What if work isn't supposed to feel good?
Viktor Frankl
Frankl's claim is that you were never primarily after pleasure — that the deepest human drive is toward meaning, and that people will endure remarkable conditions when they have a reason and collapse quickly when they do not.
He called this the , set deliberately against Freud's pleasure principle and Adler's will to power. The clinical version, , treats a patient less by resolving their past than by locating something they are still answerable to.
Applied to work, it reframes the question. Asking whether your job makes you happy may be the wrong test — a job can be tiring, unglamorous and genuinely difficult while being something you are answerable to, and that combination sustains people far better than comfort does. What does not sustain anyone is comfort without a reason.
Frankl also insisted meaning is found in the particular rather than in general: not the meaning of life but what this situation is asking of you now. That makes it available in ordinary work in a way that grand purpose is not.
The obvious pressure on this: it is uncomfortably convenient for anyone who would like you to accept a hard job. Frankl earned it in circumstances that put the claim beyond cheapness. Whether it survives being repeated by someone who has not is a different matter.