There’s a seductive narrative around meaningful work that goes something like this: once you find work that truly matters to you, everything gets better. You’ll be happier, more engaged, more fulfilled. Your stress will decrease because you’ll be doing what you love. Work-life balance will improve because you won’t resent the time you’re investing.
It’s a compelling story. It’s also incomplete.
In Smart Careers, Jess Annison dedicates an entire chapter to what she calls “the dark sides” of meaningful work—the unintended negative consequences that can emerge specifically because you care deeply about what you do. As she bluntly states: “Meaningful work is no silver bullet.”
This isn’t about dampening enthusiasm or suggesting you shouldn’t pursue fulfilling work. The benefits of meaningful work are real and substantial. But navigating those benefits sustainably requires acknowledging and preparing for the ways that caring deeply about your work can create its own challenges.
The Paradox: Caring More Creates More Stress
The first dark side Annison identifies is counterintuitive: meaningful work can actually increase work-related stress.
Most people assume the relationship works the opposite way—that stress comes from work you don’t care about, and finding meaning reduces stress. While that’s sometimes true, research reveals a more complex pattern. When you find your work deeply meaningful, you become more emotionally invested in outcomes. You care more deeply about success and failure. You hold yourself and your organization to higher standards.
As one person describes in the book: “I really care about it. I want it to do well and have the impact I know it can have. But I guess that also brings a layer of pressure too. Responsibility… the stakes feel higher. And when things don’t go to plan, I feel a bit more frustrated.”
This heightened investment means setbacks hit harder. A project that doesn’t get approved, a initiative that gets deprioritized, organizational politics that constrain your impact—these frustrations feel more acute when you’re deeply invested in the work’s purpose. When you don’t particularly care about your job, you can shrug off obstacles. When you do care, those same obstacles can feel devastating.
The frustration is often compounded by the gap between what you know is possible and what organizational realities allow. As Annison notes, “We might also hold ourselves and our organizations to higher standards, leading to further frustration if those expectations aren’t met for whatever reason.”
A doctor describes his workload as a “bottomless pit of meaningful work”—there was always more he could do, always more impact he could have, making it difficult to know when he’d done enough.
The Overwork Trap: When Meaningful Becomes Excessive
The second dark side is closely related: meaningful work makes it harder to maintain boundaries. When you care deeply about what you do, working extra hours doesn’t feel like a sacrifice—it feels like a choice you’re making to pursue something important.
This can start subtly. You check email in the evening because you’re genuinely interested in the response to something you sent. You work on weekends because you’re excited about a project and want to move it forward. You struggle to switch off because your mind keeps returning to interesting problems or opportunities.
Over time, these choices compound. The occasional late evening becomes a pattern. The boundary between work time and personal time becomes increasingly porous. Your partner or children start commenting on your distraction during family time. You notice you’re not exercising as much, not seeing friends as regularly, not making time for hobbies that used to matter to you.
Research shows this clearly: people who find their work meaningful are more likely to work longer hours, both because they choose to and because they feel the work warrants the extra effort. As Annison writes, “Finding work meaningful can lead to working extra hours and it feeling harder to switch off outside of those hours.”
The insidious part is that because you genuinely care about the work, it’s easy to rationalize the imbalance. You’re not working extra hours because someone’s forcing you to. You’re doing it because it matters. But the long-term costs to your health, relationships, and overall well-being are the same regardless of the reason.
Relationship Strain: When Work Competes With People Who Matter
The third dark side emerges from the first two: when meaningful work increases your stress and absorbs more of your time and attention, your personal relationships suffer.
No one likes feeling they’re competing with their partner’s job for attention. Children don’t appreciate that dad is distracted during dinner because he’s thinking about an important work project. Friends eventually stop inviting you to things if you’re always canceling or showing up but being mentally elsewhere.
As Annison notes, over time increased stress or overwork “can have significant negative knock-on consequences for personal relationships with partners, children and close friends.” She points to research showing that meaningful work can create what’s called “work-relationship turmoil”—conflict and emotional distance in personal relationships specifically because of how invested you are in your work.
This creates a painful irony. Many people pursue meaningful work partly because they want to be better partners, better parents, better friends—they want the time they spend working to feel worthwhile rather than wasted. But if that meaningful work pulls them away from relationships or makes them less present when they are there, they end up worse off on the dimension they were trying to improve.
One person in the book describes implementing a creative solution: “Emily starts ‘handing in’ her work mobile to her daughter in the evenings” to enforce boundaries. But the fact that such measures become necessary reveals the underlying challenge.
The Financial Trade-Off: Accepting Less Because It Matters More
Research shows that 90 percent of people would accept lower pay in return for finding their work more fulfilling. On one level, this makes sense—money is a means to an end, and if work provides non-financial rewards like purpose and satisfaction, some financial trade-off can feel worthwhile.
But Annison flags this as a potential dark side because the financial impact compounds over time, and organizations can potentially exploit people’s desire for meaningful work to keep wages artificially low.
As she writes, “This can be particularly damaging if there’s a sense that the organization is manipulating their people’s sense of purpose to keep wages low.” Teachers, social workers, nonprofit employees—people in traditionally “meaningful” sectors often earn significantly less than they could in other fields, and that wage differential is sometimes justified by the assumption that the meaning compensates for the money.
Over years and decades, earning less adds up. It affects your ability to buy a home, save for retirement, provide for your family, or handle unexpected financial shocks. And if the pay sacrifice is combined with one or more of the other dark sides—high stress, long hours, relationship strain—resentment can build.
The challenge is distinguishing between a reasonable trade-off (accepting somewhat lower pay for work that genuinely fulfills you in other ways) and exploitation (being underpaid because the organization knows you care too much to leave).
Tolerating Poor Conditions Because the Work Matters
The final dark side Annison identifies is perhaps the most troubling: when work feels meaningful, we sometimes accept work environments or organizational cultures that are uncomfortable, unpleasant, or even unsafe.
This might be physical discomfort—working in inadequate facilities, being exposed to difficult weather, performing physically demanding work without proper support. Or it might be emotional and psychological discomfort—supporting people in distressing circumstances, enduring a toxic boss, operating in an environment with low psychological safety.
Research on zookeepers provides a striking example. Many zookeepers find their work deeply meaningful—they’re contributing to conservation, caring for animals, educating the public. But the work often involves low pay, physically demanding tasks, exposure to weather, and potential danger from animals. The meaningfulness leads people to accept conditions they wouldn’t tolerate in work they cared less about.
Annison emphasizes that “negative consequences like stress, overwork and low pay are clearly not exclusive to meaningful jobs: they’re experienced in plenty of meaningless jobs too.” The difference is that in meaningless work, poor conditions make you want to leave. In meaningful work, the very meaningfulness can make you stay despite the conditions, telling yourself the purpose justifies the cost.
Navigating the Dark Sides: Awareness and Action
Annison’s argument isn’t that these dark sides mean you shouldn’t pursue meaningful work. The benefits still far outweigh the costs for most people. But you need to be aware of the potential downsides and actively manage them.
The first step is simply recognizing when you’re experiencing a dark side. This sounds obvious, but modern lives are busy enough that it’s easy to miss the gradual slide from occasional late nights to chronic overwork, or from occasional frustration to persistent stress. Building regular reflection into your routine—weekly or monthly check-ins with yourself about your wellbeing, work-life balance, and stress levels—helps you notice patterns before they become entrenched.
Second, you need to understand how the dark side relates to the meaningfulness of your work. Is the stress you’re experiencing exacerbated by how much you care? Are you working long hours primarily because the work matters to you, or are there other factors like poor organizational planning or unreasonable expectations? This diagnosis helps you determine appropriate responses.
Third, monitor the dark side over time rather than reacting to any single instance. A stressful week happens. Working late for an important deadline is reasonable. The question is whether stress or overwork becomes chronic rather than episodic. The Dark Side Diary exercise Annison provides helps with this tracking.
Fourth, take action to mitigate what you can control and influence while accepting what you can’t. You might not be able to change organizational factors causing stress, but you can control how you respond—through reframing, boundary-setting, or seeking support. You might not be able to eliminate all sources of overwork, but you can make deliberate choices about which evenings are protected family time.
The Importance of Non-Work Meaning
Perhaps the most important strategy for managing meaningful work’s dark sides is one that exists outside of work entirely: cultivating other sources of meaning in your life.
As Annison concludes her chapter on dark sides: “Finally, having non-work sources of meaning in our lives is the most powerful tool for keeping meaningful work’s downsides in check. Whether it’s family, friends, community work, hobbies or spirituality, having a meaningful life helps us keep perspective.”
When work is your only source of meaning, you’re vulnerable to all of the dark sides in their most acute forms. There’s nothing to balance against work, no competing priority that helps you maintain perspective, no other domain where you can find fulfillment when work is frustrating.
But when you have a rich life outside of work—relationships that matter to you, hobbies that energize you, community involvement that connects you to something larger—those other sources of meaning act as both ballast and boundary. They help you maintain perspective when work gets stressful. They give you reasons to protect your time and energy rather than pouring everything into your job. They ensure that even when work is going poorly, you’re not entirely depleted because you’re still experiencing meaning and connection elsewhere.
The Balanced Reality: Both/And Not Either/Or
The mature understanding of meaningful work that Annison advocates for is fundamentally both/and rather than either/or. Meaningful work is tremendously valuable and worth pursuing—and it comes with challenges that need active management. It improves well-being and performance—and it can create stress and boundary issues. It makes work feel more worthwhile—and it can make frustrations feel more acute.
Acknowledging these complexities doesn’t diminish the case for meaningful work. It just makes your pursuit of it more sustainable and realistic. You’re not expecting meaning to solve all your work problems. You’re not assuming that finding your calling means everything becomes easy.
Instead, you’re going into it clear-eyed, aware that the benefits are substantial but not unlimited, and prepared to actively navigate the challenges that emerge specifically from caring about what you do.
As Annison notes, “While we’re not likely to avoid the dark sides entirely, we can be alert to them and manage them, now and in the future.” That’s not a disclaimer—it’s essential wisdom for anyone serious about building a sustainably fulfilling career.