I have a good job, but something does not fit: when meaning is what is missing

There is a conversation that repeats itself, with variations, in coaches' consultations, in therapy sessions, at Friday dinner tables, and, above all, in internal monologues on the way home. A person in their late thirties, or early forties, says something like this:

"I have everything. A good job, a reasonable salary, autonomy, decent bosses, I do something I know how to do and that is valued. I can't complain. But I've had this strange feeling for months, maybe a year, that I don't fit into my own life. It's not anxiety. It's not depression. I'm not burned out. It's as if what I do every day doesn't really serve any purpose that truly matters to me."

If that description sounds familiar, you are not alone. And it is worth saying it slowly because often, in the midst of that feeling, what is felt most is bewilderment: if everything is fine, why do I feel this way?

The short answer is this: having a good job and having meaning are different things. They have been all along. The thing is, for a long time, we were sold the idea that the former brought the latter. And it is not true.

The malaise that has no clear symptom

The first thing to acknowledge is that this malaise is difficult to name. It does not resemble acute distress. It does not stop you from functioning. It does not show up in blood tests. You get through Mondays reasonably well, you lose a few nights thinking about vague things, you keep replying to emails, you keep going to meetings, you keep delivering projects. On the outside, everything is working. On the inside, there is like a constant shadow. A slight sensation that you are complying, but not inhabiting.

This discrepancy has an old name. And it is worth rescuing, because modern language falls short.

Juan Manuel de Prada calls it, without mincing words, an illness of the soul. The phrase may sound archaic, but his intuition is exact: there are malaises that are not chemical disorders, or neurological imbalances, or typical clinical cases. They are something else. "The health of the soul has to do with leading ways of life that our soul perceives as hospitable". And, he adds, "if our spiritual life is in contradiction with, is oppressed by, or is destroyed by our external life, that causes a crisis, that leads to a collapse. It is only natural".

He has an almost comical image to explain it: "if we want to have a long mane of hair but we shave our head to the skin every week, we are not going to have a long mane of hair". In other words: if we expect to have a dense, connected, meaningful inner life, but the life we lead every day is systematically emptied of that, there is no mystery as to why something inside is wrong. It is not our failure. It is a predictable consequence.

Applied to a successful working life: you can have an objectively good job and yet have it be a job that feeds nothing that your inner life needs. It is not the job's fault. It is not your fault. It is just that you were speaking different languages without knowing it.

Why this usually arrives between 35 and 45

For years, motivation works on its own. You learn, you get promoted, you earn a little more each year, you build a team. You don't have time to ask yourself if this fulfills you because you are too busy becoming someone competent.

And then comes a plateau. You have already mastered the processes. You already know your sector. There is no obvious next milestone. On that plateau—which in career terms sounds great, "consolidation"—there appears the mental space for a question you hadn't had time to ask yourself for years: what is this that I am doing for?

Before, there was an automatic answer: to get to the next level. Now you are already there. The question is left floating without an answer. That is why it is precisely at this age—when your CV looks its best—that many people begin to feel this form of emptiness. It is not ingratitude or impostor syndrome: it is that you have arrived where they told you you had to arrive, and nobody told you what comes next.

The mistake of looking for the solution in the wrong place

When this malaise appears, the first thing most of us do is look for the solution in the same layer where the symptom appeared. If I feel bad at work, it must be a work problem. I change companies. I change positions. I take a sabbatical. I launch into freelancing.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes, surprisingly, it doesn't. You know of cases: the friend who left the consultancy to set up her agency and two years later is doing worse. The former colleague who left for a multinational with a brutal salary and returned six months later with a dull gaze. It is not that they made the wrong choice: it is that the problem was not in the choice.

What Juan Manuel de Prada points out—and it is worth taking seriously even if it sounds like another era—is that spiritual life is not a decorative layer over material life. It is the condition for material life not to feel empty. And spiritual life, he says carefully so that it is not misinterpreted, "does not mean that we have to start meditating, that we have to isolate ourselves, live in who knows where, no". It is something simpler and more demanding: spiritual life "is born from the conformity of the soul with the body and of our being with the world".

Which, translated to 2026, means something very concrete: if you have spent seven years investing 70% of your waking hours in tasks that do not feed any part of you other than the professional one, the problem is not that your job is bad. The problem is that you are malnourished in everything else. And no matter how much you change jobs, the hunger will still be there.

Before changing anything, look at what you already have

Here enters Francesc Pujol, university professor and author of Escribir para Crecer (Writing to Grow). His proposal is not romantic, it is methodical. And it connects with surprising precision with the problem before us.

Pujol starts from an uncomfortable observation: most adult professionals spend our days without truly looking at our days. We live on autopilot. And then, when something doesn't work, we try to solve it with major decisions without having first observed the small things. His practice is the opposite. He calls it reflective writing, and it consists of something seemingly modest: every night, before going to sleep, writing down two or three significant moments of the day. Not the most spectacular ones. The most significant ones. "One line per idea", he says. Without literary pretensions.

The elderly lady who smiled at you as you crossed the crosswalk. The fifteen-minute conversation with a colleague that ended up in something you hadn't thought about for a long time. The decision you made without procrastinating, for the first time in weeks. Those. The ones that normally evaporate because they don't seem "transcendent".

What for? So that in two or three months, upon rereading it, you begin to see what can only be seen by repeating the action: where your zone of value really is, what things spark you, what kind of conversations leave you changed, what type of contribution of yours seems to have an effect on other people. These are not hypotheses. They are data about you, collected by you, without the distortions of the feed.

Pujol puts it this way: "by recording it and letting it settle, by leaving a trace of that moment, what we are doing is, little by little, making valuable those things that make up our life, that are our biography, and that we let pass by". And he adds a crucial nuance: we tend to think that meaning, purpose, the big questions, "are far away, in very big things, or are for later, for tomorrow". And no. It is here, today, in what you are already doing and are not seeing.

That is the concrete practice to begin getting out of this. Before the big decision, the honest inventory.

What comes next is not an answer, it is a conversation

I am not going to sell you that three months of reflective writing will resolve a malaise that you have been dragging for a year. What they do is something more useful: they give you back the conversation with yourself. And that conversation, maintained over time, is the only thing that throughout the centuries has proven to help with this.

Perhaps you will discover that what fulfills you is not your job, but the two times a month you mentor someone young. Perhaps you will see that the problem is not what you do, but with whom, for what company, or under which boss. Perhaps you will realize that your professional life is fine but you have let everything else die—friends, exercise, reading, cooking, long-term relationships—and that is what needs to be rescued. Any of those conclusions is more valuable than a company change decided in the heat of the moment.

A life that the soul recognizes as hospitable

Go back to the beginning. That person in their late thirties saying "I can't complain, but something doesn't fit". What that person is saying, without fully knowing it, is exactly this: I have built an external life that my inner life does not recognize as its own. It is in silent contradiction with itself. And contradiction, maintained over time, is exhausting.

The way out is neither a sabbatical nor a pill nor a weekend spiritual retreat. The way out is to begin leading, little by little, a life that your soul can recognize as hospitable. Work included. But not only work.

That takes time. It takes conversations. It takes a notebook. It takes patience. It probably takes some change, but made from another layer, from the accumulated honesty of having looked.

It is not romantic. It is practical. And, looked at closely, it is the only serious thing you can do with the next decade of your life.