Chasing Fulfillment

If you ask someone what they are chasing in life, they usually answer one of two things:

• Goals – Money, success, family, love
• Happiness – The emotional state that comes from either those results or focusing on things you like or appreciate in life

Now, we all know the happiness paradox: if you chase happiness, you’ll never get it. The reason why people say that is that if you cannot choose to be happy now with what you do have such as your health or family, then nothing can fill that void. It’s why so many people end up seeking the next high like a sexual encounter, alcohol binge, or bet and yet never seem to be satisfied. The thing about highs is that you need more of it to take effect, and eventually it’ll either not have any positive benefits or will even harm you.

The thing is about modern times is that we live in an environment of general safety, instant gratification, convenience, and ease. As a result, we are told to avoid effort and seek pleasure, and we often end up looking for the next pleasurable experience to encounter while checking out on our phones whenever there is a dull moment. What then leads is effectively living in a giant Skinner Box, looking to do the bare minimum to get the next reward and then milk the rewards for everything they’re worth.

So many people, after going through that pleasure-won’t-make-you-happy period, seek something else. Maybe it’s belonging: finding people who love, appreciate, and accept you. Or maybe it’s a cause: trying to right the wrongs of the world through awareness, petitioning, protesting, and trying to get people to change. Now, those are arguably even more tempting because they suck you into a world where everything feels right to you because you feel like you are receiving validation for who you are and what you believe or do. And everyone needs to have connections and something to strive for, but there is a negative side to that as well when others use those to pull you into cults and/or brainwash you that a certain belief system is the “right” or “best” way to live.

So what should you be chasing? Ultimately, people are looking for fulfillment, the idea that their lives are whole and they are being their authentic selves while living up to their potential. In that respect, happiness is not fulfillment because it’s a fleeting emotion in response to a pleasant event; belonging is not necessarily fulfillment because you need to feel like your life is on an upward trajectory (e.g., you can belong to a gang and be spiraling downward); causes bring a sense of self-righteousness but not necessarily fulfillment if people become willing to negatively affect others in support of it. So fulfillment is about viewing the positive aspects of your life and striving to make your life better. Fulfillment is about growth.

So how do you chase fulfillment? It’s a simple set of two activities that you perform regularly and probably have heard people recommend to you hundreds of times:

• Appreciation – The act of acknowledging everything that is positive, good, right, or beneficial in your life
• Contribution – Any progress or effort toward a positive outcome that enhances your life or the lives of people you care about

You’ve heard of the first one over and over again from everyone from psychologists on how to manage negative emotions to new-age philosophers telling you how to realize your dreams. There are so many good things in life that misery is effectively as simple as deciding to ignore all of them and focus on the one thing that is not going well. Yes, it’s human nature in our fight-or-flight and alert systems to always be monitoring the environment for anything dangerous, but the mind can override that to ensure that you focus on the good things in life for your mental health and well-being.

The second one is more interesting because many—if not most—people will run away from this aspect because it seems at odds with the search for pleasure, happiness, and the easy life. People are always trying to make their lives easier, and so the suggestion of effort seems very counterintuitive. Everyone from friends talking about wishing life were easy to new-age thinkers saying that life is supposed to be easy and fun seem to contradict this idea that contribution is important to fulfillment.

But the point of the second aspect of chasing fulfillment is the fact that for you to matter, you have to have had a positive impact. And a positive impact requires you to do something. Even the most famous “they just need to exist” example of attractive people getting special treatment does require them to spend hours and hours on grooming, diet, exercise, skincare, and other activities to deliver that positive impact that causes others to want to shower them with praise and admiration. In a universe where entropy is the natural result of conditions without a conscious organism bringing order and improvement to their environment, your effort toward making something better (or maintaining something great) is a rewarding experience that brings fulfillment and satisfaction from your role in its value and benefit.

So if you want to chase fulfillment, those are the two things you can do today: think about and list things that you love about your life and then document things you can focus on or do that can make that life even better. It will depend on what you care about, of course: if you care about health, then diet and exercise might be a priority; if you care about relationships, then social activities will matter; if you care about learning, then taking time to develop a new skill will be on your list. But it’s figuring out how you can contribute to your own and others’ benefit and appreciating every moment along the way that will allow you to live a life that feels fulfilling. That’s why all of the psychology studies put experiences over things in terms of their contribution to your happiness and show that volunteering at a soup kitchen has more of a long-term impact on well-being than eating an ice cream cone. Those activities require effort, and if effort was something to avoid completely, then it wouldn’t be key to your success in life.

So the goal in life is not to make it as easy as possible; instead, you should be seeking to find meaningful effort: art, music, sports, construction, learning, bonding, and other activities where both the journey and the destination feel like they are worth the effort required. That’s why you can find a carpenter who loves working on new projects and a musician who gets lost in their songs. It’s why you can find someone who can love to cook, host parties, clean their house, raise children, or run marathons. In the “seek pleasure and avoid pain” + “effort should be avoided because it is painful” belief system, this shouldn’t make any sense. But in the “seek fulfillment by working toward a better life for yourself and the people you care about” + “appreciate everything you have” belief system, the people who work the hardest can be the most fulfilled people you ever meet.

Seek growth, chase fulfillment, and work toward appreciating what you have and striving to make everything even better.