What matters?
It seems like a simple question. But here’s the thing: people every day ask themselves what they want in life or how they can find more meaning in life and never really face that question. They often end up looking around at what other people like and following them. With that approach, they had better hope that they like the same things that the people around them like, or they will be miserable without understanding why.
Similarly, people often jump into self-help books where they tell you to set goals and then just start aiming for things that they think they might want: money, fame, a relationship, etc. Fortunately, several common goals are pretty universal and so it’s hard to get it completely wrong, but certain ones like fame are really just a proxy for the desire to receive attention from and be liked by people you care about. So, before you go off on some long journey toward goals you were told to have in a book or by a social media personality, as yourself the question: what matters to you and why?
Don’t worry—I will give you an answer in this blog post. Not a “what” answer, though…a “how” answer. A “what” answer is either specific and wrong or vague and not concrete. A “how” answer will help you figure it out for yourself.
So what is the answer to this fundamental question? There are objective and subjective elements: objective ones are criteria that are founded in human nature and so they apply to us all; subjective ones are dependent on your interests, personality, goals, and needs.
So, what matters to all human beings? Growth and harm. We all need to breathe, eat, drink, sleep, have sex, and expel waste to go through the biological processes required for survival and growth. Growth’s fundamental form in living organisms is through cellular reproduction, but at higher levels we get into sexual reproduction, fitness, learning, bonding, resource acquisition, and other forms of improving your life in the future from what it is today. Harm take the form of anything that inhibits growth or reverses it: physical harm that damages someone’s body; emotional harm that stunts their social and relationship development; financial harm that takes someone money or assets that they acquired through effort that make them much worse off in life. Those objective matters are universal, and so that is why major sociopolitical discussions always surround issues such as homelessness (lack of shelter), abortion (life and reproduction), world hunger (lack of food), clean water (hydration), crime (harm), and the economy (resources and finance). These are objectively, universally important because everyone needs the fundamentals to grow and avoid harm.
Then, there are subjective matters. Art, beauty, taste, comedy, success criteria, what “good” looks like, what is worth spending free time on, what products people should consume, style, fashion, preferences, interests, abilities, hobbies, and life pursuits. These differ because humans vary wildly in these areas. There are two elements to this: “skill” (ability) and “will” (desire or interest). When you are good at something, you tend to enjoy it because it either feels good to be effective or it feels good to get the social status associated with the ability. Similarly, you might enjoy doing something because of its outcome or how it feels doing it. Those abilities and interests differ between people: some are taller or stronger, while others are smaller and possibly more agile; some are mathematical and logical, while others might be artistic and creative. The combination of ability and desire will have a significant impact on what matters to you.
Now, let’s combine those two factors: you need food to live, but you hate cooking…so you get a job building chairs, sell those chairs for money, and use the money to buy food. You now have money and food doing something that you are good at and don’t mind doing as much as cooking. So food matters to you only to survive, as does your job to earn money to purchase things to live. That might be all that matters to you in these areas, and you spend the rest of your time with family, watching sports, or writing a novel. This is how you shape your life: identify what you want and need, figure out how to get it, and then optimize for getting the most growth in areas that matter to you while minimizing discomfort, pain, harm, boredom, and other negative things along the way.
When you figure out what matters to you in life, you now understand where you get your meaning from: it comes from either fostering growth in yourself and the people/things you care about and protecting yourself and them from harm. It is why people find meaning in military service (protecting or growing their country), relationships and children (emotional health and reproduction), community activities (societal growth), and intellectual and creative accomplishments (both personal/professional growth and potential societal benefit). Find what matters to you and put effort toward it to feel like your life and actions have meaning.
Society knows this, as that is why they identify and reward accomplishments. An accomplishment is the completion of a task or outcome that contributes toward some form of growth: whether you finish doing the dishes (maintenance work for future food consumption), write your first script (creative work toward entertainment), or get your high school diploma (intellectual growth). When that accomplishment is deemed to be significant enough, then groups often construct awards to recognize it. Awards include scholastic degrees (academia), trophies (sports or competitions), statuettes or ribbons (creative accomplishments), and plaques (architectural or societal contributions). The significance of the accomplishment usually has three tiers: personal life achievement, contribution to a field or society, and competition. The first type includes degrees and other means of recognizing completion of a life goal; the second type includes awards for donations, projects, or sustained efforts; the third is about being one of the best at a task, sport, competition, or field relative to everyone else.
This is where things get interesting because what matters to you and what matters to others might be different and so there might not be an award for your work or accomplishments (or vice versa—you might not think others’ work deserves an award). This is where subjectivity comes in because someone else might get an award and you either think that they don’t deserve it (because you have different award criteria) or that there shouldn’t be an award for what they did (because you don’t place any value on the accomplishment at all). You see this all the time when people debate who deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, who deserves to win an Academy Award, and who deserved to make a short list of competitors to compete for a championship or first place. You also see this in things like the Guinness Book of World Records where someone might wonder why anyone would care about who made the world’s largest pizza or hopped on one foot for the longest amount of time in human history.
So it is up to you to determine what matters to you and whether you care enough about others’ recognition of your accomplishments to decide exactly what you work toward in life and whether you keep your efforts to yourself or try to get recognized for your work. Once you decide to put yourself out there, though, you have to be ready for other people to have different criteria for what “good” is and hold you to their own standards, thus possibly not getting you the recognition that you feel you deserve based on the criteria of what “good” is in your mind.
On a final note, you’ll notice many references over the last few decades over the idea of the “asterisk” in achievements. This is an interesting wrinkle in the idea of the achievement because there are two aspects causing that discussion: differing conditions or evaluation criteria and unethical behavior. In the former category, the world changes, which causes the benchmark of what “the best” is to change. For example, the most rushing yards in a season in the NFL will be higher if there are 17 games in a season than if there are 14, so someone who holds the record in the 14-game season might need clarification that their per-game average was higher than someone who has more yards but fewer yards per game than the previous rushing record holder. Similarly, it could be that a world record holder in an Olympic sport today might have benefitted from science and technology and so their record might not seem or feel as impressive as the person who did it without that advantage 50 years ago. This is why determining what “matters” in terms of significant is so difficult: there are so many factors that everyone weighs differently and a mix of objective and subjective criteria.
But the trickiest issue in the world of recognizing achievement is when that accomplishment was attained unethically. Yes, there are obvious ones like if you cheated on all of your exams or drove to the finish line of a marathon and jumped in to run the last half-mile that you don’t deserve your award. But what about if a baseball player took steroids and hit more home runs than anyone else? They still had to work hard; their muscles were just larger and so they could hit the ball farther. What about someone who did blood-doping in bicycling to have more oxygenated blood and more endurance? What about an NFL player who ran for more yards than anyone on the field but then killed two people off the field? What about a college football player (i.e., defined at the time as an amateur) who won the Heisman trophy but received monetary compensation while no one was allowed to do so during that time? What you see here is varying degrees of non-compliance with the standards of the competition or society and whether the behavior affected their performance in a way that was unfair to other competitors or if their behavior outside of the competition was so egregious that it feels inappropriate to acknowledge and recognize their achievement by listing them as the winner.
Of course, this post is not here to convince you which accomplishments you should acknowledge or not—it is simply explaining how people decide what to recognize and when they are unsure of how to treat accomplishments attained by people associated with unethical behavior. It is also intended to help you figure out what matters to you and what to work toward in your life…even if that means that you may or may not be acknowledged by others in the way that you wish you would be.
So now you know what matters in life and hopefully have some idea of how to use this information to figure out what to go after and how to approach it so you get the outcome that you are looking for. If you don’t care what anyone else thinks, then do what matters to you and gain fulfillment from it. If others’ recognition is important to you, then identify something that you are good at and work toward being the best that you can in a way that gets noticed by others. No matter (pun intended) what you choose to pursue, it will matter to you if you believe that it is useful/beneficial, significant, or unique in some way. Where you find growth or protection, you will find meaning or significance.