Career disillusionment is not a new phenomenon. But it is becoming more visible, and it is arriving earlier. More professionals across industries are finding that the titles, the achievements and the stability they worked for are not producing the sense of meaning and fulfilment they expected. That gap between external success and internal satisfaction is what this session is about.
In this fireside conversation, Anurag, co-founder and CEO of Outsized, speaks with Will Finn, general counsel at ONE Championship and a researcher and teacher in Positive Psychology at the Viktor Frankl Institute, on the psychology of purpose, the danger of attaching identity to your employer and the practical ways to create space for meaning, even when your work is consuming everything.
Why career disillusionment is spreading across experience levels, and what the psychological research says about why this is a natural part of the human journey rather than a personal failing
The problem with attaching your identity and sense of worth to an employer, and why that attachment tends to destabilise when a career changes
Why purpose is not something you chase directly, and what Viktor Frankl and Irvin Yalom both agreed about how meaning actually arrives
How to hold a dissatisfying role in the right proportion, using Anurag's own experience of putting difficult work "in a box" to free up energy for what matters
Why the advice to quit everything and follow your passion can substitute one problem for another, and what a more sustainable approach actually looks like
How to distinguish burnout caused by overwork from the deeper signal of misalignment with your career path
What it means to pursue purpose from a place of wholeness rather than from a sense of lack, and why the starting point has to be self-reflection before action