Working Is Essentially Altruistic

How to find a rewarding purpose for your efforts

The conception of work in our modern societies has gradually insisted on the individualistic motives in our motivation at work: money, social recognition, security…

We have been used to see our efforts as being guided by individual rewards, valuing less the results of our actions than the benefits we get from them.

Attaching more and more individualistic expectations to our daily jobs, this state of mind is one of the reasons leading to the current crisis of meaning at work.

Emerging social neurosciences have shown, on the contrary, that we take intrinsic satisfaction from the relationship we have with others, producing hormones such as oxytocin. We take pleasure in knowing and feeling the impact of our efforts on others and the world.

They have shown that we invest ourselves emotionally in actions with visible results, in jobs where we can connect with the consequences of our actions.

Let me explain what it says about our motivations at work, and how you can find a rewarding purpose in your job.

The Drawbacks of Selfish Work

Since industrial societies have put men to work in the form of wage-earning, work has been conceived as intrinsically painful, tedious, or uninteresting in itself.

To overcome this nuisance, the way to motivate people has been to offer external rewards to the working environment. A living wage, but also, little by little, other economic benefits, social recognition, career opportunities, and assurances of safety and comfort.

Closer to us, modern developments of work have been putting increasing emphasis on the intrinsic satisfactions of work: the search for meaning, self-actualization, rich relationships with colleagues and customers.

Work in itself remains a necessity in economic and social terms, but it is also meant to fulfill several emotional needs that are essential for a meaningful life.

The sociology of work has studied this modern reconciliation of passion and work — taking the form of passionate job like being artists, politicians, or sportsmen, as the culmination of an individualistic conception of work.

Strangely enough, this extreme form can ultimately be one of the sources of today’s occupational diseases, such as burn-out. Passionate workers can no longer distinguish between their life and their work, upsetting their work-life balance.

These symptoms show the current crisis of meaning at work: we seek mostly to justify work by purely individual benefits, to the point of attaching to it all the expectations we put in our life.

Yet work cannot meet such demands. Work is about something else than our individualistic expectations.

It can be justified by an equally rewarding reason: the intrinsic satisfaction of feeling that our work has an impact on the world.

The Rewards of Working for a Purpose

Emerging social neurosciences are increasingly interested in the physiological mechanisms that lead human beings to socialize. One of their key findings is the similarity between physiological pleasures and the intrinsic satisfaction experienced in building social and altruistic relationships.

Matthew Lieberman in Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect describes our social behavior as naturally focused on caring and loving others, interactions that produce the hormone oxytocin, which is responsible for our feelings of happiness and joy.

As this hormone matures psychologically through adolescence, its influence causes us to increasingly cultivate relationships with others as intrinsically rewarding.

This also applies to our actions and the direction of our lives: our most satisfying actions are those that show a concrete impact on people, making us enjoy a soothing dose of oxytocin.

If our career choices seem to be guided by individualistic motivations, they also hide the desire to have an impact, wanting to make our developed capacities available to ourselves and others.

This feeling is particularly betrayed by the fear of wasting the unique combination of skills and talent that we have gradually built up in our careers. Our desire for recognition at work can also be interpreted by the feeling of a gap between what we could bring and what we feel we are bringing.

We lack a social and psychological connection with the people we have helped, the audience, or consumers who have benefited from our actions, the things we have improved or contributed to.

This frustration is often overshadowed by the conscious justifications we give oneself when regretting life choices (feeling that one would have chosen a more profitable professional or personal path).

However, it is possible to regain this willingness to make a real difference in the world.

How to Find A Rewarding Purpose

The increasing specialization of expertise in companies may prevent you from feeling the consequences of your actions and their results on the world.

Drowned among the contributions of others, your actions may seem to have no reach beyond your own hands.

In this situation, it is easy to justify your work for purely individual reasons, since altruistic motivations seem to be absent.

To change your mind about it, it is a matter of taking a different view on the situation: considering not only the benefits you get from your work but also the results and the daily impact of your efforts.

Who has benefited from your work? What things have changed or improved since you’ve been here? Which people are always listening to your ideas and are always attentive to what you bring to the table?

From a management point of view, giving sens is about valuing the contribution of employees to the success of the company and the lives of others, providing evidence of results but also by the opportunity to make connections with real customers.

And if the work environment is still unsatisfactory for you, then perhaps it’s time to build a business that will make the difference you feel you can make.

That way, the value you provide to the others will turn into happy and meaningful feelings for you.