Life & Growth
What's My Next Purpose?
A few weeks ago my wife and I had a date night. Somewhere along the lines during dinner, our conversation turned to the future, and I felt really connected. Everything I’ve been doing lately, the work, the saving, the small daily choices, has started to feel like it’s pointing at something bigger than the two of us. A family we’re building. A future bigger than our own lives.
It reminded me of a Mark Manson clip I watched called “How to pull yourself out of a cheap dopamine spiral.” In it, he said that Aristotle argued that there are two versions of happiness.
There’s hedonia, which is the pursuit of pleasure, comforts, short-term satisfactions. And there’s eudaimonia, which is a deeper, purpose-driven, this-is-a-meaningful-way-to-live kind of feeling.
Put another way,
- Hedonism is about the pursuit of pleasure, comfort, and short-term happiness (feeling good).
- Eudaimonism is the pursuit of meaning, purpose, and self-actualization (thriving).
The years kind of blend together
For most of my life (especially my adult working life), the days blurred together. Work, meals, the gym, a show, a game, sleep. Maybe the occasional birthday or trip. The texture of one week is mostly the texture of the next. By the next time I would disconnect from my phone to touch grass, I’d realize a year had gone by, and I could barely recall what I had done.
That’s hedonia in a nutshell, and everyone I know is living that! I’m talking about the socially endorsed, well-balanced version of life that the modern world is engineered to deliver. Every app on my phone is built to keep me engaged for as long as possible. Every streaming service has another recommendation queued up. Every game has the next reward dropping in twenty minutes. My whole environment is optimized to give me a small hit of pleasure, and then another, and then another. And it is extremely effective.
But underneath that, every once in a while, a quieter question starts forming. What have I really done with my life? What am I building? Where’s my compass pointing to? What’s the line I’d connect across these years to say this was the thing all along?
What am I willing to suffer for that other people aren’t?
The reframe Manson offers is what stuck with me hardest. He says: instead of asking what’s going to make me happy, ask what am I willing to struggle for? What’s the pain I secretly enjoy that most other people don’t?
The reframe assumes that personal fulfillment lives on the other side of the suffering I can endure, because it means that I value it so much.
It came together for me. I realized when I was growing up, I used to think about how many kids I might have, what their names would be, what schools they might go to, or what family traditions we might have. I had it pre-planned in some part of my mind that I rarely visited nowadays.
Because somewhere along the way, those ideas got confusing and conflicted for me. I read the parent stories about no sleep and identity loss and the first few years being one long blur of survival. I talked to friends who were exhausted in a way that scared me. I started telling myself, and meaning it, that I could be perfectly content without ever having kids.
I’m not quite sure yet if that was misguided, or if it was a real version of me that changed since then.
But now things are changing, because the future is becoming real in a way I can’t unsee now that I’ve felt it. The feeling I’d been calling “good lately” was really eudaimonia. It was the feeling of being something bigger than my own comfort, and worth the hardship.
Our choice
The cultural shape around having kids has shifted a lot in the last few decades. The nuclear family isn’t the “default path” anymore. More people are accepting that not having children is a real, full life. And it’s a really interesting dichotomy - for example, to someone who doesn’t want them, kids are one of the worst things that can happen. To someone who does want them, it’s a noble sacrifice in service of something bigger.
The fact that we get to choose family-building, instead of doing it because society told us to, is part of what makes the choice more meaningful to us.
It’s the choice with potentially lots of hardship and challenges, but it’s also the thing I’m looking forward to because it’ll be my personal mission.
Honestly I watched that video because I was doing my regular morning mindless scrolling, and what I got was a lecture in developmental psychology.
My personal takeaway is that moderation is still the answer, isn’t it? We all need a little hedonia, because some days are crappy and a video game and a snack are enough. We also need our own eudaimonia, because without it the years blend together and we forget what’s the bigger picture.
I feel like I’m going in the right direction now. I feel like everything that happened to me, including the long stretch of years that ran together, happened the way it did because I needed to go through that firsthand to understand. There’s a chance maybe in two years I’ll re-read this and laugh because I missed the point entirely, or maybe I’m being dramatic. But for now, I know what I’m willing to suffer for, and that’s specific to me.
P.S. More on the etymology of eudaimonia that helped me remember it better:
- Eudaimonia (pronounced yoo-die-MOH-nee-uh) literally translates to “blessed by a good spirit,” from eu meaning good and daimon meaning spirit.
- Originally it described a lucky person, someone with good fortune. Philosophers later shifted the meaning from luck to action. Eudaimonia came to describe someone who lives in accordance with their daimon, actively fulfilling their highest potential, living virtuously.
- Modern translations rarely use “happiness” anymore because happiness has come to mean a fleeting emotion. Scholars prefer well-being, excellence, or thriving, all of which better reflect the lifelong, active process Aristotle was describing.
