Contemplate the important factors that make your life meaningful…the person you share your life with…your children…your chosen vocation…a personal passion like painting or writing. For each of these factors, we made a simple choice that opened up the possibility for a lifetime of fulfilling experiences. At the moment of that first choice, we may have had no idea how impactful our decision would become. Yet as small, subtle and seemingly insignificant as that first choice may have been at the time, our lives would be profoundly less satisfying had we made a different choice.
This is how change occurs.
As we consider our present state of personal fulfillment, we have the opportunity to make a choice to seek the fulfillment we deeply desire; Or we can choose to do what we are already doing, which only resigns us to a life of fleeting moments of happiness. This commentary is written to everyone who chooses to seek fulfillment.
How do I get from where I am to a fulfilling life?
Assess where you are. How do you spend your days? What drives the decisions that frame your life? Given how you spend your time, how much of your day is spent doing things you would not do but for the need for money? Assess how money defines your relationships, activities, skills, interests, outlook, self worth, security, health, wellness, stature, and worldview. Does any of this serve you? Does any of this impact your personal fulfillment? Do you think more money would lead to your fulfillment? If not money, then what will it take?
The first step toward your fulfillment is realizing where you stand does not serve you.
Ok, if I am not fulfilled working hard every day, playing by the rules, paying my taxes, doing everything society expects me to do, then what will it take? Simply asking the question is the second critical step toward fulfillment.
We organize our lives based on a core set of social values, taught to us by our families, and reinforced by the cultural expressions of our society. As an American, these values are independence, self-determination, freedom, and the pursuit of our own happiness. These values define our politics (democracy) and our economics (capitalism). These values emphasize individualism over community, encourage competition as a means of validating privilege, and accommodates dehumanizing deprivation as the price for losing.
In America, the poor do not hate the rich because they aspire to be rich one day. The rich do not lift the poor out of poverty because deprivation is the incentive for the poor to work themselves out of poverty. Both the rich and the poor share a common commitment to our core American values. Yet most people, regardless of their wealth, are not fulfilled.
Why?
There is an economic concept called the law of diminishing returns, which references the satisfaction we realize as we experience a phenomenon multiple times. For example, consider your satisfaction if you eat your favorite meal tonight. Then tomorrow, your best friend takes you out and pays for you to have your favorite meal again. Then your boss takes you to lunch to celebrate a promotion and again buys you your favorite meal. For most people, eating your favorite meal would be less enjoyable the third day than it was the first day. The law of diminishing returns is a meaningful method for assessing the endurance of our personal satisfaction, and a thoughtful means of distinguishing personal satisfaction from fulfillment.
Satisfaction brings us fleeting moments of happiness, but fulfillment brings us joy that never wanes. Consider how you feel when you do something that really makes a difference in the life of someone you love. Do you ever get bored with this feeling? This is fulfillment.
Now consider the experiences in your life that generate fulfillment. Do any of these experiences emphasize your individual interest over the interest of anyone else? In fact, if we are completely honest, the one common denominator of experiences that bring fulfillment is our commitment to any interest beyond our own.
By reconsidering our American values, we take the next critical step toward a life of fulfillment.