A job doesn’t have to be your passion to have meaning. Feeding your family is plenty of meaning.

The idea that work must be a calling is recent and expensive. Measured against it most jobs look like failures, including the ones that keep households running. Meaning can come from the purpose a job serves rather than from the tasks themselves. Someone who dislikes their shifts and takes care of three people with the money is not living a meaningless life.

Separate two questions when you think about work: do I enjoy this, and what does it make possible. Both matter and they are not the same question. A strong answer to the second is enough to stop apologizing for the first.