You've been asked "Why do you do what you do?" and...

...this is something I've been noticing through out my entire life. At first I did not pay attention, then thanks to one of the nastiest people I remember it pierced me with meaning - the question "Why do you do what you do?"
Have you ever and been asked
What is the purpose the work you do at your job?
Every big corp office worker in his twenties will sigh now.
The purpose of my work is...to open the DB, run an SQL query to extract the bit of data, put it in an Excel file, run a macro and send it to a distribution list
You see startled looks and enjoy yourself for a second of great technical reign and glory! But then that smug, young girlfriend of your mate will fire the inevitable:
So, what is it exactly that you do? What's it for?
And here you have a choice - to bore everybody with long and tiresome narrative analysis of this question because you don't know the straight answer, or simply lie that it's important...unless, you don't care what you do in life and this job is nothing but earning money (which is a dogshit statement if you're in your twenties)...YOU HATE WHEN THEY ASK WHY, DON'T YOU?
Shit...it's hard to admit that you don't have the slightest idea of what the hell are you doing among this half-a-million bunch of robots that all work to earn billions for a huge monster evil corp. And your small moments of pride are gone when you start seeing your more stupid (in your opinion of course) friends get more money, better jobs, showing results...here, I said this word.
RESULTS
It took me years to understand this - when you wave off parties, nice, careless evenings spent with mates partying, the only thing that matters in the end is your own result. What can you show, what can you do, what do you know...and the only person to see the benefit of being able to demonstrate this is YOU. You will feel better if when someone asks you:
What is the purpose of your work?
You'd say: I design motorboat engines for farmers or if you are into arts I build an eCommerce shop for a clothing brand etc etc etc....noone will ask you WHY or WHAT after that. You will be able to answer anything about it because you see the horizon and not a bunch of useless data bits.
I'd say, don't be afraid to ask yourself if you'd feel better to work as a fork-lift driver for sometime, or lay bricks, or work in a consumer store, or any of these jobs and communicate rather than sit in a cubicle all day, reading inspirational memos from your big evil corp. The atmosphere there provokes you to think about career and if your not successful there you'll find this monster pressing down on you and you'll end up in the shittiest department working 12 hours a day in the office and another 3 at home, just to avoid answering the question What is the purpose the work you do at your job?
I must say that I don't have hatred for big corps like IBM or Oracle...the problem with these places is their HR and capitalistic society that we all live in. An HR agent will hire you because she/he is a person and needs to cover deadlines even if you're not good for the job...and you'll get there, start working, without ANY CHANCE to develop because you're just not good for this job and you never asked yourself if you wanted it...it just happened that you got in. Maybe it's TIME TO GET OUT