The Dream Job Asks One Employer to Do Too Much
Research on careers and motivation points somewhere less romantic than the phrase suggests: the difficulty may not be that people fail to find purpose, but that they have been taught to expect a single job to supply meaning, identity, financial security and personal fulfillment all at once, according to a piece in The Conversation Canada. It's a job description for a life, not a role.
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The target is the expectation, not the ambition. Wanting work to mean something isn't the problem; asking one job to carry meaning, identity and security simultaneously is where the strain comes from.
'Expect less from one job' is a comfortable lesson if your pay and your purpose aren't already tangled together. For plenty of people, the dream-job story is less a trap than the only story on offer.