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the meaning of life

· 3 min read

My answer rests on three assumptions:

  1. Everyone has different priorities.
  2. You feel best when you solve for those priorities.
  3. Priorities change over time.

So the meaning of life is to give each of your priorities as much of your life as it deserves. When your life is out of balance with your priorities, you get discord and dissatisfaction. And since people change, life has to keep shifting with them.

The hard part is knowing yourself

This makes sense on its face: if you spend your time on what you want and what makes you feel good, you're probably happy and fulfilled. The hard part is understanding yourself well enough to know what your priorities actually are. It's the same idea as "you have to learn to love yourself before you can love others." That kind of self-knowledge only comes from life experience.

If you're more logical, treat it like an experiment: try different things and notice how you feel afterward. Non-overthinkers tend to get there more naturally, because their priorities don't need a justification for their existence.

Two layers of priorities

The first layer is the one people talk about: family, friends, hobbies, health, work, community, and faith. This is the work-life balance conversation.

But there's a second layer underneath it: winning, creativity, learning, competing, prestige, security, freedom, respect, recognition and so on. This is where people get tripped up.

Take money, the easiest and most commonly written one. Say you grind for a high-paying job. Five years later you hit the number and feel flat. Looking back, the best parts were getting good at hard things. Mastery was the real priority.

Some people will disagree and emphasize the importance of the coin. The point isn't that money isn't a priority. It's that it may not rank as high as you thought it did. Money can matter a lot and still sit below your other priorities. It's all comparative, and something everyone needs to judge for themselves.

That's the pit people fall into: not knowing themselves well enough to judge the absolute and comparative difference between their priorities.

How to live it

Say you do know yourself. Here's how to act on it.

  1. Match your first-layer priorities with your time. If family matters more than work, carve out dedicated time for them and don't take jobs that make you ditch them. If work matters more than your health, accept that you'll exercise less when it makes you better at work.
  2. Let your second-layer priorities the choices within your first-layer priorities. If you hate doing things you aren't good at, don't pick a sport you're bad at. Even better, regularly play people who are worse than you so you win more, but not that much worse, so that the games aren't fulfilling.