You might be missing a sense of purpose.

This is often the case in the capitalist corporate environment, where you should align your motives along the direction set by the CEO. If you can't do that (whatever the reason), you won't feel happy at work.

Now of course, in a capitalist corporate setting there are a lot of reasons why you may not be able to align your motives to that of the CEO, for obvious and less obvious reasons. Books are written about that.

See for example:

- Capitalisme, désir et servitude (2010) Frédéric Lordon

- L'être contre l'avoir (2012) Francis Cousin

Essentially, corporations are there to make money for the C*O and for the shareholders. Anything else is purely accidental and out of their real scope. This can indeed leave a sense of void.

You may try to find a corporation that has a real purpose, like, put a colony on Mars, or develop fusion energy. But as soon as they start to show sign of success, they're eaten by capitalists that then change their purpose. A very good example of that is Apple, which started to become successful with the Macintosh, and then the capitalists took over, fired Steve Jobs, and lead Apple to the catastroph with eventually a capitalization of -400M, when NeXTcomputer Inc took it back. But since then nothing happened at Apple, but the accumulation of capital: all you're sold today has been developped at the early Apply Computer Inc. from Xerox PARC stuff and at NeXTcomputer Inc from stuff invented at various other places (Avi Tevanian invented Mach at Carnegie Mellon University, Brad Cox and Tom Love invented Objective C at their company Stepstone Inc, and Bernard Hulo invented Interface Builder (written in ExpertLisp) while at the INRIA).

There are almost no capitalist corporation where you can have a real purpose, and invent or develop new stuff, by necessity, because use of money as final decision maker. Cf. "law of averages" in Ainsi marchait l'humanité, Jean-François Geneste.

And the situation is rather hopeless, given the current state of academia and academic research too.

You might think that you can just work for the money, and then create happiness at home working on your own projects. But you would subestimate the soulsuckingness of corporations. Realize that you are much poorer than your grand parents or great grand parents: they had a land to cultivate and to live on. You probably don't. Before the industrial "revolution" and before the capitalists forbid people to use the communal terrains for their food production, people lived well working much less than now. We've been robben of our means of survival, and forced to work as slave in corporations. You need to find a way to free yourself from this system, and this means, you need to re-acquire the autonomous means to your survival; land, culture, livestock. Buy some cheap place with a garden to grow your own food. Add some solar panels and an Internet connection, and you'll be ready to work freely on your own projects.

http://www.amazon.fr/Capitalisme-d%C3%A9sir-servitude-Fr%C3%...

http://www.amazon.fr/L%C3%AAtre-contre-lavoir-Francis-Cousin...

http://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/2756311030/ref=oss_product

(And sorry for the French book references, I know no English translations for them, and I know of no equivalent in English).