1: Introduction

For as long as I can remember, my life has been semi-regularly interrupted by a parade of existential crises. My earliest memories of these would have been in my early to mid teens. I’m 39 now, and they show no sign of abating.

As frequently as a couple of times a year, I’m overcome with internal conflicts and struggles. Questions about reason, purpose and meaning – and particularly, questions about my future and what I want it to be.

As is so often the case with the battles we fight inside our own heads, there’s a general sense of solitude and loneliness – driven by the belief that we’re somehow unique or special in these struggles. And, as is just as often the case, we’re completely wrong in believing we’re the only one of eight billion people to experience such an inner conflict.

This is the concept of ‘sonder’ – the realisation that everyone has their own inner struggles, their own shit going on. And it’s just as existential and uncomfortable as our own.

We’re all in this together, and everyone is fighting a battle we know nothing of. I’m really not that special.

Off the back of my latest ‘episode’, I’ve been fortunate enough to experience an alignment of various parts of my life that have led down a path to answering some of the more baffling paradoxes I face and the more pervasive questions I often ask myself.

I found myself experiencing an existential crisis, while simultaneously being exposed to some smart thinkers (authors, speakers, podcasters, thought leaders etc.) and having the opportunity to share my thoughts and struggles with others. As a business mentor and consultant, I spend around ten hours every week talking to small business owners about their struggles. And often, explorations and lessons from my own struggles make their way into these conversations.

After sharing the inner dialogue of my latest crisis through many conversations, I was surprised to find that, almost to a person, everyone I spoke with has their own inner ‘battles of meaning’ raging. Granted, a lot of the people I speak with are business owners and (at risk of sounding pretentious) entrepreneurs like me. And, while I don’t have any data on this, I’d hazard a guess that this population of people has a higher propensity to question their life and their future (maybe because they’re generally all ‘growth mindsetted’ and have a heightened sense of control over their internal and external world).

I think I rate highly in the personality variable ‘need for cognition’ – a tendency to be drawn towards deep thinking and analysis. If you’re reading this, maybe you do too.

So, in following the advice of Winston Churchill, I determined to ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ (not even an existential one).

I bought a blank notepad and spent many hours transcribing the nonsensical stream of consciousness of my inner voice onto paper – using writing as an attempt to organise my thoughts and ideas. As an attempt to ‘write my way through this’. This led me down the rabbit hole of studying the messages of many thinkers and philosophers.

As it stands now (and at risk of being overly hyperbolic) I think my explorations will prove to be life changing for me – but that’s something only the future can confirm.

This essay is the final result (or at least a working draft) of my own thoughts, and the thoughts of many others. This is for me, as a sort of ‘break in case of existential emergency’ letter to my future self. Judging by my conversations, it may resonate with others. But if not, that’s fine. Again, ultimately, this is for me.

An important comment at this stage. I realise that I’ll never actually ‘work this all out’, ‘solve life’ and ‘cure the human condition’. Eckhart Tolle tells us that ‘real wisdom doesn’t lie in getting life figured out, it lies in realising you never will get it figured out’. In fact, the description of the ‘human condition’ as a ‘condition’ that needs curing is equally a misnomer. ‘Life is not something to be dealt with’, says the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. And Oliver Burkeman tells us that ‘The world opens up when you realise you’re never going to sort your life out. Struggling to escape your demons is what gives them their power. Clinging to a particular version of a happy life while fighting to eliminate all possibility of an unhappy one was the cause of the problem, not its solution’.

And while I accept that I’ll never get it ‘figured out’, and never ‘find a cure’, it won’t stop me exploring. Because, as Oliver Burkeman says in his book ‘Meditations for Mortals’, ‘Grappling with all the problems is what life is fundamentally all about’.

He also tells us, ‘The activity of figuring things out is the substance of an absorbing life, not something you need to do in order to prepare for living.’ And as leading Buddhist thinkers say ‘Ultimately in life, happiness comes down to the decision between choosing to become aware of your mental afflictions or the decision to be ruled by them.’

• Here are the mental afflictions I want to become aware of, the questions I’ve entered this journey attempting to answer, and the problems I hope to explore.
• What role do problems and pain and suffering play in life? How do I remove them? Should I remove them?
• How do I balance ambition with contentment? Striving with settling? Journey and destination?
• What role does work play in my life? And what effect does the interplay of work, productivity, time and money have on ‘a good life’?
• When I strip back the work I do, who am I? Do I use busyness and work as a distraction from the (highly) confronting question of what I actually want to do with my life, and what I want it to be?
• What are the elements of a ‘good life’, and how do I get more of them?

As I write these questions, I realise it may sound like I’m not ‘happy’ (whatever that means). That is completely not true. My life is fucking awesome in pretty much every way. But I still feel drawn to explore the human condition – MY human condition.

It feels a little grandiose to define this as my philosophy of life – but I guess that’s what it’s working towards – and I’m sure there will be many revisions.

 

2: Pain and suffering

Good problems to have.

Let’s begin, seemingly depressingly, with problems, struggle, pain and suffering.

You may be familiar with Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow, a 20th century Psychologist, proposed a model of human motivation that is often displayed as a pyramid (though Maslow himself never used this visual metaphor). At the base of the pyramid are basic physiological needs (air, water, food, shelter etc.), followed by safety (personal security, resources etc.), love and belonging (friendship, connection, relationships etc.), esteem (respect, recognition, self esteem etc.), and culminating at the tip of the pyramid, self-actualisation (growth, and the desire to be the best that one can be). The basic premise is that people must fulfil lower-level needs before they can focus on higher-level ones.

In his book, ‘Transcend’, Psychologist, Scott Barry Kaufman continued the work of Maslow – extrapolating his thinking from unpublished manuscripts. Kaufman proposed that self actualisation (and therefore growth) is made up of three specific needs: Exploration, Love and Purpose.

So why do I bring this up? It’s to reiterate (to myself) how fortunate I am that I am privileged enough to grapple with questions of purpose and meaning. The fact that these are the problems I face sends a clear signal that I am largely in a pretty bloody good place when it comes to basic physiological needs, safety, love and belonging, and esteem.

That one has the bandwidth to tackle questions of existentialism is a clear sign that one has a pretty good lot in life. But this doesn’t downplay the magnitude or importance of asking (and perhaps, answering) these questions.

Research shows that mental health problems are highest in richer, industrialised regions (even when taking into account the likelihood of getting diagnosed). Perhaps it’s because we’re all experiencing this ‘privileged struggle’ with the higher order problems of self actualisation and meaning.

I guess there’s a danger that this essay on a loose ‘philosophy of life’ ends up being a ‘peace time philosophy’ (the philosophy of someone being in the privileged position of dealing with self actualisation). And I guess it is – my life is good. I’m sure this philosophy will adapt and change in the future when I’m faced with the catastrophes that life will certainly throw my way.

But to return to this philosophy, the reflexive instinct is in coming up with ways to solve problems, remove struggle, and ease pain and suffering.

But there are two deeper questions to ask. Is it actually possible to remove these things, and (even deeper), is it actually desirable or beneficial to remove them?

Can we solve our problems?

Let’s tackle the first question, is it possible to solve all our problems?

That’s an easy one. ‘No’. We can’t.

If you’re fortunate enough that, like me, you’re near the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (and if you’re reading this, you probably are), it means your problems are ‘higher order’ problems. Your problems are more like ‘what is my purpose?’, and less like ‘can I access clean drinking water?’

But they’re problems none-the-less. There will always be problems in life. It’s just about upgrading to better problems. From there, it’s about having a strong enough sense of perspective that our attitude becomes one of gratitude for the ‘higher order’ nature of the problems we’re so lucky to be facing.

As you solve problems, you’ll be faced with new problems. These are better problems. Be grateful for them, and work to upgrade your problems to better problems.

Oliver Burkeman makes the point that ‘We perceive our problems as ‘doubly problematic’. First, there’s the problem itself, and then there’s the way in which the very existence of any such problems undermines our yearning to feel perfectly secure and in control.’.

He goes on to clarify, saying that ‘you’re always going to have problems, but don’t let the fact that you have problems be a problem in itself that needs to be solved.’

There’s a sort of relief that comes from accepting we’ll always have problems. The acceptance gives us permission to stop working so hard to try to rid our life of problems, or ‘cure the human condition’.

The American philosopher and neuroscientist, Sam Harris, is quoted as saying that ‘life is an unending series of problems, so it doesn’t make any sense to be surprised by the next one’.

Scott Barry Kaufman agrees, saying ‘A central problem of existence is managing uncertainty, which is always increasing. While this can be a source of great anxiety, the unknown also has its delight. It’s important to leave familiarity to grow. It takes courage to grow.’

Do we want to solve our problems?

So we accept that it’s not possible to solve all our problems. Which brings us to our second question. ‘Is it actually desirable or beneficial to solve them all?’ Do problems, struggle, pain and suffering actually have a net negative effect on life?

Here’s an enlightening concept. We actually need these things to be happy – we can’t be happy without them.

‘To face no problems at all would leave you with nothing worth doing’, says Oliver Burkeman.

In fact, life is about pursuing great problems.

In his excellent book, ‘Life in Three Dimensions’, Professor of Psychology, Shigehiro Oishi, makes the case that the three dimensions of a good life are happiness, meaning and psychological richness. While happiness and meaning are widely accepted as contributing to a good life, Oishi claims psychological richness as equally important.

He defines psychological richness as ‘a life characterized by a variety of interesting and perspective-changing experiences.’

He extends the traditionally accepted ingredients from happiness, saying, ‘Simplifying one’s life so as to have reliably positive experiences or contentment is key to happiness. Dedicating one’s life to others with compassion is key to meaning. Experiencing the unusual , challenging one’s self, and learning new things (though frustrating and unpleasant at times) are key to psychological richness.’

The monk and writer Thomas Merton tells us ‘The truth that many people never understand is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things seem to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.’

Let’s explore these ideas.

And we can’t do that without examining the works of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor. There’s a bio that reads like a tragically perfect combination of expertise and life experience to be uniquely qualified to talk about suffering and the human condition.

In his book, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, Frankl proposes that ‘What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at all cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.’

Happiness, or what positive psychology researchers call ‘positive effect’, is made up of many parts (several of which will be covered in this essay).

And one of the major ingredients for happiness is satisfaction.

Satisfaction comes from striving for a goal and achieving that goal. Therefore, to be happy, you need satisfaction. And to achieve satisfaction, you need to achieve a difficult goal.

Happiness comes from solving problems. Without problems, there’s no happiness. This is further evidence that our life should not be in pursuit of removing all problems.

Maslow asked ‘Is growth and self fulfilment possible at all, without pain and grief and sorrow and turmoil?’. Kaufman provided his answer to this question by claiming that ‘uncomfortable experiences are not necessarily bad, and protecting people from them shows a lack of respect for the integrity, nature and future development of the person’. The psychology professor and author, Angela Duckworth would agree. In her book, Grit, Duckworth wrote about the need for hardship as a precursor to resilience. Being ‘beat down’ by the hardships of today is the exact thing that’s needed for us to stand up to the hardships of tomorrow. The essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb went one step further, saying ‘Don’t just be resilient. Be antifragile. The resilient resist shocks and stay the same. The antifragile grow from them.’

In his book, Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman encourages us not only to accept that problems will always be there, but that we should ‘Develop a taste for problems’, and ‘Aspire not to a life without problems, but to a life with ever more interesting and absorbing ones.’

The Stoic philosophers, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, extolled the virtues of ‘voluntary discomfort’. They taught that by putting ourselves in uncomfortable physical and mental situations, we can train resilience, lessen the fear of suffering, and strengthen gratitude.

And if we accept that ‘growth’ plays a deciding role in Maslow’s ‘self actualisation’, and that learning is a major contributor to growth, we can’t go on without touching on the work of the journalist and author, David Epstein. In his book, ‘Range’, he explores the concept of ‘desirable difficulties’, saying ‘When we are forced to slow down, to struggle, and even to fail, we are more likely to retain what we learn.’ Further evidence that growth cannot happen without struggle.

It seems that accepting (and even pursuing) pain, and being willing to struggle through problems, are the greatest determinants of our success (however it is we choose to measure success). Loving this process (not the outcome) and solving the problems is what creates happiness. Therefore, without pain and struggle, there can be no happiness.

In fact, there’s evidence for this in the chemical cocktail that makes up our brain. Take dopamine, the neurotransmitter in our brain responsible for pleasure, motivation, and goal achievement. We’ve engineered our worlds to make it easy to get a quick hit of dopamine. Things like sugar and social media give us this easy, quick hit. The downside is, this leads to overstimulation and a rapid drop in dopamine, leaving us craving more and addicted to the stimulus (sugar, social media etc). Contrast this with ‘hard dopamine’ which can be earned only through sustained effort in the pursuit of meaningful goals.

With the idea that the path to happiness passes through pain and struggle, comes an acceptance of both the possibility and presence of failure. I’ll take that one step further and say that not only should failure be accepted, but that (like struggle) it should be pursued, normalised and, ultimately, celebrated.

But there’s a very important asterisk on the necessity of struggle – a concept born of Victor Frankl’s time in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Frankl proposed that ‘meaning is a feeling’, and one of the things that creates this feeling is that you have ‘an optimistic perspective on your suffering’. His experience was that it’s ok to be going through the tunnel of hell, as long as there’s a light at the end of that tunnel.

Frankl went on to emphasise this point, writing that ‘In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning’.

These sentiments are echoed by Burkeman, who says that ‘coming up against your limitations and figuring out how to respond is precisely what makes a life meaningful and satisfying.’

If self actualisation is a basic human need; growth is needed for self actualisation; and struggle is needed for growth, I don’t think it’s too big a jump to say that hardship is a basic human need.

The struggle-free Hedonist.

In his excellent book, ‘Happier’, the Israeli psychologist and Harvard lecturer Tal Ben-Shahar talks about what he calls the four ‘happiness archetypes’. While I’ll explore the other three archetypes later, it’s worth at this point introducing ‘The Hedonist’. This is the person who seeks pleasure and avoids pain. The person who maximises their enjoyment of the present, but ignores future negative consequences. Later, I’ll talk about the relationship between ‘the journey’ and ‘the destination’, but for now, and to quote Ben-Shahar, ‘The Hedonist’s illusion is that only the journey is important. They are a slave to the moment.’

The Hedonist falls slave to ‘Hedonic Adaptation’, constantly needing more to achieve a baseline level of happiness. The problem is, we either run out of money to spend, or we run out of health to enjoy it.

The blogger, Pete Adeney writes ‘The problem is that each desire, when satisfied, tends to be replaced by a new desire. So the person continues to chase. Yet after a lifetime of pursuit, the person ends up no more satisfied than he was at the beginning. Thus, he may end up wasting his life.’

This Hedonist is the opposite of the person who embraces the struggle that I’m extolling the virtues of here, they do everything they can to remove present day hardship, no matter the negative long term consequences.

Using hardship.

There are three additional quotes that really resonate with me that provide actionable guidelines in turning hardship to our advantage in the pursuit of happiness. And I include them here because I think they’re valuable to revisit and come back to in the future.

‘Do hard things that interest you.’

‘Comfort the troubled and trouble the comfortable.’

‘When faced without a challenge, make one.’

These quotes, and versions of them, are attributed to too many people for me to give accurate credit, but they all echo this idea that not only should we not attempt to avoid hardship – but that we should actively move towards it.

The ‘desire to become the most that one can be’ (that defines ‘self actualisation’ at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) extols the virtues of personal growth and striving.
In line with this ‘desire to become the most that one can be’, and pushing one’s own personal limits, Derek Sivers tells us ‘You grow by doing what scares you, and what excites you.’

And Maslow, the father of humanistic psychology cautions us that ‘If you deliberately plan on being less than you’re capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You’ll be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities’.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and the founder of analytical psychology, proposes the idea of a ‘life task’ – a central, meaningful pursuit that gives purpose to an individual’s life. He tells us that ‘A life task is something you can do only by effort and with difficulty.’ Oliver Burkeman adds to this definition by saying, ‘and specifically, with that feeling of ‘good difficulty’ that comes with pushing back against your long established preference for comfort and security.’ James Hollis, the American Jungian psychoanalyst, encourages us to pursue ‘The kind of endeavour that ‘enlarges’ you, rather than making you feel immediately happy.’

Section summary: To suffer with questions of existentialism is a privilege. Not only is it not possible to solve our problems, but we shouldn’t try, as we can’t have satisfaction without struggle.

But all this talk of life tasks and striving and stretching and self improvement and growth and unmet potential sounds pretty stressful, and (at risk of contradicting myself), like a lot of hard work. And it brings me to perhaps the greatest contradiction that I struggle with… the balance between ambition and contentment.

 

3: Balancing ambition and contentment

Is it possible to be both ambitious and content?

Ambition has been a cornerstone of my life. Whether in study, sport, or business, I tend to be rewarded for working hard and striving hard – as I guess most people are. When you work hard, good things seem to happen.

And this has conditioned me to be cautious about the removal of ambition. As the author Ryan Holiday says in his book ‘Stillness is the Key’, ‘…there is a perfectly understandable worry that contentment will be the end of our careers. That if we somehow satisfy this urge, all progress in our work and in our lives will come to a screeching halt.’

But fuck me, it gets exhausting. Always pursuing more. Always pursuing better. The internal and external pressure.

As Burkeman says, ‘perhaps you’ve tethered your self esteem to the most crazy-making standard of all, ‘realising your potential’. Which means you’ll never get to rest, because how can you ever be sure there’s not a little more potential left to realise.’

And if I’m always ambitiously looking to the future, does this mean I can’t be happy with where I am, with the lot I’ve earned myself in life? The conditions of my life are extraordinarily good, the problem is that by only striving towards some future ‘optimised/perfect’ state, I’m sacrificing living a good life today for the uncertain promise of a better life tomorrow.

Then, if you do start to feel content with where you are, there’s the nagging fear that you’ve ‘lost your edge’. Years of being conditioned and rewarded for hard work pushes back against you. ‘Ambition’ is viewed as such a positive trait. If you’re not ambitiously growing because you’re content, does that mean you’re lazy?

Contentment is a battle, because our mind is in no small part the process of millions of years of an evolutionary drive for more. We’ve evolved to be ambitious because it’s a survival advantage. If we have more resources, we can pass on our genes to more offspring. And just like anxiety is less useful today than it was when there was a potential sabre toothed tiger lurking in the bushes, perhaps ambition is too?

What does this ambition versus contentment tug-of-war look like practically? Generally speaking, I divide the work I do into two categories – ‘explore’ and ‘exploit’. Businesses or projects that I’m in the process of building and experimenting with are ‘explore’. Then, when those businesses become financially successful, they move into ‘exploit’, where I capitalise on the hard work I’ve done.

The conflict, in part, comes in the balance between the two.

I want to be ambitious – to explore. It’s a key element of the ‘self actualisation’ of Maslow’s pyramid – the desire to be the best that one can be. But at the same time, I want to be content – grateful for where I am, and with what I have, and not always living for some ‘better future’ that never arrives.

I want both.

This is the conflict I’ve struggled with.

In a chapter of ‘Stillness is the Key’, titled ‘Enough’ the author Ryan Holiday says:

‘It is a painful crossroads, or worse, one that we ignore, stuffing those feelings of existential crisis down, piling on top of them meaningless consumption, more ambition, and the delusion that doing more and more of the same will eventually bring about different results. In a way, this is a curse of one of our virtues.

No one achieves excellence or enlightenment without a desire to get better, without a tendency to explore potential areas of improvement. Yet the desire or the need for more is often at odds with happiness. Billie Jean King, the tennis great, has spoken about this, about how the mentality that gets an athlete to the top so often prevents them from enjoying the thing they worked so hard for.

The need for progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process. There is no stillness for the person who cannot appreciate things as they are, particularly when that person has objectively done so much. The creep of more, more, more is like a hydra. Satisfy one, lop it off the bucket list, and two more grow in its place.’

So my question is, ‘is it possible to be both ambitious and content? To strive while still settling?’

Is it possible to have both, or like flipping a head or a tail on a coin, are they opposites that can only occur without the presence of the other?

After spending more time that I’d care to admit wrestling with this question, I think I’ve got a working theory. So let me flesh it out.

Resolving the ambition/contentment paradigm.

‘Yes’, I can be both content and ambitious. Here’s how I resolved the conflict.

I am content, grateful and happy with, and for, my life. And at the same time, I strive and harbour ambition. I strive not because I need the end result of that striving, but for two other very important reasons.

Reason one, because, as I’ve already discussed, a good life needs the struggle, pain and problems that striving brings. And reason two, because striving means creating something. Building something. Solving problems. And I enjoy the creative process. Not the outcome of creativity, but the process of creativity.

I strive because I want to. Because I choose to. Because striving (and the pain it often brings) is an important part of the human experience. The struggle is important, as long as (as Frankl reminds us), there is an ‘optimistic perspective’ on the suffering that the struggle brings.

One of the things I am grateful for now, today, is my ability and desire (though the desire isn’t always there, and that’s ok) to strive and be ambitious.

I don’t NEED to be accomplishing things. I want and choose to accomplish things because it’s fun to accomplish them.

I don’t NEED to build. I want and choose to build because building is creative and it helps people.

I don’t NEED to earn money. I want and choose to earn more money because income is the scoreboard that tells me I’m creating valuable, problem solving things.

I am content with my life and part of the life I’m content with is the journey/process of striving.

I am content with what I have, and part of what I have is the ability and drive to build and grow.

I am content with my level of ambition.

Thus, I can be content with where I am while still enjoying the process of striving.

HOWEVER, if I stop enjoying the process, striving only for the sake of striving, and do it for the wrong reasons (the destination not the journey), I’m under no obligation to continue. I’m giving myself permission to stop striving.

And ‘being satisfied’ isn’t the same as ‘being complacent’. That’s an important distinction. Often you need to apply a bit of effort to maintain the level you’re satisfied with. The human drive to avoid loss is strong – use that to your advantage.

There’s an Oliver Burkeman quote that takes the pressure off. ‘You don’t actually have to do any of this – use your life in a worthwhile manner I mean. None of it is compulsory, you have my permission not to bother.’

Working hard should be intentional, not habitual. Because you want BOTH the process and the result. Not because you only want the result or, just as bad, because ‘that’s how you’ve always done it’. There’s a real and present danger in striving just to keep yourself busy, and to distract yourself from the fact that you don’t actually have any idea what you want your life to be (much more on that later).

So with all that in mind, here are my three criteria for when ambition and striving are ok:

• I’m doing it because I enjoy the journey/process – because it’s fun, not because I’m using it to perpetually chase some future destination where I think I’ll be happier.
• I’m not doing it to distract myself from not knowing what I want life to be.
• As Frankl says, if the suffering ceases to have an optimistic perspective, stop.

Striving towards something.

Oliver Burkeman put it beautifully in ‘Meditations for Mortals’ when he said ‘The pursuit of ambitious goals is one excellent way to be fully immersed in life.’ Having ambition and something to work for tends to force one into the present – a present to be content with. He also tells us that we can ‘pursue… goals AND feel alive and absorbed while pursuing them’.

So ultimately, for me, the ambition part of the arm wrestle between ambition and contentment is not about the end result – some future vision or dream of the perfect life. But the ambition part is about the ambition itself. The actual act of striving TOWARDS something. Excuse the cliche, but it’s not just about the destination (though that’s important too), but the journey it takes to get there (with all the struggles and problems to overcome that make for a good life).

Section summary: It is possible to be both content and ambitious at the same time. I am content, grateful and happy with, and for, my life. One of the things I’m grateful for is the ability to choose to strive. Striving gives us problems to overcome, something to suffer though, and a vehicle to build, create and solve. The act of striving leads to satisfaction. You should strive because you choose to, and because you’re enjoying the process. And you should stop striving if you’re using it as a distraction from what you want life to be, or if you don’t have an optimistic perspective on the outcome of your striving.

So with the ambition/content contradiction seemingly settled for now, this leads us to the next great contradiction I struggle with. That between the journey and the destination.

 

4: The journey and the destination

What to optimise for.

As I see it, there are four different relationships we can make between journey and destination, between process and outcome. Three of these relationships are broken and lead to an unhappy life, while only one leads to a good life.

It all comes down to what you’re trying to optimise for; the journey, the destination, neither, or both.

Happiness is basically a combination of pleasure (current benefit) and meaning (future benefit).

Nihilism.

Let’s start with the most obviously broken relationship. This is the person who is negative about both the present, and the future – both the journey and destination. There’s no surprise that this will lead to unhappiness. This person is called the Nihilist, and is the first of what Tal Ben-Shahar calls the ‘four archetypes of happiness’. They have no pleasure or enjoyment (no current benefit to happiness) and no meaning (no future benefit to happiness).

Hedonism.

The second of these archetypes is one I’ve already discussed in the section on pain and suffering. This is ‘The Hedonist’, the person who seeks pleasure and avoids pain. The hedonist’s life is all about the journey, optimising for the here and now – but giving little regard to the future. In fact, living ONLY for today often damages future happiness. While their life is full of pleasure, it has little meaning. And remember, happiness needs both. In his book, ‘Happier’, Ben-Shahar tells us that ‘The hedonist’s illusion is that only the journey is important. He is a slave to the moment.’ Victor Frankl warns that ‘when a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure’.

The Rat Race.

The next of our archetypes is one that I want to spend a little more time exploring. It often characterises what are considered the most ‘successful’ people in society. ‘Successful’ probably isn’t the right word though – unless your only measure of achieving a good life is the number of zeros at the end of your bank balance. And while we may celebrate billionaires, there’s a reason many of them are divorced and depressed.

These are the people who focus on the destination only – hoping for happiness in their future while being devoid of pleasure today. And unfortunately, we glamorise and celebrate these people. We applaud their ability to delay gratification, not realising that delaying gratification at the expense of all else is a hard habit to break.

There’s no shortage of research extolling the virtues of delaying gratification. Of course, there’s the famous marshmallow test, where children were rewarded in the medium term for delaying gratification in the short term. The researchers found that the children who were able to sacrifice immediate pleasure for the promise of some future pleasure were more successful in life. There’s that word again – ‘successful’. So how did the researchers measure success? Among other things, they found that the kids who delayed gratification achieved higher exam results and academic success, and, later in life, more career progression and higher incomes. And of course, all these things are great, and with all else being equal, we definitely want them in our life. But isn’t this definition of success a little narrow? Where’s the measurement of life satisfaction? Of meaning? Of positive effect? Of happiness?

The author Rory Vaden said ‘Easy short term choices lead to difficult long term consequences. Difficult short term choices lead to easy long term consequences. We always pay a price. We either pay it today, now, or we pay it later with interest.’

I love this quote… and maybe I’ve loved it a little too much. I’ve revisited it many times over the years, and it’s been a source of focus and inspiration for me. And I agree with it. But as Oliver Burkeman says, ‘Treating life as an exercise in doing favours for your future self will serve you well in some ways, but badly in others.’

So on its own, delaying gratification is not enough.

Tal Ben-Shahar calls this archetype the ‘Rat Racer’. The Rat Racer optimises everything for future benefit – for future meaning. In the process, they ignore present benefit – not enjoying the moment and taking no pleasure from it. Ben-Shahar points out that ‘the Rat Racer’s illusion is that reaching some future destination will bring him lasting happiness. He does not recognise the significance of the journey. He is a slave to the future.’

Oliver Burkeman diagnoses this condition with beautiful simplicity. He calls it ‘deferred happiness syndrome’. In his book ‘Meditations for Mortals’ he goes on to advise us, ‘Don’t take life too seriously, to obsess so much about using your life wisely or efficiently for future purposes that you find yourself treating the present as mere preparation for the stage where you’ll have everything running smoothly.’

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre warns us of the long term dangers of neglecting the present, saying ‘I have led a toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on—and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.’

As Ryan Holiday points out, ‘That is not industry. That is slavery. We were not put on this planet to be worker bees, compelled to perform some function over and over again for the cause of the hive until we die. Nor do we owe it to anyone to keep doing, doing, doing. Not our fans, not our followers, not our parents who’ve provided so much for us, not even our families. Killing ourselves does nothing for anybody. It’s perfectly possible to do and make good work from a good place. You can be healthy and still and successful.’

Process and outcome.

And this brings us to the final archetype of happiness, which Tal Ben-Shahar simply calls ‘Happiness’.

The author sums up the entire matter in one sentence: ‘Happy people live secure in the knowledge that the activities that bring them enjoyment in the present will also lead to a fulfilling future’. Remember that happiness is a combination of pleasure or enjoyment (current benefit) and meaning (future benefit). Happy people optimise for both. Watching TV brings pleasure, but little meaning. Work brings meaning, but little pleasure. Spending time with my children brings both meaning and pleasure. Filling life with things that bring both meaning and pleasure isn’t a bad place to start.

This concept is similar (though not identical) to a branch of philosophy known as ‘Enlightened Hedonism’. Far from the ‘Hedonist’ who lives only for today, the Enlightened Hedonist is happy to delay gratification and has a strong sense of empathy and desire for the wellbeing of others. It has a strong balance between pleasure and fulfilment. As with standard Hedonism though, a criticism of Enlightened Hedonism is the undervaluing of struggle and suffering which I think is so important.

When asked to sum up the common theme of his work, David Epstein answered: ‘Obviously people want success, but I think there’s pretty significant research showing that often they’re reacting to their trajectory as much as they’re actual absolute performance level. That the feeling of improvement, the feeling of moving on, it gives them some sense of fulfilment, which obviously will get them to a higher level.’

Epstein is talking about the journey, and the importance of making progress on that journey. The journey alone is not enough – you also need to be moving forward in some way. And that ‘moving forward’ will improve the status of some future destination.

Since this entire rant is mainly for my own selfish, personal benefit, and since my tendency has been to delay gratitude and optimise for future benefit, I want to balance out my ‘Rat Racing’ tendency with a longer quote from Oliver Burkeman which I think is deeply poignant:

‘This, here and now, is real life. This is it. This portion of your limited time, the part before you’ve managed to get on top of everything… this part matters just as much as any other, and arguably even more than any other since the past is gone, and the future hasn’t occurred yet, so right now is the only time that really exists. If instead you take the other approach, if you see all this as leading up to some future point when real life will begin, or when you can finally start enjoying yourself or feeling good about yourself, then you’ll end up treating your actual life as something to get through, until one day it’ll be over without the meaningful part ever having arrived. We have to show up as fully as possible here, in the swim of things as they are. None of that means you don’t get to harbour ambitious plans as well, about the things you’ll accomplish, the fortune you’ll accumulate or the difference you’ll make to the world, far from it. It means you get to pursue those goals AND feel alive and absorbed while pursuing them. Instead of pursuing them, instead of postponing the aliveness until when (or if) they’re achieved.’

In a separate quote, Burkeman echoes a similar sentiment, ‘The day is never coming when all the other ‘stuff’ will be ‘out of the way’ so you can turn at last to building a life of meaning and accomplishment that hums with vitality. For finite humans, the time for that has to be now.’.

Being in love with the outcome is never enough. You need to be in love with the process.
So here’s the punchline. It’s not journey OR destination. It’s journey AND destination. Just like it’s possible to be both ambitious AND content. It seems we can optimise our happiness for both the journey AND the destination. For both today AND tomorrow.

Remember, happiness is a combination of pleasure or enjoyment (current benefit) and meaning (future benefit).

Let’s close out our exploration of the relationship between journey, destination, and happiness with a concluding quote from Tal Ben-Shahar: ‘Attaining lasting happiness requires that we enjoy the journey on our way toward a destination we deem valuable. Valuable happiness is not about making it to the peak of the mountain, nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain. Happiness is the experience of climbing towards the peak.’

Section summary: For a good life, instead of trying to optimise for only present enjoyment, or only future benefit, optimise for both. Fill life with things that simultaneously give you pleasure today, and lead to meaning tomorrow. Happiness is about enjoying the journey towards a valuable destination.

 

5: Time, work and money

One of the most fundamental questions we need to ask ourselves in our existential quest, is ‘what should we do with our time?’. The things we choose to fill our days with will go a long way towards building a good life.

Alain de Botton, the Swiss-British philosopher and writer made the general observation that ‘When we’re young, we don’t have enough money. When we’re middle aged we don’t have enough time. When we’re old we don’t have enough health.’

As I see it, one of our challenges lies in engineering our life so we can get the trifecta most of the time. And it is indeed a challenge.

In his book, ‘The One Thing’, Gary Keller tells us ‘Options are infinite. Time is finite. Choose wisely.’

I’m going to dive into the ways we should spend our time for a ‘good life’, but first… where does work fit into all this?

What is work for?

While we can’t answer the question of what ‘life’ is for, we probably can define what ‘work’ is for – at least on a personal level, what it SHOULD be for. Work is to make our life better.

I view this through the lens of someone who determines and defines their own work, so the high degree of autonomy I have gives me the latitude to ‘steer my own ship’.

The author Simone Stolzoff points out that ‘People spend so much time searching for meaning in their work that they forget to build meaning in their life.’

So, under the proviso that work exists to make life better – how does it do that?

Of course, the most obvious answer is that we get paid for it. And we need money to tick off (at least the first few) levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. So early in life we get rewarded for working hard – rewarded by having the resources to fill our physiological needs, and security and safety. Work conditions us to put in extraordinary effort, because extraordinary effort has always been rewarded.

But as we march up Maslow’s pyramid, more money and more resources no longer suffice. Money will only aid us in pursuing self actualisation insofar as it allows us to start exploring it by virtue of having addressed our more basic needs first.

The value of money has diminishing returns. $10 for someone starving on a street corner is more valuable than that same $10 for someone privately launching a rocket to Mars.

And research shows the same goes for happiness. More money makes us more happy to a point (the point where our basic human needs are met) – but beyond that point, it doesn’t. And I’d suggest there’s even a point where more money starts to make us unhappy – our divorced and depressed billionaires.

It comes down to opportunity cost. The cost of the effort we put into our work comes at the expense of other things in life (things I’ll discuss later). We sacrifice the important things in life because we wrongly believe that doing so will give us future benefit. We believe this because it used to be true – early in our careers when our lower order needs were not yet met and when self actualisation was not on our radar. But it’s not true any more.

Here’s the big problem I see time and time again. People sacrifice their lives for the benefit of their work. They live to work, instead of working to live.

So work can make life better because it allows us to earn, which, as we’ve said, is important… to a point.

But work itself can also be a source of pleasure or enjoyment (current benefit to happiness) and meaning (future benefit to happiness).

What can work give you?

So there comes a point – there has to come a point, where work provides you with a sufficient amount of money. And you may have to force that point, to eschew growth for the sake of growth, to forgo growth purely for the sake of financial benefit.

And at that point, you have two choices for what work gives you.

The first thing it can give you is nothing more. Nothing but the contribution it makes to giving you a good life outside work. Remember, work to live, not live to work. And if you choose for work to give you nothing more than the income you need to fuel a beautiful life, there is nothing dishonourable about that. As Simone Stolzoff tells us in ‘The Good Enough Job’, ‘You don’t need work to be your source of self actualisation’.

Isn’t that a great title for a book? ‘The Good Enough Job’. Work can be a tool. Tools are useful, they are ‘for something’. In this case, work is a tool that helps us to live a good life outside work.

This is the permission for us to be content with what work gives us. There’s no rule that says earning money can only come from fulfilling work. It’s ok to earn money from work that isn’t fulfilling.

The second thing we can do with work is to use it to enrich our lives – not just our lives outside of the work we do, but by making work an enriching way to spend our time in and of itself.

But first, a word of warning. We should take a moment to consider the need to balance the pursuit of meaningful work with the risk of letting your job consume who you are. As with many of the paradoxes I’ve discussed, you can have the best of both worlds. Simone Stolzoff again, ‘Work can be meaningful without it needing to consume you and form your only source of identity’.

Enriching work.

So how can work be enriching?

Firstly, it gives us something to struggle with. Let’s return to that powerful quote from Holocaust survivor, the Psychiatrist Victor Frankl. ‘What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.’

Work can give us the ‘tensioned state’. The strive and the struggle. A worthy goal. It can challenge us to solve meaningful problems. It can be our creative outlet.

But remember, and to revisit another of Frankl’s teachings, for work to be meaningful, we need to have ‘an optimistic perspective on your suffering’. This disqualifies the repetitive meniality of the 9-5 hamster wheel that Tal Ben-Shahar identified as the ‘Rat Race’ archetype – where there is plenty of suffering, but no optimistic perspective.

The second way that work can be enriching is as a vehicle to play with ambition. As I discussed in my exploration of ambition and contentment, receiving money in exchange for working hard is the scoreboard that tells me I’m creating valuable, problem solving things.

At my first ever school father’s day breakfast this year, my four year old daughter proudly gave me a tour of the classroom. She showed me the magnificent keyring she’d made me, and the hand drawn picture of me that she’d worked so hard on, beneath which she’d answered questions about things like how old I am (39), my favourite food (lamb), my favourite colour (the blue of my daughters’ eyes) etc. But the one that got me was her answer to ‘what does your Dad like to do every day’, aka, what does Dad do for work. Her answer? ‘He helps people’. I cried right then and there in that Kindy classroom. A four year old had correctly observed that I find meaning in what I do – solving problems.

I’ve already discussed my three criteria where ambition and striving are ok. Let’s revisit in the context of work. These are the three conditions that I believe must be met by work.

• The first is if I’m working because I enjoy the journey/process – because it’s fun, not because I’m using it to perpetually chase some future destination where I think I’ll be happier.
• The second is if I’m not doing it to distract myself from not knowing what I want life to be.
• And the third is if, as Frankl says, if the suffering ceases to have an optimistic perspective, stop.

So work gives us the all important struggle with an optimistic perspective. It gives a target for our ambition.

Work itself can give us pleasure or enjoyment (current benefit to happiness) and meaning (future benefit to happiness).

If these three criteria aren’t met, it’s time to fire up your growth mindset and your right to choice, and change something. We have vastly more control over the external conditions of our life than we realise. Vastly more ability to change the things that need changing.

Productivity.

I can’t talk about work without talking about productivity.

My name’s Dan, and I’m a recovering productivity junky.

Over the 2,359 days since I started using my current digital todo list in April of 2018, I’ve completed 40,870 tasks. That’s an average of just over 17 tasks a day… for six and a half years.

I used to take great pride in the number of items I ticked off my to do list each day. My reasoning was, the more I got done, the more productive I was, the more I was ‘advancing’ in the ‘game of life’.

My thinking has flipped. I now take greater pride in ticking off less items (having less input) while having the same (or a similar) end result (output). My focus is now on getting the same output from less work, rather than more output from more work. I no longer wear ‘busy’ as a badge of honour, but as a lagging indicator that I’ve messed up somewhere.

The author Seth Godin warns us that ‘The number on a car’s speedometer isn’t always an indication of how fast you’re getting to where you’re going. You might, after all, be driving in circles really quickly.’

The actor Denzel Washington would add ‘don’t confuse movement with progress’.

One of several key performance indicators I track on a monthly basis is how much of my time is spent on a range of different work tasks. I’ve worked a lot over the 18 years of owning a business. I don’t work so much any more – my priorities have changed. But still, in the first six months of this year (2024) I’ve worked on average 32 hours per week. This is all types of work, client facing billable work, ‘shallow’ unbillable admin work, ‘deep’ business development work etc. This 32 hours is probably a third of the average weekly hours I was working in my late 20s to early 30s, where I was knocking on the door of 100 hour work weeks.

But in the last two months, as part of this existential exploration, I intentionally reduced my work hours to see what would happen. For the last two months I’ve averaged 20 hours a week. And even with a 40 hour drop in the work I’d done in each of those months, there was zero drop in revenue. I earned exactly the same.

This flies in the face of the toxically damaging ‘hustle and grind’ culture that’s overly glamorised. Don’t get me wrong, you need to have that period in your life, and I’ve definitely done more than my fair share of 100+ hour weeks. But I don’t need to do that any more. I’ve earned the ability not to. But remember, there’s a difference between working hard and workaholism. Being a workaholic, like being an alcoholic, is an addiction. By definition, addictions are a ‘compulsive dependency on a substance or behaviour that causes harm to the individual’. The danger is that a high work ethic turns into an unbreakable habit, and goes beyond the point where it serves you, to the point where it ’causes harm’. You need to be able to identify the point where the grinding hustle of hard work ceases to serve you, and begins to harm you. Then, you need to make an intentional shift. I guess this whole essay is part of my shift – a way to help me work through this transition.

Part of the shift is moving from being a ‘maximiser’ who uses effort to force progress, to an ‘optimiser’ who undertakes an exhaustive search to make everything as efficient as possible, and finally what the economist Herbert A. Simon would call a ‘satisficer’ who accept that often things are good enough. Even writing the words ‘good enough’ there caused my blood pressure to rise. It’s as if accepting that things are ‘good enough’ is in some way lacking ambition and a drive for self improvement – a sign that my journey to hold both ambition and contentment in the same hand at the same time is far from over.

My previous rocky relationship with ‘ticking-off-as-may-things-as-possible’ productivity (leading to my successful experiment with reducing my work hours by a third) is well defined by Georgetown University Professor and author Cal Newport in his book ‘Slow Productivity’. He calls it ‘pseudo productivity’. Newport tells us ‘There will always be more work to do. You should give your efforts the breathing room and respect required to make them part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it.’

Well said. Your efforts should be ‘…part of a life well lived, not an obstacle to it.’ This fits in with my criteria for striving that requires it to benefit the journey, not just the destination.
Perhaps, our question at the end of a day of struggling through problems shouldn’t be ‘what have I achieved?’, but ‘what have I enjoyed?’.

Mary P. Follett, the early 20th-century management consultant and organisational theorist warns us to not ‘confuse movement with progress.’

Add to this, the first line of Stephen Dobyns’s short poem, Pursuit: ‘Each thing I do, I rush through so I can do something else.’

This would be enlightening if it didn’t feel like Dobyns was holding up such a confrontationally reflective mirror.

We should attempt to avoid a life where we’re rushing through something just so we can get to the next thing to rush through.

As the Transcendentalist philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, observed in his book ‘Walden: Life in the Woods’, ‘Life is too short to be in a hurry’.

Section summary: Work should exist to make our life better. It can do that either by only providing the resources to live a good life outside of work (and that’s ok) or by also enriching our lives by the nature of the work itself. It can be enriching by giving us something to struggle through, as a vehicle by which to be both useful and ambitious, and as a source of both pleasure and meaning. We should measure productivity not by how much we do (which can lead to a damaging addiction to work), but by how little we can do and still get the same result.

And now, this brings me to perhaps the most privileged and ‘first world’ of all the problems I’m facing. A problem that lives right up towards the pointy end of self-actualisation in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s a problem that I’ve arrived at after travelling a two-decade-long journey that began first with achieving the basic human needs, then working incredibly hard to earn more money, then optimising my productivity to earn more time. I’ve exchanged my time to earn money. Then I exchanged my money to buy back time.

So now, the most confronting and fuckingly terrifying question of all.

Great, I’ve arrived.

Life is great.

I’m content with the balance I’ve struck between time, work and money.

Now what?

What do I do with all this time?

 

6: What to do with our spare time

The problem with time.

Let’s define the problem, then get about trying to solve it. Oliver Burkeman says, ‘Spending your time trying to ‘get everything done’ is a way to avoid deciding what you should actually do with your finite time.’

Most of us (me included) have no idea what we should be doing with the time we’re earning as a result of our success.

Tim Kasser, a professor of psychology, coined the term ‘time affluence’. You will be more familiar with ‘monetary affluence’ which refers to having enough money to meet basic human needs, freedom to make choices without being constrained financially, and to sustain a luxurious lifestyle. Similarly, ‘time affluence’ refers to having enough time to fill our basic obligations, control over how we spend our time, and enough free time to engage in activities that offer pleasure and meaning.

I think we’re using busyness and productivity and striving and work to cover up a deeper sense of emptiness around what to do with the rest of our lives. We’re using productivity as a way to avoid difficult emotions and to avoid hard questions.

What to do if we’re not striving.

We justify to ourselves that distractingly hard work is the best way to spend our finite time because, as Oliver Burkeman says in his remarkable book ‘4000 weeks’, ‘As long as you’re filling every hour of the day with some sort of striving, you get to carry on believing that all this striving is leading you somewhere. An imagined future state of perfection. Your limited time causes you no pain, and you’re free of the guilty sense there’s more you should be doing in order to justify your existence.’

Burkeman calls people who rely on striving to cover up a lack of direction ‘Insecure overachievers’, ‘Driven high performers who do what they do to try to fill some sort of hole inside.’

In his book, The Good Enough Job, Simone Stolzoff tells us ‘Work culture often perpetuates a chicken and egg problem. People work all the time, so they don’t know what to do when they aren’t working. And people don’t know what to do when they aren’t working, so they work all the time.’ He goes on to ask ‘I wonder what percentage of my drive to work all the time is that I truly love it, and how much is that I don’t know what else to do with myself?’.

Again, it seems like I’m not the only one grappling with these questions.

There’s a paragraph from Burkeman’s 4000 weeks that really got me.

‘What’s really morbid from this perspective is what most of us do most of the time instead of confronting our finitude which is to indulge in avoidance and denial. Rather than taking ownership of our lives we seek out distractions or lose ourselves in business and the daily grind so as to try and forget our real predicament. Or, we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves we don’t get to choose at all, that we must get married or remain in a soul destroying job, or anything else, simply because it’s the done thing. Or, we embark on the futile attempt to ‘get everything done’ which is really another way of trying to evade the responsibility of trying to decide what to do with your finite time. Because if you actually could get everything done, you’d never have to choose among mutually exclusive possibilities. Life is usually more comfortable when you spend it avoiding the truth in this fashion. But it’s a stupefying, deadly sort of comfort. It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life.’

The author Derek Sivers offered up a similar perspective in another lengthy quote, this time from his book ‘Hell Yeah or No’.

‘What if you didn’t need money or attention? You know, that feeling you have after a big meal when you’re so full that you don’t want anything more. Ever wonder what that would feel like in other parts of your life, we do so many things for the attention to feel important or praised. But what if you had so much attention and so much praise that you couldn’t possibly want anymore. What would you do then? What would you stop doing? We do so many things for the money whether we need it or not. But what if you had so much money that you couldn’t possibly want anymore? What would you do then? What would you stop doing? And then if you stopped doing all those things you’re doing just for the money or the attention, what would be left? Who would you be if you didn’t do these things? If you were completely satisfied, then what? After an understandable period of relaxing, what would you pursue? Don’t say sit around and do nothing, because that’s still just relaxing. I mean after that, when you’re ready to be useful to others again, what would you do then, if you didn’t need the money and didn’t need the attention?’

We can come back to our exploration of the ambition/contentment paradox, and our criteria for launching new ambitious and ‘explorative’ businesses and projects. When embarking on work or a new project, we need to ask ‘Am I doing this because it adds to the experience that is my life, or am I doing it to distract myself from having to make a decision about what life could/should be?’.

We need to not use busyness/productivity/projects/tasks as a distraction from not knowing what to actually do with life. Instead, we must choose things that can give us pleasure, today, in the journey, and meaning, tomorrow, as a result of challenges, problems and hardships to overcome.

We spend time doing things to distract us from not knowing what to do with our time. We need to do less ‘pseudo productive stuff’ that makes us feel like we’re being productive. But before we can do less of this ‘stuff’, we need to work out what will replace it.

Section summary: We need to be wary that we’re not using busyness and productivity to simply fill our time and distract us from deciding what we actually want to do with this time.

So therefore, before I can stop being productive for the sake of being productive, I need to work out what I want life to be, i.e. what life is beyond productivity.

And that’s where we go now.

 

7: Ingredients for the good life

Lifestyle design.

Here’s where I’m currently sitting as my answer to, ‘what should I be doing with all my time?’. What does ‘the good life’ actually look like? And I’m talking specifics here.

I’m a firm believer in the rather wanky sounding, but self explanatory concept of ‘lifestyle design’. The intentional designing, construction and implementation of the events and activities of our life.

In fact, in my mentoring and consultancy work, this is where I always start. Before I even look at someone’s business, I need to first know what lifestyle it is that they want this business to provide them.

Aristotle coined the term ‘Eudaimonia’ and sees it as the ultimate objective for humans.

Eudaimonia sometimes gets translated as ‘happiness’ and sometimes as ‘flourishing’. Flourishing seems a little more ‘all encompassing’. Happiness is an emotion that comes and goes, whereas ‘flourishing’ in life is a bit more of a long-term state that can be happening even with the ebbs and flows of happiness.

In Aristotle’s view, the purpose of living is to flourish.

There are two criteria for designing a ‘happy life’, or a ‘flourishing life’ (or whatever we want to call it). According to Tal Ben-Shahar (and I’ll revisit this quote from earlier) ‘Happy people live secure in the knowledge that the activities that bring them enjoyment in the present will also lead to a fulfilling future’. You’ll remember that happiness is a combination of pleasure or enjoyment (current benefit) and meaning (future benefit), and that one without the other makes us hedonists or rat racers.

So the events of our life need to contribute both pleasure and meaning. The investor and author, Ray Dalio, observed that ‘The happiest people discover their own nature and match their lifestyle to it’.

Experiences and events.

I’ve traditionally used a lifestyle design exercise with both myself and others, where you write down the events that constitute some future ‘perfect day’, ‘perfect week’, ‘perfect month’ and ‘perfect year’. And then you simply organise your life so you can do as many of those things as you can every day, week, month or year.

The events are pretty clear cut and tangible. Read a book. Breakfast at a cafe. Walk on the beach. Weekend away. Overseas holiday.

But I’m beginning to think there’s a problem with this approach. And the problem is, humans are generally pretty terrible at predicting what it is that will make them happy. Are you as happy as you want to be? No? There’s the proof.

So I’m in the process of changing my approach here. I think there’s a step before choosing the exact activities on which to spend our time.

Instead, we need to first choose the attributes that we want the activities of our life to give us.

Basically, there’s an event (watching a sunrise) and the experience that event gives you (awe).

Instead of saying ‘I want to watch the sunrise every Sunday’ (which is a tangible event), we need to say ‘I want to experience awe’. The feeling of awe is one of the ingredients for a good life. It’s an intrinsic, internal experience, not an extrinsic, external event.

Imagine you’re making a pizza. It needs something salty. That could be olives, anchovies, feta cheese or salami. If your only criteria is that you want something salty, it doesn’t really matter which you choose… as long as it’s salty (and as long as it’s not anchovies!).

It’s something we GET from the event, not the exact event itself.

Then, once we have the list of the experiences we want, we can then move on to deciding what the actual events are that will give us these things.

With that in mind, I’d like to list and unpack the things that I believe need to be part of my ‘good life’. Maybe they’re a part of your ‘good life’ too.

This list is a combination of my own self-introspection, experiences and observations, and of the results of extensive research and studies into positive psychology by numerous people far more intelligent and insightful than me.

I’ll divide these contributors to a ‘good life’ into ‘external’ and ‘internal’ lists. The external contributors to a good life are things we can actually go out and do. ‘Right, I’m going to go out and watch the sunrise to experience awe’. The internal contributors are more related to how we chose to think – to our attitudes and beliefs. And we have much more control over our thoughts that you might think.

External contributors to a ‘good life’:

These are my external contributors to a ‘good life’. These are the things we should go out and pursue.

Challenge/struggle/hard things/problem solving:

I’ve covered this one in some detail already, so I’ll make this brief. As someone who rates highly in the personality variable ‘need for cognition’ I am drawn to activities that involve problem-solving, critical thinking, and engaging with complex ideas. A good life needs the satisfaction that comes from challenges that demand we struggle to solve hard problems that we’re optimistic of solving. Happiness is the pursuit of meaningful goals.

Examples:

• Work out how to fix something you don’t know how to fix.
• Solve a riddle.
• Solve a puzzle.
• Complete a difficult physical challenge.
• Ice bath.
• Intense exercise.
• Fasting.
• Escape room.
• Start a side business/passion project.
• Renovate a room.
• Attend a quiz night.

Atelic high quality leisure:

The ‘productivity-driven’ pursuit of more output conditions us to believe that everything we do has to be ‘for’ something. That everything has to have a purpose or an outcome. This ties back into our desire to optimise everything we do. To work for the purpose of earning money. To walk for the purpose of getting fit. To read for the purpose of self improvement. But what if not everything we did had to be ‘for’ something?

Our life is dominated by these ‘telic’ activities. Telic activities are the things that have a goal, a purpose, and a clear endpoint. They are done with the intent of achieving some specific outcome.

Contrast these with ‘atelic’ leisure activities – things that have no endpoint or purpose (other than the activity itself).

‘Telic’ and ‘Atelic’ activities are related to what the author Professor James P. Carse calls ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ games.

He defines finite games as a game that is ‘…played for the purpose of winning (where) the rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won. The rules are like the boundaries of the game, and by extension, like the boundaries of the players, giving definition to who they are within the game.’

Infinite games however are ‘…played for the purpose of continuing the play. The rules of an infinite game must change during the course of play. The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possible into the play.’

In ‘Digital Minimalism’, Cal Newport calls these ‘high quality leisure’.

To paraphrase Aristotle, the Ancient Greek philosopher, ‘high quality leisure is essential to a life well lived’.

In ‘Meditations for Mortals’, Oliver Burkeman says ‘Any focus on ‘reaping the benefits’ (of something) risks obscuring the truth that a meaningful life, in the end, has to involve at least some activities we love doing for themselves, here and now, so you needn’t always choose to do what is most edifying, or professionally useful… Sometimes it’s ok to do whatever seems most fun… These things are done not just to improve who you may become in the future… but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.’

What we’re talking about here are pointless hobbies. High quality leisure time.

Burkeman continues, ‘Leisure is not the means to another end. Conversely, it is the end to which everything else worth doing was the means. True leisure is amongst the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake.’

If we can accept that living a good life is more art than science, we would do well to heed the experience of Derek Sivers, an author on philosophy and entrepreneurship. ‘Art is useless by definition. If it was useful, it would be a tool. For the past twenty years, I was obsessed with being useful. That one measure drove all of my daily decisions: ‘How can I be the most useful to the most people today?’. That question served me well but had its downsides. It kept me from playing and doing things just for me.’

Cal Newport outlines three guidelines to cultivate high quality leisure: ‘Prioritise demanding activity over passive consumption; Use skills to produce valuable things in the physical world; Seek activities that require real world, structured, social interactions.’

We need to be careful not to rate the importance of leisure on its ability to improve your performance in other things. Leisure doesn’t need to be for anything other than leisure’s sake. We need more fun, playful, pointless atelic leisure. Leisure for leisure’s sake.

Examples:

• Going for a walk.
• Reading fiction.
• Drawing, art, or a colouring book.
• Gardening.
• Listening to music (maybe on a record player).
• Cooking.
• Swinging on a swing.
• Do a crossword or Sudoku.
• Modelling with clay or plasticine.
• Knitting.
• Chopping wood.

Fun and play:

It might go without saying, but it’s important to have fun. As obvious as it seems, how often do you intentionally insert fun into your life? How often do you ‘play’? How often are you ‘playful’? How often do you finish an activity and say ‘that was fun’? Undertaking atelic activities for no reason other than to have fun will go a long way to improving the short term pleasure that’s an important contributing factor to happiness.

Examples:

• Playing social sport.
• Dancing.
• Turning everyday tasks into games (throwing a scrunched up piece of paper into the bin from across the room, instead of placing it in the bin).
• Play a game of chess.
• Building sandcastles.
• Playing in the pool.
• Jumping on a trampoline.
• Flying a kite.
• Water pistol fight.
• Play ‘catch’.

Time with others:

The Harvard Study of Adult Development is one of the longest-running longitudinal studies in history, focusing on the impact of relationships on health and happiness. 85 years of data from this study points to a single thing: strong, meaningful relationships are the most important factor for long-term happiness and well-being.

Examples:

• Joining a club (a sport club, book club, a gym etc).
• Eat a meal with family and friends.
• Organising a date with a romantic partner.
• Play a board game.
• Do a road trip.
• Sitting around a campfire.
• Golf.
• Cook a meal from scratch (making pasta etc).
• Poker night.

Creating:

Creativity is defined as ‘the process of developing original ideas that have value’. In ‘Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow’, Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian, philosopher, and author points out that ‘humans derive a great satisfaction from being good at what they do and creating useful things’. Personally, I derive a great sense of satisfaction from putting valuable, original ideas into the world. For that matter, they don’t even need to be good, valuable or original – the satisfaction that comes from completing something I’ve worked hard on is enough for me. Often (probably incorrectly) attributed to Einstein, the quote ‘creativity is intelligence having fun’ goes a step further, suggesting the thing you create doesn’t need to be good, valuable, original or even complete. As long as the process (the journey) is fun. If happiness is made up of enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose, creating something can tick all three.

Examples:

• Storyboarding, filming and editing a video.
• Building a website.
• Making an origami crane.
• Writing a book, blog or essay.
• Releasing a podcast.
• Building a lego masterpiece.
• Writing a short story or poetry.
• Building furniture.
• Photography.
• Making/building a present for someone.

Growth:

About Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman says ‘Self actualisation (and therefore growth) is made up of three specific needs; Exploration, Love and Purpose’. In his book, Transcend, he goes on to say that, ‘At the base of growth is exploration, the fundamental biological drive that all growth needs to have as its foundation. Exploration is the desire to seek out and make sense of novel, challenging and uncertain events.’ So we should seek out opportunities for growth by exploring, consuming, learning, developing and changing. We can add to this, the ‘pursuit of mastery’ – the journey towards betterment.

Examples:

• Reading or listening to a nonfiction book.
• Listening to a podcast.
• Learning to cook.
• Learning a language.
• Learning an instrument.
• Learning a martial art or a complex form of exercise.
• Learning photography.
• Taking an online course.
• Getting a mentor.
• Watching a TED Talk.
• Watching a documentary.

Peaks of experience and novelty:

In their book, ‘The Power of Moments’, Chip Heath and Dan Heath tell us that people don’t rate holidays based on the ‘average’ of how good it was, but on how good the best bits were. In the same way, people don’t rate days, weeks, months or years based on how good they were ‘on average’, but on how good the peaks were. The lesson here? Insert more peak experiences into life – more memorable ‘upward blips’ on the radar. In ‘The Rise of Superman’, Steven Kotler tells us that ‘The happiest people on Earth, the ones who felt their life had the most meaning were those who had the most peak experiences. Moreover, this did not come down to chance or luck. The happiest people on earth worked hard for their fulfilment. They didn’t just have the most peak experiences, they devoted their lives to having these experiences, often going to extreme lengths to seek them out’. We should seek out novelty – unique experiences that stick their head up from the repetitive scrum of life.

Examples:

• Choose activities on a ‘date night’ or for social catch ups, that you’ve never done before.
• Listen to live music or attend a concert.
• Book a weekend away at a unique airbnb.
• Go to a sporting event.
• Go camping.
• Plan, train for, and undertake a ‘physical adventure’ – either solo, or with others.
• Do an extreme activity (like skydiving or bungee jumping).
• Fly in a hot air balloon or helicopter.

Flow:

We can’t talk about peak experiences without talking about ‘flow’. Steven Kotler believes that ‘Flow is what makes life worth living.’

You’ve probably experienced flow – but not often enough. It’s that state where you lose track of time and become completely focused and immersed in what you’re doing.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian-American psychologist is known as the ‘Grandfather of Flow’. His research identified a handful of criteria that characterise this state.

• You have complete concentration on the task, fully absorbed in the activity, with a deep focus that blocks out distractions. Your attention is completely directed toward what you are doing. Steven Kotler calls it ‘Being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.’
• You lose track of time, where time may seem to speed up (hours pass in what feels like minutes) or slow down (moments seem like hours). The author James Clear put it well, ‘When you lose track of time, you are either living your best life or wasting it.’
• The activity itself is rewarding (it’s an ‘atelic task’). You’re completing the task for the intrinsic pleasure and enjoyment it brings, not for some external reward or outcome. It’s about the journey not the destination.
• Even though the task may be challenging, you feel a sense of ease and effortlessness in the way you perform it.
• You feel a strong sense of control and autonomy over your actions and the situation.

So how do we get in flow? What are the ingredients required to put ourselves in this state? According to Csikszentmihalyi, there are three things:

• There are clear goals and a clear understanding of what you need to do. The process and steps you need to follow are well defined. This means there’s a high level of intentionality – a conscious and deliberate decision to ‘do what you’re doing’ and nothing else.
• There is immediate feedback about your progress towards these clear goals, allowing you to adjust and improve your performance as you go.
• There is a balance between challenge and skill. The difficulty of the task is well matched to the level of your skills. Too high a challenge level leads to anxiety. Too low a challenge level leads to boredom. Flow is found in the sweet spot where challenge and skill are balanced. The need for growth to achieve self actualisation (as discussed by both Maslow and Kaufman) fits well into this need for challenge.

Before we leave our discussion of flow, it’s worth mentioning one extra point that has served me well. In ‘The Rise of Superman’, Steven Kotler talks about the different stages that make up the entry into flow, flow itself, and the exit from flow. Specifically, he talks about one stage required before you can enter flow – the ‘struggle’ phase. This is characterised by negative feelings. Things like stress, anxiety and overwhelm. It feels like you’re doing things that exceed your limits. But you physiologically HAVE TO go through this stage to unlock flow. Once again, we encounter pain and suffering as a path to the good life. Churchill advises, ‘when you’re going through hell, keep going’. This point has always been reassuring for me. When I’m going through a rough patch, I remind myself that this is just me paying upfront for the flow state I’m heading towards.

Examples:

• Learning a dance routine.
• Learning a complex musical piece.
• Learning circus skills, like juggling or riding a unicycle.
• Training for a technical sport (like rock climbing).
• Working on a creative project.
• Building a complex model.
• Editing complex video productions.

Awe:

If ‘flow’ is an inner state – maybe its outer cousin is ‘awe’. In his book by that title, Dacher Keltner, the American psychologist and professor at the University of California defines awe as ‘…being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world… being amazed at things outside yourself. In ‘Transcend’, Scott Barry Kaufman tells us that some of the things that trigger awe are natural scenery, great skill, great virtue, a building or monument, a powerful leader, a grand theory or idea, music, art and epiphany. The characters of Keanu Reeves exemplify awe. Whether they’re seeing a time-travelling phone booth for the first time in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, or witnessing the bending of reality in ‘The Matrix’, Reeves presents us with a wide eyed, wide mouthed ‘whoa’, and a feeling of awe.

Examples:

• Gaze at the stars.
• Visiting a museum.
• Visiting an art gallery.
• Watching fireworks.
• Watching the sun rise or set.
• Enjoying the lights of the city at night.
• Watching your kids do something for the first time.
• Listening to a live orchestra.
• Watching an amazing physical performance like elite sport or Cirque du Soleil.
• Watching an ant carrying a beetle ten times its size.
• Examining things through a microscope.
• Exploring a cave system.

Time in Nature:

Personally there’s a calming escape I get from time in nature. For me, the key ingredients are water (the beach or the river) and greenery. Something as simple as the colours around you can make a big difference to your happiness and mood. The presence of greens and blues increases immune system function, while reducing levels of high blood pressure and depression. Being in nature also increases the levels of serotonin and endorphins – improving mood and providing an immediate boost in pleasure and enjoyment. Sunlight exposure has also been shown to reduce rates of depression, while also promoting regular sleep/wake patterns.

Examples:

• Going for a walk.
• Swimming in the ocean.
• Looking for pictures in the clouds.
• Sitting on a bench and take in nature.
• Gardening.
• Exercising outdoors.
• Learning about the natural flora and fauna in your local area.
• Exploring rock pools by the coast.
• Birdwatching.
• Kayaking.

Things to look forward to:

Rightly or wrongly, a lot of the time we spend inside our own heads is us thinking about the future. If you’re going to spend that much time looking forward, it makes sense to have something to look forward to. When surveyed, people routinely nominate Saturday as their favourite day of the week. No surprise there. What’s more surprising is that their second favourite day is Friday (not Sunday) – even though it’s a work day. They spend Friday looking forward to Saturday, while they spend Sunday dreading Monday. Aside from the fact that dreading Monday is a surefire sign that something needs to change in their life, this shows the power of having peak, positive experiences in life to look forward to.

Examples:

• Book a holiday well in advance.
• Have an ‘Uber Eats’ and movie night once a fortnight.
• Have a ‘deload week’ (from work etc) once a quarter.
• Seeing a movie
• A weekend away
• Attend a sporting event.

Meaningful work:

We yearn to feel like we matter – that we make a difference in the world. That we are FOR something. Meaningful work can help here. Wanting to make the world a better place can be overbearing and seem all consuming. So instead, just make a difference in your tiny little corner of the world. You don’t need to help eight billion people. Sometimes (and often) helping just one person might not change the whole world, but it might change THEIR whole world. Seek out work that makes the world better, even if it’s only a tiny bit better.

Examples:

• Completing some ‘pro bono’ work as part of your regular work.
• Measuring the life improvements people are getting as a result of the work you do.
• Starting a mentorship program or taking on interns.

Helping others:

The research is unanimous. Showing kindness to others, and helping others is one of the most important things we can do for our own happiness.

Examples:

• Charity work.
• Volunteering.
• Take responsibility for keeping a section of nature clean and tidy, or join a group that does this.
• Helping a friend move house.
• Mentoring someone.
• Donating to a food bank, donating toys/clothes etc.
• Cooking a meal for someone in need.
• Donating blood.
• Fostering animals.

Journaling:

Using the chamber inside our head is a lonely and confusing way to make sense of our own thoughts. Though it’s not something I’ve ever done consistently, getting my problems onto paper in a seemingly random, nonsensical stream of consciousness always seems to help. When dealing with the shit inside your own head, our problems often seem endless and infinite. Getting them out of your head seems to give them shape and borders. It contains and defines our problems in one place so we can deal with them.

Examples:

• A daily journaling practice.

White space:

There’s a danger of trying to ‘optimise’ our life to fit in as many of these ingredients for a good life as we can. But living a good life is as much art as it is science, and art needs white space. We need emptiness and the ‘absence of stuff’ in our days – times when our mind is free to wander and daydream.

Examples:

• Sit in a patch of sun on a winter’s day and drink hot chocolate.
• Daydream.
• Have a long shower/bath.
• Float tank.

Mindfulness:

If the purpose of ‘white space’ is to let our thoughts wander, a mindfulness practice is an opportunity for us to practise being in the present, and not being pulled towards the depressive tendencies to ruminate on the past or the anxiety-causing tendencies to obsess about the future.

Examples:

• A guided meditation (through an app, or in-person).
• 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise: Use your senses to bring yourself to the present by identifying five things you see, four you can touch, three you hear, two you smell, and one you taste.
• Focused breathing.

Genetic requirements:

I should also make mention of some of the external contributors to happiness that are baked into our genes. There’s some overlap with the above list. Not that we’ve evolved to be happy (we haven’t, natural selection is too distracted by procreation, and prioritises the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs over its peak), but by looking at our evolutionary past we can examine the environment that we’re best suited for. By emulating at least some of that environment, we’re upping our chances of upping our happiness.

The British Philosopher, Bertrand Russell, said, ‘Man is an animal, and his happiness depends upon his physiology more than he likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.’

The evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky claimed that ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ So, in light of evolution, we should:

• Avoid the highly processed western diet, in favour of varied sources of unprocessed food with plenty of veggies, protein and water.
• Get plenty of varied exercise.
• Get some exposure to the sun and the elements.
• Avoid chronic stress.
• Foster social networks.
• Get plenty of sleep, with consistent sleep/wake patterns.

These external contributors to a ‘good life’ (both the things we can go out and ‘do’, and the things that are programmed into our genes) have a lot of overlap. And that’s a good thing. We can combine these ingredients. Walking somewhere new in nature with a loved one for example can tick the boxes of atelic leisure, time with others, awe, peaks of experience, novelty and exposure to the sun and the elements. There are many more examples of combining experiences in our pursuit of a good life.

Internal contributors to a ‘good life’:

Now to internal contributors to a ‘good life’. These are the ways we need to think, the attitudes we need to have, and the things we need to believe. These are the contributors that live not on a tropical beach, or in a dinner with the people you love, but inside our own mind. If it’s true that happiness comes from within, not from without, it’s these internal things that really matter.

Gratefulness:

Attributed to a whole bunch of different people is the idea that ‘happiness isn’t getting what you want, it’s wanting what you have’. This idea boils down to gratefulness. Whether this is a formalised gratitude practice (such as writing down three things you’re grateful for) or simply a mindset, this is perhaps the biggest ‘internal’ contributor to happiness.

Ryan Holiday says ‘You will never feel okay by way of external accomplishments. ‘Enough’ comes from the inside. It comes from stepping off the train, from seeing what you already have, what you’ve always had. If a person can do that, they are richer than any billionaire, more powerful than any sovereign. Yet, instead of seizing this path to power, we choose ingratitude and insecurity of needing more, more, more…  In truth, enough is a beautiful thing… No ceaseless wanting. No insecurity of comparison. Feeling satisfied with yourself and your work.’

An important point on gratitude. It’s not just about being thankful for the good things, it’s about being thankful for the bad things too.

Intentionality and presence:

I touched on intentionality and presence in our discussion of flow, but I want to mention them again. Because I think a conscious and deliberate decision to ‘do what you’re doing’ and nothing else has benefits reaching far beyond our desire to be ‘in flow’. I find that whenever I’m trying to do two things at the same time, I do a terrible job of both. If I’m trying to check emails while building lego with my kids, I’m doing a terrible job of being a father, and a terrible job of being a business owner. Whatever you’re doing… do that. Wherever you are… be there.

Acceptance:

Hopefully I’ve presented some evidence that all emotions have a place. That there are no ‘bad’ emotions in the pursuit of a full life. All emotions have a purpose, even if they seem misguided and excessive at times. Accepting that struggle and failure is a non negotiable part of life, that all emotions have a place, and that our states and emotions will experience never ending peaks and troughs will go a long way to stopping us fighting the human condition. This acceptance of the human condition will go a long way to better living it.

Growth Mindset:

The idea that we have an enormous degree of control over our lives and how they play out is a powerful one. The Psychologist and Stanford Professor, Carol Dweck, in her book ‘Mindset’ tells us that ‘In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point.’

The knowledge that we have the power to ‘steer the ship’ that is our life allows us to change the direction of our lives should we wish to. This lies at the heart of our desire to mould our life. At the same time as appreciating our desire to control our world, we must also accept those things that we have no power to control. Obsessing over these uncontrollables is only a recipe for negative effect.

Benevolence:

There’s a central concept in Confucian philosophy called ‘ren’ (pronounced ‘jen’). In his book ‘Born to be Good’, Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology, defines ren as ‘…an ideal of benevolence, kindness, and humanity that ideally should pervade every action, from the most important to the most mundane.’ Keltner argues that in living a good life we should prioritise the connections, relationships, and contributions we make to others. We should lead with empathy, compassion, kindness and a desire to do good for others. The Dalai Lama teaches ‘If you want to be happy, practice compassion. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.’

Reframing and choosing your responses:

One of the key tenets of Stoic philosophy is the idea that we can’t control what happens to us, but we control how we respond to what happens to us. Stoicism is a branch of philosophy that deals with how we respond and react to our world, and teaches that although we may not be able to control every element of our environment (and what happens to us), we can control how we interpret and respond to our environment. It can teach us much about dealing with adversity. Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher taught the concept of ‘neutrality of events’, and that ‘It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.’ Viktor Frankl added his thoughts, writing ‘between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’ The action step here is to stretch out the interval between something happening, and decide how to label and respond to that thing. To choose to ‘see the good in things’ The idea that we can reframe something that may conventionally be perceived as a negative event or emotion is powerful. The author Mel Robbins says ‘Your emotions are only signals and you get to decide how you’ll respond to them’. And to repeat a Churchill quote I’ve already used, ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’. When an event challenges us, hurts us, or causes us pain and suffering, we have some power to resist ‘post traumatic stress’ and instead reframe hardship and choose ‘post traumatic growth’.

Self awareness:

‘Metacognition’ or ‘thinking about thinking’ refers to our ability to take a step back from our own thoughts to examine them more neutrally. We should constantly examine how our thoughts, actions and behaviour affect us – and be open to tweaking these factors as a result of this examination.

Each of these internal contributors to a ‘good life’ can (and should) be practised, trained, and developed. Just like we get better at physical skills (like writing or juggling) because of physical changes to networks in the brain, we can get better at thinking in certain ways due to the same strengthening of networks. According to the professor of sport psychology, Terry Orlick, ‘Attitudes are skills.’

Controlling hormones

It’s worth exploring the importance of these contributors to a good life from a basis of ‘first principles’. That is, what is the actual underlying reason for each being so important?

A lot of it comes down to the four key brain chemicals that impact our general wellbeing. The levels of dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins can be boosted by how we act and how we think.

Each of the contributors to a good life clearly increase one (or more) of these four chemicals.

Dopamine is responsible for pleasure, motivation, and goal achievement. It spikes when we achieve or anticipate rewards. Challenge and struggle, creating, flow, peaks of experience, things to look forward to, exercise, eating well, a growth mindset and intentionality, and presence all increase dopamine.

Oxytocin is often called the ‘love hormone’ because it fosters connection, trust, and affection. Oxytocin is increased by time with others, helping others, meaningful work, fun and play, socialise, sleep, gratefulness, benevolence and acceptance.

Serotonin contributes to feelings of well-being, stability, and happiness. Atelic leisure, time in nature, awe, mindfulness, journaling, white space, exercise, eat well, sleep, avoid chronic stress, gratefulness, intentionality and presence, acceptance, reframing and choosing your responses, and self-awareness increase serotonin.

Endorphins act as natural painkillers and stress relievers. We can increase endorphins through fun and play, peaks of experience, flow, time in nature, challenge/struggle, exercise, exposure to the elements, avoiding chronic stress, reframing and choosing your responses and self-awareness.

External plus internal

We need to fill our lives with the external contributors to a good life, while filling our heads with the internal contributors to a good life.

How to spend money

So we’ve explored how to spend our time for a good life, it would be remiss of me not to touch on the best way to spend our money. It’s worth mentioning, because humans are traditionally pretty terrible at spending our money in ways that make us happy. The book ‘Happy Money’ by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton explores this question exclusively, and gives five key principles for spending money to increase happiness.

• Buy Experiences, Not Things: Spending on experiences, like travel or events, tends to bring more lasting happiness than material purchases because of the memories and social connections they foster.
• Make It a Treat: Limiting access to things you enjoy (even things like coffee or dining out) increases appreciation and enjoyment. Scarcity makes experiences feel more special.
• Buy Time: Spending money to free up time (e.g., hiring help for house work) can reduce stress and increase happiness by giving you more control over how you spend your time.
• Pay Now, Consume Later:  Paying upfront and delaying gratification can increase the anticipation and enjoyment of a purchase. It also helps avoid the stress of lingering payments.
• Invest in Others: Spending money on others, whether through gifts or donations, brings more happiness than spending money on yourself, especially when it strengthens social connections.

Section summary: We have the power to design our lives. External contributors to a good life are the experiences we should pursue. They include: Challenge/struggle/hard things/problem solving; Atelic high quality leisure; Fun and play; Time with others; Creating; Peaks of experience and novelty; Flow; Awe; Time in Nature; Things to look forward to; Meaningful work; Helping others; Journaling; White space; and Mindfulness. Evolution requires that we eat well, exercise, get exposure to the elements, avoid chronic stress, socialise and sleep. Internal contributors to a good life are the ways we should think. They include: Gratefulness; Intentionality and presence; Acceptance; A growth mindset; Benevolence; Reframing and choosing your responses and Self awareness. These contributors optimise our ‘DOSE’ hormones. We should spend our money on experiences, things that free up time, and on others. We should spend money up front and consume later, and limit access to treats we enjoy.

 

8: Conclusion

As I’ve been working through this journey of my own existentialism, it’s been hard not to think about everything in the context of my kids. They are, after all, the most important thing in my universe a million times over.

The line that’s so often thrown around by parents is ‘I just want my kids to be happy’. And that’s what I thought I wanted too – that my kids be happy.

But I think my position on this has changed. Wishing happiness on my kids is, I think, as realistic as wishing they could flap their arms and fly to the moon. It’s just not realistic.

When you reach the acceptance that happiness in the absence of any ‘negative’ emotion is not possible – you magically become happier.

So instead of wanting my kids to be happy, I think my hope for them is that they live a full life. Yes, a life full of happiness, but also of sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. Of pain and suffering. Of ambition and contentment. Of journey and destination. And being accepting of experiencing these things. As I’ve found myself saying and thinking ‘It’s all part of it’. Knowing that these things are the things that breed enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose.

A life of ‘flourishing’.

The full human experience.

As Thoreau put it, to ‘…live deep and suck out all the marrow of life… to get the whole and genuine meanness of it… or if it were sublime, to know it by experience…’

That, as far as the me of today can tell – is a full and good life.

 

Overall summary:

To suffer with questions of existentialism is a privilege. Not only is it not possible to solve our problems, but we shouldn’t try, as we can’t have satisfaction without struggle.

It is possible to be both content and ambitious at the same time. I am content, grateful and happy with, and for, my life. One of the things I’m grateful for is the ability to choose to strive. Striving gives us problems to overcome, something to suffer though, and a vehicle to build, create and solve. The act of striving leads to satisfaction. You should strive because you choose to, and because you’re enjoying the process. And you should stop striving if you’re using it as a distraction from what you want life to be, or if you don’t have an optimistic perspective on the outcome of your striving.

For a good life, instead of trying to optimise for only present enjoyment, or only future benefit, optimise for both. Fill life with things that simultaneously give you pleasure today, and lead to meaning tomorrow. Happiness is about enjoying the journey towards a valuable destination.

Work should exist to make our life better. It can do that either by only providing the resources to live a good life outside of work (and that’s ok) or by also enriching our lives by the nature of the work itself. It can be enriching by giving us something to struggle through, as a vehicle by which to be both useful and ambitious, and as a source of both pleasure and meaning. We should measure productivity not by how much we do (which can lead to a damaging addiction to work), but by how little we can do and still get the same result.

We need to be wary that we’re not using busyness and productivity to simply fill our time and distract us from deciding what we actually want to do with this time.

We have the power to design our lives. External contributors to a good life are the experiences we should pursue. They include: Challenge/struggle/hard things/problem solving; Atelic high quality leisure; Fun and play; Time with others; Creating; Peaks of experience and novelty; Flow; Awe; Time in Nature; Things to look forward to; Meaningful work; Helping others; Journaling; White space; and Mindfulness. Evolution requires that we eat well, exercise, get exposure to the elements, avoid chronic stress, socialise and sleep. Internal contributors to a good life are the ways we should think. They include: Gratefulness; Intentionality and presence; Acceptance; A growth mindset; Benevolence; Reframing and choosing your responses and Self awareness. These contributors optimise our ‘DOSE’ hormones. We should spend our money on experiences, things that free up time, and on others. We should spend money up front and consume later, and limit access to treats we enjoy.

That, is a full and good life.

 

References (items indicated by an asterisk are recommended reading):

1. *Ben-Shahar, T. (2007). Happier: Learn the secrets to daily joy and lasting fulfilment. McGraw-Hill.
2. *Burkeman, O. (2016). The antidote: Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking. Faber & Faber.
3. *Burkeman, O. (2021). Four thousand weeks: Time management for mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
4. Burkeman, O. (2022). Meditations for mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
5. Carse, J. P. (1986). Finite and infinite games: A vision of life as play and possibility. Ballantine Books.
6. *Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
7. *Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit: The power of passion and perseverance. Scribner.
8. *Dunn, E., & Norton, M. (2013). Happy money: The science of smarter spending. Simon & Schuster.
9. *Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.
10. *Epstein, D. (2019). Range: Why generalists triumph in a specialized world. Riverhead Books.
11. *Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)
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