Humans have been staring at the wall wondering about the purpose of their lives since time immemorial, urbanisation and industrialisation have made matters worse.
One leading ethnographer/sociologist has recently pushed the case that most people blessed with neither exceptional talent, nor the restlessness that drives ambition, make sense of their lives by believing that the accumulation of their experience over time counts for something and has value. Whether you're a cobbler or an IT consultant, you take pleasure in a job well done and believe that you get better with experience. Most of us want to be valuable in the eyes of others, but today's capitalism has turned the rules of humanity on their head. In a society in permanent flux, we are no longer valuable for what we have accomplished and the experience we have gathered, we're valuable for what we might be able to do in the future.
To embrace the future means to be the kind of person who, at the drop of a hat, will surrender the past, trash experience, and embrace the short-term opportunity. This is a world in which having potential is more important than having experience - It is argued that the cultural Rubicon that modern society is crossing puts us all in peril. Usefulness and sense of purpose are no longer achieved by steadily doing a job well, they are achieved by being permanently ready to live only in the present. So, as far as many people in cutting-edge industries - from television to software - are concerned, you are, in effect, redundant by 35... only the young can have no history and so be useful.
The phenomenon is largely cultural, the result, for most people, is an intensifying sense of their own uselessness.It was not like that in the recent past, even 25 years ago, the great multinational companies could hire somebody at 20 and offer them a predictable career. What's changed is less economics, more our culture.
However, William Whyte's - Organisation Man, depicting the lifeless, ordered 1950s world of the men who had given their souls to the company, was so influential because it captured a truth. Corporate life was a bureaucratic prison, however golden it might now seem, and it wasn't only a few radicals who thought so, but organisation men themselves - and their families.
What to do? Perhaps the search for renewed purpose should be part of our national conversation.
The service sector could certainly use an overhaul.
For whatever reason, it is ever harder to feel useful, to have purpose and to make sense of one's life. It's why volunteering is growing so rapidly, and why so many are attracted to public-sector work despite its many drawbacks.


... and with thanks to Will Hutton of the Guardian