Hear you, but I think you’re over emphasizing the importance of work to self in most corporate/for profit environments. We are just a cog, and a very replaceable cog. It’s easy to over exaggerate how important you/we are in a corp with billions in revenue and hundreds of millions in profit.
You're quite right, that we're just cogs. But to illustrate the
personal element, consider an example. Rufus is a mechanical engineer at Boeing. He started at Boeing as a college intern, ending up in the fuselage structural design section. At Boeing, he learned finite-elements analysis, weldments, composite layup and composite-metal joining. Later, he moved to the landing gear unit, where he worked on hydraulic struts and structural design for landing gear hard points.
After 15 years, Boeing downsized Rufus. The company did just fine without him, and soon he was forgotten.
Rufus was unemployed for 6 months, eventually signing-on with Scaled Composites, a small/boutique aeronautical manufacturer. He was there for 10 years. He led a team that did the landing gear for the company's latest demonstrator, mentoring younger engineers and even getting a patent for a landing gear design... retracts that fold neatly into the wing/body junction, which have a simple safety mechanism to unfold in case of hydraulic/electrical failure. But then, he had an argument with management, and got fired.
For a few months, Scaled Composites struggled without Rufus, and his teammates missed him. But after more personnel changes, the company moved on. Rufus, after an even longer period of unemployment, moved across the country to work for Gulfstream Aerospace. At Gulfstream, he developed a new idea for a wing torsion-box that structurally integrated his earlier landing gear idea. He wrote a paper on the concept, presenting it to his engineering professional society, winning the award that year for "best paper". He also mentored a cohort of junior engineers, one of whom went on to do a PhD thesis at the local university, in consultation with Rufus.
But the good times didn't last. Management became more and more crotchety, Rufus felt marginalized, and one day, realizing that he'd hit FI long ago, Rufus resigned. He now sits at home, mostly surfing the internet.
In no case was Rufus irreplaceable. With a few personal exceptions, he wasn't even much missed. The companies for which he worked, went on just fine without him. But along the way, he influenced people in profound ways. He invented things, developed things, patented things. His professional peers recognized him. His name entered the history of his profession, affixed to innovative and seminal advances in design. Though he was never particularly important to his employers, his employers were important to him... less for the paycheck, than for the peer-interaction, the opportunity for interesting work, the chance to learn new things, and to contribute to his profession.
20 years later, Rufus, now an elderly man, is watching TV in the nursing home lounge. He sees a news program showing an aircraft making an emergency landing in a field. It uses his system for retracts! The aircraft lost all power, and the pilots were desperate.... but because of the engineering work that Rufus and his team had done, all 170 people onboard survived the landing. Rufus may never have been much thanked by Boeing, Scaled or Gulfstream, but he just saved 170 lives.... something that he couldn't have done, had he retired "prematurely".
R : life always throws curveballs.
