The Four Activities of Meaning
I almost committed suicide when I was in college. I wrote before about my experience. The despair I went through was centered around my lack of purpose and meaning. I felt as though I wasn’t going anywhere. Going to classes and studying for tests never fulfilled me. I was stuck in limbo at college and hated it.
Since leaving college, I’ve become much happier. And I’ve written since about purpose, meaning, and happiness. My happiness has come from doing useful things with my time. I was built to be a productive member of society. Not trapped in a classroom filling my head with knowledge and filling my ego with a self-centered focus on me and my grade point average.
Today, my life feels complete. Sure, there are things that I still want like to have children and health insurance. However, there’s not a day that passes where I have the deep despair from the feeling that something is missing in my life.
This feeling of completeness gave me a moment of realization recently. I realized that I had four things in my life that I did that made me feel whole. Each activity fills a yearning inside of me that, if I were to remove it, I would feel is missing.
These four aspects of my life, the Four Activities for Meaning, as I will now call them, provide me with a great sense of purpose. They also feel universal to me, where if each human had Four Activities of Meaning of their own, then they would feel as complete as I do.
The fact check on this universality is true. There is a theory in psychology called the Self-Determination Theory. It is the modernized version of Abraham Maslow’s famous Hierarchy of Needs. It states that there are three basic needs in humans that motivate us: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Each of these is defined below from the American Psychological Association:
Autonomy: the feeling you are choosing your behavior versus feeling controlled or compelled by others
Competence: the feeling that you can be effective in the activity
Relatedness: a feeling of connectedness and belonging with others
(Source: apa.org)
I think that not only do my Four Activities of Meaning provide the three basic psychological needs of humans, each one of them provides all three psychological needs. Not only that, the first one provides for all of our physiological needs as well.
Activity of Meaning #1: An activity that makes you money.
Our world flows on money. Although this has not always been the case with people, today it is. And I do not see that changing in my lifetime or the several after mine. For the modern person to fulfill their basic physiological (not psychological) needs, they need money to get shelter, food, and water.
To make money, I own a gym. My gym fulfills all three of my physiological needs as well as my psychological ones. It gives me the feeling of autonomy because I own the business and make all of the decisions. It gives me a feeling of competence because I’m a good gym owner as shown by the ever-increasing revenue. And it surrounds me with people all day that I help achieve their fitness goals, helping fulfill my need for relatedness.
Most jobs give you this. If you make money doing anything and don’t rack up too much debt, you gain autonomy from having money in your pocket that you get to do what you want with. It gives you a feeling of competence because not only are you good at what you do, you’re so good that people are willing to pay you for it. And as you get better, you get paid more. And most jobs give you a community of people that you’re working together with to solve a problem or achieve an objective.
But having a job or a business is not enough to give you everlasting meaning. At some point you will stop working and retire. I’m surrounded by retirees who have had to redefine their life in retirement. Many go back to work because they simply cannot stand their life without work. And they cannot stand their life because their psychological needs are no longer being met.
This is one of the reasons that I have decided upon having layers of activities that give me meaning. If you took my gym and my need for money away today, the three other activities of meaning would balloon in size and keep me psychologically afloat.
Not only that, but my health would not deteriorate either, as happens with many in retirement. That is because the next one, as a gym owner, I find to be particularly crucial to a life well lived.
Activity of Meaning #2: An activity that keeps you healthy.
As a personal trainer, I think strength and cardiovascular training are crucial to longevity. However, what I’ve noticed from people is that they are far more willing to commit to a fitness routine if they are doing it to enhance the activity that keeps them healthy.
This may be golf (which is horrendous for your back), tennis, dance, or something else. From my observations, there is a clear difference in my perceived sense of happiness between those that have a structured physical activity and those that do not. It is palpable. My clients who are avid tennis players are some of the happiest people that I know.
I personally salsa dance. And just like my work, it fulfills my psychological needs. It makes me feel autonomous in that all the moves I do with my partner, who I chose at that moment to dance with, are improvised. It provides me with a sense of competence as I continue to improve. And it gives me a community of other salsa dancers that I connect with to fulfill my need for relatedness.
If you took my work away from me. I would salsa dance a lot more.
And if you took both away, it would leave me to write these pieces more. Which is my third out of Four Activities for Meaning.
Activity of Meaning #3: An activity that makes you creative.
My work and my dancing allow me to be creative. I solve business problems and client problems in creative ways. And with dance, I create new dance routines on the fly based on what the music drives me to do.
However, I do not think those endeavors are purely creative. My work is not creation for creation’s sake. It is creation for an end goal: to make money. In salsa, there is no end-product, like a painting, that I can show to people when I leave the dance floor
That is where my writing fits. I can’t draw, make music, or sculpt. But my brain is always piecing together the ways of human existence. And since I want to communicate it, I create these little pieces of writing. There is no end-goal other than to create writing. Making money or becoming famous would be a byproduct.
And it also fulfills my psychological needs as described by the Self-Determination Theory. I feel autonomous because these ideas are mine and nobody else’s. To be able to write well without artificial intelligence or an editor, clearly articulating these ideas gives me a sense of competence. And when people who have read my work come to me and discuss the ideas I shared, it provides me with my need for relatedness.
It also makes me feel like I’m giving back to the world. I write these pieces because I feel like I’ve learned something useful I can share with whoever is willing to listen. I truly feel like if people read, internalized, and put into action the concepts I’m laying out in this piece, they would feel more fulfilled with their life.
But the main goal of my writing, as I’ve said, is to create. Not to give back. Which leads me to the fourth and final Activity of Meaning. Which is:
Activity of Meaning #4: An activity to serve others.
If everyone reading this could only have two of the four activities that give them meaning, I would hope they would choose to make money and serve others. Making money and serving others are not interchangeable, either. Making money is something you do that provides you with a profit. A profit is when you take more than what it costs for you to deliver a good or service. Your profit is the return you get for delivering that good or service.
Serving others is something you do with no expectation of return whatsoever. You give to those in need maybe because they specifically can’t afford the price of a good or service being sold at a profit by someone else.
I personally don’t do much serving others at the moment. I have a reason why, which I will explain. The little I do is for those around me who I care about. I do my best to say yes when others ask for help. But on a consistent basis, I do little.
I feed the feral cats that live behind my gym. I feed them every night after work. There are about fifteen to twenty of them running around back there. I was even able to save one and get it placed in a foster home with the help of one of my clients. If we didn’t act, the twelve-week-old kitten would have died of a ruptured ear drum and ear infection.
That act alone fulfilled my psychological needs. It gave me a sense of autonomy because nobody asked me to help these cats. I’ve taken them on myself. My feeling of competence was met when I was able to devise a plan to catch the kitten and get her the help she needed. And working with my client to catch the kitten as well as the other shop owners to help feed all of them has connected me with people I wouldn’t have connected with otherwise.
Unfortunately, when you are young, the activity of making money takes up far more of your time than anything else. This is where I am in life. I work nearly every day to ensure that my bills are paid, and my wife and I can take the next step towards having children. I simply don’t have the kind of time to serve others as much as I would like. However, my goal in life is to transition the time I spend making money to spend it instead of serving others.
I believe this is the transition everyone should make if they are fortunate enough to have made enough money to no longer need to keep making it to survive. I’m surrounded by retired people. And it saddens me that when they retire and have all of this newfound free time, instead of serving others they just continue to serve themselves. It should be all of our goals, while we are working to survive, to find those that we are specifically able to serve and then serve them when we are able.
Most people I know do one of these Four Activities of Meaning at any given time. They work. And then when they are done working, they do either a creative activity or a physical activity. I believe that in order to live a completely full life, we need more. And we are capable of more. So, why not do more? Our own internal psychological state will thank us for it.