For a while now, work hasn't felt meaningful. I used to love software engineering, but a lot has changed in the last few years, and somewhere in there the joy went out of it. Maybe I've changed too. Either way, I've caught myself mourning my chosen profession, trying to work out whether it's still salvageable.

When people are unhappy with their work, they usually want something concrete. More money. Maybe a promotion. But that's not what I'm after right now. Neither would fix it. What I'm after is harder to name. I want work that's engaging and interesting. I want it to mean something.

"Meaning" is a slippery word. Everyone wants it, but I'm not sure any two people share the same definition. I think you have to define it for yourself.

For me, meaning is something you make rather than find, and you make most of it by solving problems and helping people.

In talking with someone about this conundrum, they asked me a pointed question.

"What problems do you have?"

It's a good question. If that's where meaning comes from, then naming mine should point me toward what I've been missing.

I couldn't come up with a single one. At least not one that felt worth saying out loud.

I thought I'd feel proud of that.

I felt ashamed.

For a long time, I've believed that most of the problems we have are of our own making. We try to solve one problem, and end up layering on more, until we've lost sight of the one we started with.

Take human connection, and the "solution" of social media — a fix that I believe creates more problems than it solves.

I still think there's a lot of truth there. A lot of our problems are self-inflicted. They don't need to be solved so much as avoided entirely.

So that's what I did. I made it one of the core optimizations of my life: minimize the problems I have to deal with. Question whether a problem is actually worth solving, and if it isn't, find a way around it. Eliminate it.

And I was good at it. Maybe too good.

Because here's how you actually get to a place where you have no problems. You close yourself off. You only deal with what you absolutely have to. Sure, if someone asks for help, I'll help. But I don't go around looking for people to help. That would just be adding problems that aren't mine to my list.

And that's the part I'm most ashamed of. Because if meaning comes from solving problems and helping people, then closing myself off to both means I spent years optimizing away the exact thing I was looking for. I extinguished my own supply of meaning, efficiently, and called it success.

The strange part is that none of this leaves a mark. Avoidance doesn't leave a trace. You can't point to the friendships you didn't make, or the problems you never took on. The cost is real, but it's invisible by design. Which is probably why it took someone else's question to make me see it.

That's not the person I want to be.

My problem is not having a problem. And it's a pretty big fucking problem.

I don't think the old idea was wrong, exactly. Most of our self-made problems really can be let go. I'd just been aiming that idea in the wrong direction — inward, at my own life, until I'd cleared it of nearly everything. Aimed outward, it isn't a withdrawal at all. Helping someone see that a problem isn't one they need to carry is one of the better things you can do for a person. Same idea. Opposite direction. Completely different result.

I don't have it all worked out. But the shift is clear enough: to stop eliminating, and start looking.

So if you've got a problem you think I might be able to help with, let me know.