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Category: Feeling Fulfilled

Meaning > Fun

If your top criteria for doing something is that it be fun… then you’ll eventually regress to doing things that give comfortable thrills, dopamine hits, and easy wins.

If your top criteria for doing something is that it be meaningful… then you’ll push yourself to do things that are uncomfortable up front, but long term rewarding… things that are accompanied with progress, deep-seated gratitude, and fulfillment… things that challenge you to fail, learn, and grow.

Fun is for lazy Sundays, nights out with the boys, day trips with the girls…

Meaningful is for career paths, health and fitness efforts, community service, legacy…

The trick is to do meaningful work that you also have fun doing that you’d STILL DO even during the times when it isn’t so fun (no meaningful work is fun 100% of the time).

Expecting meaningful work to feel like an arcade isn’t practical. What you can expect, however, is to feel a deep sense fun/joy/reward from meaningful work that superficial “fun” work could never provide.

Something that comes from seeing others and feeling yourself improve… that comes from building something of value and awe… that comes from seeing your art/ creative visions come to life… that comes from thank you letters and unprompted gifts… that comes from changing lives.

Fun-only is almost always absent of meaning. Meaning-only almost always includes some sense of fun. Maybe not immediately, but almost always over the long run.

Who Is A Rich Person?

…This is the question we’ve been discussing this week at the martial arts school I teach at.

Some of the student answers we received ranged from, “Someone who has a lot of money” to “Someone who has a lot of kindness” to “Someone who has a lot of friends” to “Someone who has a big house and fancy car” to “Elon Musk/Jeff Bezos” etc.

And after discussing those answers, the answer we offered for the students to reflect on was, “Someone who appreciates all they have.”

If your mind immediately goes to rich by comparison, then you’ll always be poor.

There will always be someone out there who has more money, more luxury items, more connections, more resources, more privileges, etc. Always.

And this is the trap so many of us fall into when we equate richness to being about what we have in comparison to.

Richness, I’d encourage you to consider, has nothing to do with comparison.

Richness has everything to do with perspective. It’s a feeling that can be cultivated—not a title earned from a number of zeros.

And once we realize this and can start actively cultivating that feeling of richness in our lives via appreciation, gratitude, mindfulness—suddenly the game we’re playing changes.

…Suddenly we get to step off the hamster wheel we’ve been trained to run on (the one that only speeds up and gets harder the harder we speed up and run)—and get to start soaking it all in instead. With each step… each conversation… each touch… each smile… each exchange along the way.


P.s. I also published: 20 Heavy Michelle Zauner Quotes from Crying In H Mart on Cancer and Grief

That We Made It This Far…

  • That we won the one-in-a-trillion lottery and were born.
  • That we had the basics of survival covered until we were able to provide on our own.
  • That we had the chance to learn and grow.
  • That we were able to create art and consume art and share art.
  • That we were able to love and laugh and lose…

…Is the ultimate blessing.

And to live as though it isn’t (by taking it for granted or simply forgetting) is to set your story up for an abrupt and regretful conclusion.

Rheotaxis

Modern day culture is pushing all of us—especially those swallowed deep within its massive current—towards dopamine, dopamine, dopamine with increasing intensity with each passing day.

Soak up the diagram below which illustrates these modern day currents:

Image Credit: Ted Gioia | Full image resolution here.

The danger with surrendering to this current is that it pushes us further and further into a never ending cycle of short-term pleasure seeking where we do a dopamine releasing task, which causes the neurochemical dopamine to be released, which makes us feel good, which makes us want to repeat the stimulus, which makes us do the domaine releasing task again, and so forth until it’s repeated so much it turns into a habit and eventually—an addiction.

This addiction, like all addictions, becomes increasingly hard to satisfy which leads us further and further downstream towards increasingly intense dopamine releasing sources (e.g. doom-scrolling, gambling, nsfw content, etc). And this, of course, leads to derailed lives.

Rheotaxis is the general tendency of an organism—like a fish—to orient themselves and swim against the flow, rather than with it. And the more I look at the above diagram, the more I think they’re onto something. There are many theories on why fish do this, but the one I like to believe is that they know—be it instinctually or experientially—that upstream is where better living is found.

Maybe because it leads to the development of strength; maybe because it increases their mental acuity/awareness; maybe because it’s where the more fulfilling rewards are found…

…And maybe it’s the same for us humans and we should consider reorienting, too.

Clogged Sinuses

My sinuses have been clogged all week.

…Like clogged to the point where I swallow and my ears get plugged leaving the world noticeably muted and my only unplugging strategy being to plug my nose and blow into it really hard until they re-open.

…Sorcery, I tell you.

Maybe you’ve experienced it, too?

Couple that with the nose running like a faucet and you have yourself a pretty annoying set of symptoms.

I share this not to complain.

I share this because I just realized, at 6pm into the day, that both symptoms are gone.

Like, I haven’t blown my nose once today and I’ve swallowed all day without plugging my ears.

…And I didn’t notice even though I’ve been up since 7am.

A timely reminder, I’d say, that so much of what we have to be grateful for aren’t just the things we have… but the things we (finally) don’t.


Inner work prompt: Come up with a list of ten things you’re incredibly grateful you DON’T have today.

This Life Is Enough

Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”

Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 277)

How much unhappiness has been generated in our modern world by the constant comparisonism exacerbated by social media?

…Young kids (and adults) with nothing BUT potential and time and unique aptitudes beating themselves up… counting themselves out… sabotaging their futures because of what they see other people doing with their lives… thinking to themselves, “I wish I was them…” “I want THAT life…” “My life sucks compared to…”

When really, if we subtracted all the comparisons, turned off and forget about all the media posts, and grounded ourselves back into reality—our reality—the truth is as clear as the smile that fills a baby’s face… or the laugh your best friend makes… or the tears that stream down your lover’s face…

…The reality is “Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.” And this life, filled with all of that and more, is as enough as any other life we might be living. Happiness is happiness is happiness… we just have to open our senses (once again) to experience it.

Don’t Be Dull

I’m the type who likes to obsesses over time efficiency.

Once I discover a way to do something in its most efficient manner, like take the most efficient, time-effective route to work, I lock in.

And I’ll do it the same way day-in and day-out until I find a better way.

Now, because of this, and because I’ve been maximizing the efficiency of my days for two-ish decades now, my days are pretty locked in.

My morning routine is on lock… my afternoon routine is on lock… and my evening routine is on lock…

Which has me leading very “locked in type days” that can start to feel awfully monotonous.

But, generally speaking, the efficiency side of me is more stubborn than the spontaneous, just-do-whatever-the-heck side of me is persuasive.

And it’s at times like this, when I’m feeling the monotonous grind, that I have to remind myself to book something that I can look forward to.

This has been the key for me for years.

If I have something in my calendar that’s going to strip me from the daily grind and immerse me in a new world with new experiences… then spontaneity comes completely naturally to me and I have zero problem doing whatever, whenever, however.

In fact, it’s my time to NOT be time efficient and I relish in the opportunity by going all in.

Being time efficient is a beautiful thing. It’s a sign that you’re effectively managing your life’s most precious resource.

But, as is the case with many things in life, too much of a good thing can make you… dull.

And today’s message is just that: don’t be dull, dear reader.