People Want a Sense of Purpose, Not Just a Wallet of Money
At the end of 2015, after eight years mining coal in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, Dave Hathaway was laid off. Despite a year of searching, efforts to find a new job had failed. His unemployment insurance ran out. Yet it was not just the loss of income that troubled him; his wife had a job so the family was not destitute. “I think for the man of the house to not have a job, it’s pretty disheartening,” he said. “It’s a hit to my ego, really.” He had loved his job. His father and grandfather were coal miners. “Pretty much everyone you knew was a coal miner,” he said, and the local community was shaped by this.
For Dave Hathaway, mining, his union comrades, family and the local culture gave his life structure, dignity and purpose. The threat to Americans’ sense of a meaningful life is by no means limited to miners. While about 127,000 coal miners lost their jobs between 1986 and 2024, millions of Americans are projected to lose their jobs or have them restructured due to AI in the next five years. This will include people who provide clerical, customer service, routine legal and financial services and legions of programmers whose hard work, perversely, will make their current jobs obsolete. Automation of long-haul trucking may threaten about 300,000 jobs, not to mention those who provide ride-sharing and delivery services. As Dave Hathaway’s experience shows, all these people may face a threat to dignity and meaning in their lives.
The importance of meaning was central to Viktor Frankl’s survival in four Nazi concentration camps. Prisoners died, he said, when they felt their lives no longer had purpose. Explaining to puzzled fellow prisoners why he agreed to join a camp work party, he said “I knew that in a working party I would die in a short time. But if I had to die there might at least be some sense in my death.” In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he said: “striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.” It’s also the reason he struggled to reconstruct in his mind the contents of a book he had been writing that guards trashed with all his other belongings.
Depression, anxiety, loneliness, diminished relationships and a retreat from responsibilities are not uncommon responses for those who feel their lives are devoid of meaning. Physically, people can lose sleep, energy, have a higher risk of illness and resort to addictive behavior (drugs/alcohol, gambling, gaming). For some this leads to suicide, now called deaths of despair.
It’s not just joblessness that can lead people to feel a loss of meaning in life. Retirees transitioning from lives built around work, the elderly in nursing care and even young people who live alone or feel isolated from meaningful social connections may struggle. People want to feel useful, like their lives have a purpose. As President Lyndon Johnson put it, “to hunger for use and to go unused is the worst hunger of all.”
There are solutions. While many jobs will disappear due to AI, new ones will be created and some old ones will be restructured. For example, there will be a need for safety supervisors for autonomous systems and human reviewers of legal AI products. Most will require a commitment of public, private and nonprofit support systems and retraining during the transition. This is critical especially in small communities, such as when a Tysons meatpacking plant in Lexington, Nebraska closed and threw 3,200 people out of work in the town of 12,000.
Initiatives to diversify local economies and support local communities facing disruptive economic change are needed as are more options for volunteerism, charitable work and national service aimed, especially for young people, at goals that foster patriotism and provide meaningful work – paid and unpaid. More family-friendly policies are essential to strengthen that institution that, as for Dave Hathaway, anchors a life filled with purpose. For the elderly, more support for programs for those aging in place, in assisted living or nursing homes can help those who built our society find meaning in the last period of their lives. It can maintain their dignity and confirm the realization that others value what they have done and still can do.
Some have argued a guaranteed basic income would protect those facing ravages of joblessness. Yet that will not necessarily foster meaningful lives. As Frankl put it, even if “people have enough to live by, they may “have nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning”. “The truth,” he said “is that man does not live by welfare alone.”
Whatever help society provides to those facing the loss of purpose and meaning in their lives, the individual’s attitude is key. As Frankl also put it, we must not focus on what we expect of life but what life expects of us. Frankl wrote that meaning could be achieved in any or all of three ways: “creating a work or doing a deed, experiencing something or encountering someone, and by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.” Dave Hathaway chose to stay in his community rather than take a job offered in another state. He had a support system at home and locally that eventually produced another mining job, and he managed the suffering of his lost pride with a hopeful, determined attitude rather than descending into despair.
Photo Credit: wvpublic.org
