I had an hour to kill this afternoon, and decided to read Anything You Want by Derek Sivers.
In under 100 pages, Sivers outlines the key lessons he learned from launching a website, accidentally growing it into a large company, selling that company for $22 million, and donating all $22 million directly to charity. If you’re ever looking for a book with high density of insight, I highly recommend you give this one a try.
Despite this, however, I disagree with Sivers on one thing, and - in justifying my point to myself - I realised something interesting…
Growth Over Greed
Let’s unpack this quote from Sivers’ book:
“The whole point of doing anything it because it makes you happy! That’s it!”
Now, we can disprove this on a surface level (i.e. sometimes we do things for immediate reasons other than to make ourselves happy), but the book’s argument is much more nuanced than that.
This quote falls within the chapter titled “It’s About Being, Not Having”. Put simply, this chapter talks about how skills and experiences will always outweigh material possessions and the perceptions of others. Although I agree with this sentiment, but the quote above doesn’t sit well with me, and I’ve managed to put my finger on the reason why.
Sacrifice and Service
A big part of my issue with happiness is that it can be deceiving. Not only can fleeting happiness be used to incentivise negative behaviours, but it can also slowly decay into a hollow feeling of emptiness that’s punctuated by the occasional spike in emotion. The better alternative, I’ve come to believe, is fulfillment.
So far, this is not a ground-breaking idea; all I’ve really done is derive one of my pre-existing beliefs from first principles. Despite this, I began to wonder: what is fulfilment, fundamentally?
Of course, we know fulfilment as a feeling of contentment, often brought about by seeing things improve over the course of time. However, I wanted to see if I could drill deeper into the core of why we seek fulfilment. If you read the title of this article, then you’ll have some idea of what I came up with.
Ages 3 and Up
I’m fortunate enough to be able to look fondly back on my childhood; for a decent chunk of my early life, I was entirely care-free. As I can recall it, everything was more interesting, everyone was more nice, and nothing was anywhere near as stressful as it is nowadays.
Of course, for the most part, these memories are largely distorted.
My early life was pretty great, but I still experienced the spectrum of emotions (positive and negative) that I experience today. It would be easy to assume that this nostalgic misremembering is the only reason we look back on the past fondly, but I think there’s more to it than that.
Why are we almost universally pleased to see a laughing baby, or a playful dog, or children playing gleefully together? These are all instances of pure, unadulterated happiness; they show us the best parts of being young and remind us of our own positive experiences.
However, we all know that there are also downsides to being young.
When we’re young, we have less control, less money, less height, less authority, and less strength than we do in adulthood. Critically, in adulthood, we also have a better understanding of how our world works, even if this results in greater exposure to suffering and hardship. This is where we return to the notion of fulfilment.
In my analysis, the purest form of fulfilment is to stare down the barrel of life’s horrors, and then to choose to recreate the joys of youth anyway. This isn’t ignorance, but rather the highest form of understanding. When the whole world is pushing us toward nihilism and hopelessness, only the strongest among us can choose the path of wonder. These people choose to play. They choose to appreciate music. They choose to listen to great books. They choose to laugh, and to run, and to ask stupid questions, and to learn valuable lessons. Fulfilment may be the incremental improvement of your life, but it’s also the act of raising your middle finger at the forces that are trying to make you quit.
Never stop thinking.
- Will