Jobs that are satisfying enough
to be self-fulfilling are quite rare,
assuming they exist at all.
Possibly for someone like Jonas Salk, some teachers, doctors or others who make a difference for humankind by their work there is enough meaning in that work; but for the vast majority (and particularly for us desk jockeying, paper-shuffling, pencil-pushers) the work we do although possibly important in a given space and time has very little meaning in the big picture.
By big picture I mean the big picture of what my life looks like on my deathbed looking back. A job is a way to make a living, hopefully you do your best, can enjoy, be interested and challenged most of the time, but for most of us it's a tiny piece of the cosmos. The real lasting effect most of us have on the world, our legacy, is not what job we have - but our family, and not limited only to family but our relationships with other people in general.
Work can be self-consuming, and not always in a good way. A job can eat away your self/soul until you are left as a shell or in extreme cases just a pile of dried up bones under a desk ;-)
Self-consuming in the sense that they may cause people to give up marriages, family, real friends or any other sense of being other than I am my "job". Self-consuming in the sense that we define our value as a human being to be strongly correlated to our job (or worse a job title).
Life is short, jobs come and go (if you are lucky), or maybe if you are really lucky you find a job and hold it for your whole adult life and it's everything you wanted.
For young people the likelyhood of finding and holding on to the same job for life are slim. The world is changing much to rapidly to assume that a job/career/occupation is going to last a lifetime. The world needs knowledge workers, people able to adapt, to think, who can deal with ambiguity and hold opposing truths in tension.
