by Jordan Fulghum, February 2026

What happens when you're shipping more than ever and feeling less than ever?

What is meaning

"Do what makes you happy" is bad advice that doesn't hold up to much scrutiny. Happiness comes and goes. Meaning is what carries you through the stretches when you're not happy.

I think meaning comes from three things:

Contribution is feeling like what you do improves something besides yourself. Building something that lasts, helping people grow, solving problems that matter to you, etc..

Engagement is deep work that actually challenges you. Your skill matched to the difficulty. Clear feedback w/ a sense of progress. Time disappears!

Belonging is the relational part. People in your life who would notice if you stopped showing up. A shared mission. Being known.

You need all three; weirdly, for awhile there, software engineering provided all three without anyone having to think about it.

The accidental meaning machine

Think about what an engineering job gave you beyond a paycheck. You had a physical place with people in it. Lunch with coworkers. Context shared & absorbed just by being around others like you. Things learned in code review from the person next to you. In short, belonging.

Then there was the work. Hopefully you had came across some hard technical problems. That feeling of staring at a bug for two hours and then finally getting it. The slow accumulation of mastery over a codebase, a language, a framework. What I've heard called "the good suck" before.

In the best case, you shipped real products that real people used. You could look at something in the world and know you were part of why it existed. Contribution.

Engineers got all three just by going to work. We were lucky! That structure is coming apart now, very quickly.

The pillars of meaning have been quickly disappeared

Belonging went first. Remote work took it. When offices went away, the lunches, the hallway conversations, the whiteboard sessions, the after-work drinks went with them. Slack and Zoom are fine for transmitting information but terrible at transmitting belonging. You can collaborate remotely. You cannot really hang out remotely. Everyone knows this, even the people who prefer remote.

It was mostly survivable, though, because the other two pillars were still intact. You still sat down every day and wrestled with hard problems. The work still felt like yours.

Engagement is going now, quickly. AI is taking it. I've written before about how vibecoding took away the fun, about the difference between frontier fun and mastery fun. But the implications go further than just fun. If the struggle is where the engagement lived, and AI is removing the struggle, then AI is removing the thing that made the work feel absorbing. Productivity and output are up (I think, at least it feels like it!). However, the deep cognitive absorption, the hours of thinking hard and solving something yourself, is happening less and less. Honestly, I think it's completely gone now.

Contribution is getting shaky too. When you can't really say you built the thing that shipped, it's hard to feel like you're improving something outside yourself. You typed some words and 'directed an agent'. The product exists, but your fingerprints aren't really on it.

What's left

So I think here's where engineers are headed. Belonging is gone. Engagement is going. Contribution is basically gone too. For someone whose identity rested on all three, that's a lot to lose in a matter of weeks or months.

What remains is a person sitting alone in a room, headphones on, telling a machine what to build, watching it build the thing, and collecting a paycheck.

I suspect a lot of engineers are going to run into a "who am I and why does any of this matter" moment in the next couple of months, maybe year or so. The things that used to answer those questions were baked into the job, we took them for granted, and now they are rapidly disappearing.

Choosing instead of inheriting

For most of human history, people didn't get meaning from their jobs. They got it from family, faith, community, place. The idea that your career should provide your purpose is recent and fragile. I think software engineers are just losing a luxury most workers never had.

Three questions I find helpful:

• Contribution: What outcomes in the world would bother you if they never happened?
• Engagement: What activities make you forget to check the time?
• Belonging: Who would notice if you withdrew from their life?

The engineer who could coast on the job for all three is on borrowed time. The rest of it, we have to build ourselves.

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