A 3-Step Guide for Living a More Fulfilling Life
It goes without saying that everyone wants to live a “fulfilling” life – in other words, a life that seems fundamentally meaningful, that contains enough positive moments to outweigh the negative, and that doesn’t just feel like it’s a prolonged sequence of going through the motions in order to appease social conventions, or keep the bills paid.
It was around 200 years ago that Henry David Thoreau first suggested that most people “lead lives of quiet desperation,” and it would be great to be able to say that this situation was entirely a thing of the past. And yet, polls and surveys consistently find that people are, on average, not at all happy with their jobs, and frequently struggle with finding a greater overall sense of fulfilment and meaning in their lives.
Whether you feel as though you may be one of those people who is still leading a life of “quiet desperation,” or whether you are generally content in your life, but still wish it could be more fulfilling, here are a few suggestions on how you might be able to live a better life, and set about making your life more fulfilling overall.
Step 1 – Stop treating your dreams as goals to achieve in the future – focus on living them out today
There’s a certain fable that has been told in many different variations, and in many different corners of the world, that gets at the heart of the problem of being too “goal-focused” in life.
In one version this fable, an ambitious businessman encounters a not-so-ambitious individual, who spends most of his days fishing on the bank of a river. The businessman chides the fishermen that he is wasting his time, and would be far more productive if he applied various different strategies to make his fishing ever more commercial and efficient.
When asked “why” he should do this, the businessman rattles off a bunch of benefits of the goal-driven, productivity-focused lifestyle, that ultimately comes full circle and ends up with something like “and then, when you’ve made your fortune, you can retire and spend your days relaxing and fishing…”
Goals can be great. They can help us to clarify exactly what it is we are after in life, and what we find meaningful, so that we can then set about implementing strategies and plans to pursue and achieve those things.
In fact, “goals” are essential and unavoidable, on some fundamental level. You can make a decent argument that it’s really impossible to do anything – even to go to the fridge and grab a snack – unless you have a clear sense of what it is you’re after, and what would be preferable to your current situation.
The issue is really when you arrange your entire life around goals, and pin your sense of self-worth on future accomplishments.
The writer James Clear, and the cartoonist Scott Adams, have both argued the point that fixating on goals in this way makes your life fundamentally unfulfilling, because you are always in a state of pursuing things, and never in a state of being satisfied with who you are, or what you have at that moment in time.
The proposed alternative to living this way that was initially suggested by Adams, and then elaborated on by Clear, is to focus on being more “systems-focused” – which is to say, to focus on “acting out” your goals on a daily basis, instead of treating them as distant targets to hit.
In practice, this would mean something like setting a daily habit of writing for a certain amount of time, as opposed to setting yourself a target such as “I will be a bestselling author by 2022…”
When you focus on “living out” your goals in this way, you can take satisfaction in the fact that, on a daily basis, you are being the kind of person you want to be – whether or not you are receiving certain external validation or not.
Step 2 – Stop sabotaging yourself and see what happens, before you allow yourself to become to jaded about the way things are
One of the deadliest things that can happen when we are met by repeated setbacks and disappointments in life, is that we can become jaded, and feel that there is ultimately no real point in even trying, and that the “game” is so fundamentally stacked against us, that it’s pointless to live in an aspirational and enthusiastic way.
Suffice to say, this type of life philosophy certainly reduces the odds that your life will feel “fulfilling” by any measure.
The thing is – before you allow yourself to become at all jaded about the way things are, you first owe it to yourself to do absolutely everything you can in order to stop sabotaging yourself.
Life is often unfair and arbitrary in various ways, but it’s a rare person indeed who isn’t doing all kinds of stupid and counter-productive things on a daily basis, that make things far worse than they have to be.
If you’re after a fulfilling life, first make a list of all your negative habits and routine behaviors, and set about combating and eradicating them one by one. Likely, you’ll find that your life becomes a lot more fruitful and fulfilling with every one of these things you manage to get out of the way.
STEP 3 – Focus on being genuine, and let go of the need to always maintain a certain social persona
It’s very difficult – and may be impossible – to actually live a fulfilling life, if you are constantly trying to people-please, and project a desired social image and “persona,” instead of living in a way that is more genuine and authentic to you.
To some extent, we all inevitably adjust our behavior in order to be more socially acceptable to the people we are surrounded by. That’s fine – up until it ends up making us feel “phoney” and “insincere.”
If you can get yourself to a position where you are able to be polite and balanced, while still saying the things you believe, and refusing to say the things you don’t believe, your life will be a lot more in line with your values, and will likely be a lot more fulfilling, too.
