The challenge to make work truly good has a number of aspects.

• There needs to be work available that genuinely addresses global needs, not just what people want on the surface.
• The working environment needs to meet the needs of the people working there.
• The work needs to be satisfying to the person working.
• The person needs to be able to do the work. This needs learning (or training) of some sort.

Or compare the three principles that the unusual organisation Unlike Minds, founded by my dear acquaintance David Dickinson, proposed as the touchstones of good work:

1. Make a difference
2. Have fun
3. Make enough money to enable 1 and 2.

Put these together, and it all looks quite like collective ikigai, and that is no coincidence.

How can ReGenMatch address this? Maybe the easiest explanation is to ask, what work would you most like to do? Different people will most likely have different ways to answer this, but here is what I would like.

• The work needs to be contributing something meaningful or significant to the world.
• It needs to provide for my economic needs.
• It should be appreciated or valued by people who can give me that feedback — that is, people who know both me and the work.
• Ideally, it should be something that feels like it needs just me to do it: something that no one else could do as well as I could. But I don't feel this is absolutely necessary, just desirable.

So, we need to envisage a world where people are able to get together to address the challenges that need to be addressed. (I don't need to give a long list starting with climate …) This is something that can only grow. As opportunities to do this kind of good work emerge, more and more people will choose to take it up. This depends on being able to bring together just the right people to make viable the organisations within which this good work can be done.

In essence, it's another matching problem. ReGenMatch can (and I hope, will) grow into serving that. It's about finding a job that really fits a person well. And with this service in place, I expect that jobs that don't fit people well will slowly but surely start to disappear.

We need to envisage a world where people can more easily learn the knowledge and skills needed. That's what learning is about.

We need to envisage a world where people are not stuck in dysfunctional patterns ­— either they have been brought up in a family life that is more healthy than the present norm, or they hve done the self-development needed to bring out the innate capacities to help each other and collaborate.

When there is good work to be done, perhaps it can best be done around a co-living situation, where people don't have to commute to work; where they are learning and practising living the kinds of skills that help them all to be collaborative; co-creative.