Sometimes, in the face of extraordinary events, work can feel irrelevant or even kind of silly. A pair of researchers featured in the Harvard Business Review, drawing on people's reactions to the 9/11 attacks on New York and the SARS epidemic in Toronto, found that, rather than fixating on massive problems that made them feel small and powerless, people were able to inject meaning and purpose in their lives by focusing on the small things within their control.

For instance, the researchers found that some people were able to give their work new meaning by recontextualizing it within the current crisis, such as a banker they interviewed who reframed his job as keeping his company strong in defiance of terrorists who wanted to do economic damage to the country. They noted that even if someone doesn't have the skills that seem most needed (such as doctors and nurses today), there are many ways to apply one's skill set to the problem at hand, such as using one's accounting expertise to help an aid organization.

However, fighting a sense of meaninglessness and helplessness need not be done solely on the job. Volunteer work, they researchers found, can also prove an effective balm, such as the case of a woman who began donating sandwiches to first responders at Ground Zero. This eventually snowballed into running an ad hoc volunteer organization of hundreds of people.

People also find meaning by reevaluating their own goals and direction in a crisis. In one case, the former head of a telecommunications company, after 9/11, began focusing more on community development and charitable work. Ultimately he founded a nonprofit with his wife that provides entrepreneurship, employment, and character development training to currently and formerly incarcerated men and women.

The researchers said we do not choose our circumstances, but we do choose what we do within them. In this sense, they say, meaning and purpose is not something we either do or do not have, but something we create ourselves through our own efforts.