I Can't Find the Point of This Anymore.

There is a sentence I keep hearing in coaching sessions, training rooms, consulting gigs. I hear it over dinner with friends, in informal catch-ups with acquaintances, in the kind of conversations that happen after the official conversation is over. People say it in low voices, or laugh it off so it doesn't land too heavily. Lawyers say it. Teachers say it. Strategists, consultants, journalists, product managers, researchers say it. People who spent years building careers they genuinely wanted say it.

I can’t find the point of this anymore.

Not burnout. Not exhaustion. Something stranger and harder to name.

We have got very good at treating the wrong problem.

When someone loses their drive, the system reaches for familiar explanations. Too much pressure. Unclear priorities. Poor boundaries. And so the interventions follow: the coaching package, the team offsite, the restructured role, the leadership framework with four quadrants and a colour palette.

None of it touches the real thing.

Because the real thing is not about workload. It is about meaning, and meaning, it turns out, is not something you simply have. It is something that happens between you and the world. It requires both a sender and a receiver. And when the receiver disappears, or the signal stops landing, the exhaustion that follows is not physical. It is philosophical.

The philosopher and writer Andrea Colamedici recently described this as stanchezza metafisica, metaphysical fatigue. The tiredness, he writes, of someone who while shovelling invisible coal begins to suspect that the coal doesn’t exist, the furnace doesn’t exist, and that perhaps nobody needs heating at all. It is not the fatigue of having done too much. It is the fatigue of suspecting that what you are doing doesn’t matter.

This is the sentence behind the sentence that most people aren’t saying out loud.

Here is something that has been true for a long time, and that we are only now being forced to look at directly.

Most knowledge work, over the past few decades, has been quietly converted from something alive into something legible. The pressure to measure, report, optimise, and scale meant that the parts of work that resisted measurement, the judgement calls, the relational texture, the slow accumulation of understanding that doesn’t show up in any dashboard, got gradually squeezed out. What remained looked like the work. It was called the work. But the thing that had made it worth doing was no longer in it.

Colamedici names this with a distinction that I keep returning to: the difference between a task and an activity.

A task is something that can be isolated, described, replicated, evaluated. An activity is something that only makes sense inside a practice, a history, a relationship. Teaching is an activity. Delivering a lesson is a task. Caring is an activity. Administering a protocol is a task. Thinking, real thinking, the kind that requires sitting with discomfort and not knowing and genuine encounter with complexity, is an activity. Producing a report summarising your thinking is a task.

Management spent thirty years converting activities into tasks, because tasks can be optimised. And now a machine can do the tasks. Of course it can. We made them replicable. We cleaned them up, standardised them, made them legible and transferable. We accidentally made the case, over decades of process improvement, that the human wasn’t strictly necessary.

The AI is not the cause of the crisis. It is the moment the bill arrives.

Knowledge workers carry a particular version of this wound.

Unlike people in roles that were never promised to be meaningful, who had quietly made peace, in some part of themselves, with the gap between their work and its significance, knowledge workers built their professional identity on meaning. The work was supposed to matter. You went into law to argue for something. Into journalism to tell stories that needed telling. Into strategy to shape decisions that would affect real things. The meaning wasn’t incidental. It was the whole premise.

When that connection frays, you don’t just lose motivation. You lose the story you were telling about yourself.

Colamedici puts it sharply: the machine takes from white-collar workers what they already knew they had lost. But it takes from knowledge workers what they thought they still had. The economic blow and the identity blow arrive together. And the identity blow is the one that lingers.

This is why what is my value here, actually? is so difficult to sit with. It sounds like a professional question. It is, in fact, an existential one.

And yet. The answer exists. It just isn’t where most people look for it.

We have been trained, by self-help culture, by every “find your why” exercise ever inflicted on a conference audience, to believe that meaning is something you locate inside yourself. That if you dig deep enough and reflect hard enough, you will find it waiting there, solid and immune to organisational chaos.

This is not how meaning works.

Meaning is relational. It lives in the space between what you do and who receives it. Remove the receiver, or find yourself surrounded by people who can no longer recognise what you’re offering, and even the most skilled, most purposeful work goes silent. Not because it isn’t good. Because nothing on the other end is catching it.

This is uncomfortable to accept. But it is also, if you let it be, clarifying.

Because it means the question is not am I still good at this? It is: who actually needs what I have, and am I close enough to them to know?

That is a question you can work with. That is a question that points somewhere real.

Early cartographers, when they reached the edge of the known world, didn’t leave the page blank. They drew sea monsters. Not because anyone had seen them, but because blankness was intolerable. The unknown became populated with dread rather than possibility.

Knowledge workers do the same thing. When the role loses its shape, when the value isn’t legible, when the old certainties have dissolved and new ones haven’t formed, the blankness fills with a particular internal noise. I’m not contributing enough. Something is wrong with me. Maybe I’ve already done my best work.

But the monster is not in the territory. It is in the discomfort of not knowing.

The people who navigate this well are not the ones who resolve the uncertainty faster. They are the ones who get curious about it. Who treat the blankness not as evidence of failure but as the actual frontier, the place where something new could be drawn, if you stayed long enough and paid close enough attention.

The question what is my value here? is not a crisis. It is a compass. It is pointing you toward the conversation you haven’t had yet, with the people who could actually tell you what they need.

Colamedici ends his piece with a political argument: that this crisis cannot be solved by better personal habits or smarter prompt engineering. That individualising a structural problem, telling people to be more resilient, more adaptable, more mindful, is a way of avoiding the real question, which is what kind of society we want to build now that producing things requires less and less human time.

He is right. And I want to add something to that.

There is also an inner reconstruction to do. Not the self-optimisation kind, not another framework, not a morning routine, not a values exercise. Something quieter and more demanding than that.

It is the practice of asking, regularly and honestly: is what I am doing connected to something that actually lands? Not to metrics. Not to output. Not to the quarterly cycle of proving you were present and productive. But to a human being, somewhere, whose situation is different because of what you did.

That connection, between effort and effect, between work and the world that receives it, is what was lost in the conversion of activities into tasks. It is what needs to be rebuilt. Not at the level of policy, though policy matters. At the level of how you spend a Tuesday. What you choose to make legible and what you choose to protect from legibility. Where you let the slow, untrackable, irreplaceable activity back in.

The task is not to find your passion. It is to find the receiver.

And if your work isn’t landing anywhere, that, at least, is something you can start to change.

This piece was inspired by Andrea Colamedici’s essay “Perché non ti va più di lavorare” (Why You Don’t Feel Like Working Anymore), published on Tlon in April 2026. If you read Italian, go find it. It is one of the most honest pieces of writing about work and meaning I have encountered in a long time.