Yet again, you're right inside my head!!
Things I do need to have meaning, I need to see and feel where they fit into a bigger picture, how they enable progress towards a meaningful goal not just for my life but sorta making a difference in the world, leaving a legacy if you will. If I can't see this, then whatever I do, however superficially exciting - I'm bored, because it seems pointless to me.
I think this could be one reason why I could never do the career in paid employment thing... I've been successful at self-employment because I could determine my own 'promotional ladder' as it were... but I could never do entry level stuff for long. For a while I was for example, photocopying the service sheets for my local church - a dull, routine, unchallenging and boring task. But I was able to do it for a while quite happily, only by reminding myself about how it fitted into the whole, how it enabled bigger things to happen that I believed in. Once I questioned those things though and couldn't believe they were happening any more, my work felt pointless and I just couldn't bear to do it, I'd come home at the end of a working morning and feel really profoundly depressed - as I say it had taken all my persuasion skills turned onto myself to keep doing it anyway, but once the meaning was lost I just couldn't do it a second longer and just quit without notice.
I've had the same thing with jobs... I could go in at entry level and sustain interest as long as I believed a) the job I was currently doing was an important tile in a bigger mosaic that I believed in and was happy to help with enabling its continuing existence and b) it was a necessary step in a direction I wanted to go in and would enable progress for me in that direction. As soon as I had reason to question those points, the job became intolerable.