss "assists," the support, trust-building, and behind-the-scenes work that make outcomes possible.
• Free traits explain why people act out of character for people or projects they care about, and why that performance carries a real cost.
• Restorative niches, the ways people recover after stretching beyond their natural tendencies, aren't one-size-fits-all.
• Asking about someone's personal projects can surface deeply private material, so leaders need trust and restraint, not a checklist.

Why This Episode Matters

Most conversations about meaningful work stay at the level of purpose, motivation, or engagement. Brian Little's research goes a layer deeper, into the ongoing, often invisible projects that structure someone's day. The colleague who seems checked out in a meeting might be trying to get a diagnosis for a sick kid. The manager who's uncharacteristically sharp might be holding together a role that's stopped being sustainable. For leaders, coaches, and anyone thinking seriously about meaningful work, this episode makes the case for paying attention to the project behind the performance, and building workplaces that make caring about that project actually possible.

About Our Guest

Brian R. Little is a personality psychologist whose research has helped shape the study of personality, motivation, personal projects, and human flourishing. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught or lectured at Cambridge, Oxford, Carleton, McGill, and Harvard. He's best known for developing Personal Projects Analysis, a framework for understanding the personally meaningful pursuits that structure a life, along with his related work on free traits and restorative niches. He is the author of Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being.

Mentioned in This Episode

• Personal Projects Analysis, Brian Little's framework for studying personally meaningful pursuits
• Me, Myself, and Us by Brian R. Little
• Walter Mischel's Personality and Assessment and the person-situation debate
• Gordon Allport, one of the founders of personality psychology
• Ken Sheldon's research on goals, striving, and well-being
• Albert Bandura's work on self-efficacy
• Adam Grant's work on giving and contribution
• Research on "mattering," including work associated with Isaac Prilleltensky
• Free traits and restorative niches, Brian Little's own concepts

In this episode, Andrew Soren is joined by organizational psychologist Ryan Fehr to explore how gratitude and social sustainability shape the quality of our relationships at work, and why those relationships are central to whether work feels meaningful, energizing, and fair.

Ryan is a Professor of Management and Michael G. Foster Endowed Professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, where his research focuses on building positive relationships, leadership, gratitude, compassion, forgiveness, solitude, and social burnout. In this conversation, he helps clarify what gratitude really is: a feeling of appreciation for benefits that come from outside ourselves. At work, that means recognizing the ways other people contribute to our progress, wellbeing, and sense of belonging.

Andrew and Ryan dig into why gratitude can be so powerful in organizations, and why it can backfire when it feels forced, uneven, or disconnected from fairness and respect. They also discuss Ryan’s work on social sustainability: the ability to build relationships that energize us rather than exhaust us.

This conversation offers a practical look at what it means to feel that we matter at work. And, you’ll learn what leaders, teams, and individuals can do to build relationships that are meaningful enough to sustain us.

• Gratitude can strengthen workplace relationships by helping people feel seen, valued, and connected.
• Appreciation has to be authentic and fair. When gratitude is unevenly distributed, it can create resentment instead of belonging.
• Social sustainability is about building relationships that give energy rather than quietly draining it.
• Busy professionals may be less lonely than socially burned out. They are surrounded by interaction, but missing the kinds of connection that actually restore them.

Meaningful work depends on more than purpose or personal motivation. It is deeply shaped by the relationships around us.

When people feel appreciated, treated fairly, and connected to others, work is more likely to feel energizing and worthwhile. When they feel unseen, overextended, or socially depleted, even meaningful work can become exhausting. Ryan Fehr’s research helps explain why gratitude, fairness, and social sustainability belong at the center of the conversation about meaningful work.

Ryan Fehr is a Professor of Management and Michael G. Foster Endowed Professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. His research focuses on building positive relationships in organizations, with particular emphasis on gratitude, forgiveness, compassion, leadership, solitude, and social burnout. He teaches courses in leadership, negotiation, personal change, positive organizational scholarship, and organizational development. Ryan also writes Sustainably Social, a Substack focused on evidence-based lessons for building relationships without burning out, and is the author of the forthcoming book I’d Love to, Just Not Today: Beat Social Burnout and Build Relationships That Don’t Exhaust You.

• Connect with Ryan at University of Washington School of Business
• Sustainably Social by Ryan Fehr
• Greater Good Science Center: Gratitude at Work
• Three Research-Backed Tips for a Grateful Workplace
• The Grateful Workplace: A Multilevel Model of Gratitude in Organizations
• I’d Love to, Just Not Today: Beat Social Burnout and Build Relationships That Don’t Exhaust You

In this episode, Andrew Soren is joined by executive coach and humour ambassador Bea Bincze for a conversation about why humor, playfulness, and what she calls “fun framing” deserve a bigger place in how we think about meaningful work.

Meaningful work often carries a lot of weight. It matters to us, and it asks a lot of us. In many cases, it pulls people toward seriousness, perfectionism, and a sense that if the work is important, it must also feel heavy. Drawing on her own journey from finance and executive leadership into coaching and humor-based facilitation, Bea argues that humor is more than a distraction from meaningful work. It can be one of the things that makes meaningful work more sustainable, creative, relational, and human.

Together, Andrew and Bea explore how humor can reduce stress, soften perfectionism, strengthen psychological safety, and help people working in high-stakes environments cope more skillfully with challenge, failure, and suffering. They also talk about humergy, the energizing force humor brings into a room, and how leaders can create the kind of small, safe “micro experiments” that make more playfulness possible at work.

• Humor is not just about being a comedian. It is about creating moments of lightness, connection, perspective, and relief.
• Meaningful work can become heavy, and humor can help make it more sustainable without making it less serious.
• Bea’s concept of fun framing offers a way to reframe stressful or perfectionistic situations with more playfulness and flexibility.
• Humor can increase trust, creativity, team connection, and psychological safety.
• Leaders can create safer conditions for people to experiment with more warmth, levity, and human energy.
• In care work, education, coaching, and other purpose-driven settings, humor can be a powerful way to cope with stress and stay connected to others.

A lot of conversations about meaningful work focus on purpose, contribution, and impact. Those conversations matter, but they can also become heavy. This episode introduces a different ingredient: humor.

Bea Bincze helps reframe humor as a practical leadership and wellbeing skill rather than something extra or trivial. For listeners doing serious, values-driven work, this conversation offers a reminder that joy, lightness, and laughter do not undermine meaning. They can help us carry it better.

Bea Bincze is an executive coach, trainer, speaker, and humor ambassador who helps leaders and teams use humor more intentionally to reduce stress, improve connection, and support healthier, more effective workplaces. Before moving into coaching, she worked in senior finance leadership roles, including as a CFO, and now brings that organizational experience into her work with leaders and teams. She is also the author of Perfectly Imperfect: Fun-Framing Playbook, a practical guide to reframing perfectionism, reducing stress, and laughing more in everyday life and work.

In this episode of Meaningful Work Matters, host Andrew Soren is joined by Stanford design leader and life design pioneer Bill Burnett for a conversation about what it means to build a meaningful life, and why that question is bigger than work alone.

Bill brings a design thinking lens to the topic meaning: how do we move beyond transactional living and create a life that feels psychologically rich, connected, and fully alive? Together, he and Andrew explore a set of practical mindsets that can help us approach our lives with more curiosity, flexibility, and intention.

They also talk about an important tension in the meaning conversation: while meaningful work can be a powerful source of energy and purpose, it can also tip into obsession, burnout, and exploitation when our identities become too tightly wrapped around it. Bill offers a refreshing alternative that expands meaning beyond career success and into community, experimentation, and the relationships that shape who we become.

Key Takeaways

• Meaningful work matters, but a meaningful life cannot rest on work alone.
• Design thinking offers a practical way to approach life: stay curious, prototype, and learn by trying things.
• Mindsets like wonder, radical acceptance, and availability can help us move out of purely transactional living and into richer experiences of meaning.
• The healthiest way to pursue meaningful work may be to stay fully engaged and calmly attached, committed, but not consumed.
• Formative communities play a critical role in a good life by helping us become the kinds of people we want to be.
• Too much meaning in work can have a dark side, including burnout, blurred boundaries, and vulnerability to exploitation.

Why This Episode Matters

A lot of conversations about meaning focus on finding the right job, the right purpose, or the right passion. This episode broadens that frame. Bill Burnett reminds us that meaning is not just something we discover once and secure forever. It is something we design over time through our attention, our relationships, our habits, and our willingness to stay open to what life is asking of us.

For listeners who want meaningful work but also want a sustainable, psychologically rich life, this conversation offers both language and tools.

About Our Guest

Bill Burnett is an Adjunct Professor and Executive Director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford, where he has helped thousands of students and professionals apply design thinking to life and career decisions. Trained as a product designer, he has worked in both startups and Fortune 100 companies, including Apple, where he designed award-winning laptops, and in the toy industry, where he worked on Star Wars action toys. He is the co-author of Designing Your Life and Designing Your New Work Life, and his work bridges design, meaning, and human flourishing in ways that are both practical and deeply resonant.

Mentioned in This Episode

• Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
• Designing Your New Work Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
• Fully Alive by Design newsletter
• Free Life Design worksheets and tools

In this episode, Andrew is joined by psychology and philosophy researcher Joffrey Fuhrer to explore the critical role of self-transcendence and positive impact in experiencing meaningful work.

Drawing on his empirical research into well-being and morality, Joffrey challenges the modern, highly individualized pursuit of happiness, arguing instead that true meaning requires an outward focus and a tangible contribution to others.

Together, Andrew and Joffrey examine how the historical drift from collective well-being to self-centeredness has impoverished our experience of work, and how reintroducing pro-sociality and service can act as an antidote to existential burnout.

• Meaning in life and work is incomplete without actually having a positive impact. This is called self-transcendence, and it is often missing when we define or measure meaning in life.
• When we experience existential crises or meaningless work, we often collapse inward into a self-centred "black hole"; engaging in service forces an outward focus that restores our sense of mattering.
• The psychological feeling of meaning is distinct from an objectively meaningful life, which research shows is deeply tied to morality and pro-social behaviour rather than selfish pursuits.
• Self-transcendence at work doesn't require massive, consequential impact; it can be found in everyday moments of "flow" and small, intrinsically motivated acts of helping others.

Modern workplace culture often treats well-being and meaning as purely individual pursuits—finding your personal "why" or optimizing your own happiness. This conversation challenges that isolation, revealing how our intense focus on the self might actually be what keeps us from feeling that our work matters. By distinguishing between simply feeling valuable and tangibly contributing to a collective, this episode reframes meaning as a deeply pro-social act, offering a pathway out of the self-centered exhaustion of modern work.

Joffrey Fuhrer is a researcher in psychology and philosophy whose work explores the nature of the good life, meaning, well-being, and morality. Drawing on both empirical research and philosophical inquiry, he examines how self-transcendence, prosocial behavior, and positive impact shape our experience of meaning in life and work.

He is currently leading a research project funded by the Young Universities for the Future of Europe initiative. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

A Note Before You Listen

We are sharing this episode in memory of Dr. Isaac Prilleltensky, who passed away on May 7, 2026. Isaac was a giant in the field of positive psychology — a scholar, a humanist, and a tireless advocate for fairness and well-being. He touched the lives of tens of thousands of students, researchers, and practitioners around the world, and his influence on this podcast, and on our work, runs deep. We are grateful this conversation exists, and we hope it introduces him — or reintroduces him — to a new generation of listeners.

About This Episode

Dr. Isaac Prilleltensky was Mautner Endowed Chair in Community Well-Being and Professor of Educational and Psychological Studies at the University of Miami — as well as an internationally renowned keynote speaker, author, researcher, and well-being advocate.

In this conversation, Andrew and Isaac explore the importance of meaningful work and mattering. Drawing from decades of scholarly research on justice, fairness, and well-being, Isaac makes the case that we cannot thrive as individuals unless the systems around us are designed to help us do so. He unpacks what it truly means to feel valued through recognition while adding value through meaningful contribution — and why these are among the most overlooked drivers of workplace engagement.

For people managers and leaders, this episode offers concrete ways to foster what Isaac called a "WE culture" — where fairness, dignity, and belonging are prioritized over individual pursuits, and where everyone has a fighting chance to matter.

There is no wellness without fairness. That was Isaac's north star. We think you'll feel it in every minute of this conversation.