How do you go about crafting your life of work? Some people go the bread and butter route (for the money), or the career progression route (for the success), or the lifestyle route (for the perks), or often some combination of these. Ultimately, what a lot of them are trying to end up at is some kind of happiness, but the happiness they’re aiming for isn’t directly tied to the work they do. For that, the most common choice is the pursue your passion/dream route.
The trouble with passions and dreams
Pursuing your dream and following your passion are probably the most well-established approaches for finding fulfilment in your work. There are good reasons they are well-established, since both approaches get you to focus on what you think will make you thrive. What’s more, they are complementary – with the dream approach you start from wherever you are and move towards the goal of your dreams, whereas the passion approach has you start from your passion and follow wherever it may lead. And yet, while the aim of these approaches is usually fulfilment and happiness, in practice they tend to come up short: many people get stuck, or else find the pursuit less rewarding than expected.
Why might this be? Getting stuck (“What if I don’t have a dream/passion?” “I have something, but I’m not sure it counts.” “I have something, but how do I turn that into a career?”) largely comes from the fact that following your passion or dream are broad guidelines, not fleshed-out approaches. If you don’t let that stop you and you manage to apply one or both approaches in practice, you may find that you are doing what you thought you were supposed to but without the increased sense of happiness or fulfilment that you believed would come with that. Or maybe it did work for you until it didn’t. This is where the disappointment comes in, or a sense of failure.
Both problems stem from the fact that these approaches are largely gut-based with no explicit or concrete guidelines. If you do manage to get moving, you can be under the impression that you are aiming for fulfilment when, instead, cultural messaging and social norms have led you to fill in a lot of those vague guidelines with two more straightforward preoccupations: maximising pleasure and – even more so – avoiding discomfort. That is why the unspoken definitions of passions and dreams tend to focus on intense and unwavering feelings. They are meant to provide not even pleasure so much as a sense of certainty about yourself and your choices in the pursuit of the promise of happiness, because any doubt in this regard can feel deeply unsettling.
And so, in effect, the unspoken guidance looks something like this: doggedly pursue a single, idealised object of infatuation for as long as the infatuation lasts. (If you don’t have an infatuation, keep looking for one. If you are not getting what you want out of it, you’re either not dedicated enough or you’re pursuing the wrong thing.) It is in many ways not unlike the search for The One in romantic relationships. There is the feeling that finding “the right (i.e. perfect) match” is the hard part, and if you get that right then the relationship itself will develop naturally. In other words, if you’ve found the right passion or dream, you don’t need an approach – you’ll just know what to do. To be fair, this way of thinking might indeed help you avoid the discomfort of uncertainty for some time, but it inadvertently creates an “escape hatch from reality” because neither certainty not perfection exists in the real world. We can remain fueled by a fantasy for only so long before a sense of deep dissatisfaction settles in.
What is happiness?
The core issue here is not the fact that we don’t have clear approaches for pursuing passions and dreams, or even that we are defining them in a problematic way. The problem underlying both of these things is that we don’t have enough clarity about what the ultimate goal is. Can you define happiness? In society at large, it is often thought of as “feeling good, for a long time.” And this isn’t just in advertising and lifestyle magazines and self-help books – most psychology research equates happiness with hedonia, which largely boils down to presence of pleasure and absence of discomfort. One issue here is that permanently getting rid of discomfort is an unattainable goal. More importantly, it misses the point. There is more to life than pleasure alone – in particular, meaning. (Note how most people wouldn’t want to spend their life hooked up to a happiness machine.) And the rub is in the fact that focusing on maximising pleasure, and especially on avoiding discomfort, gets directly in the way of meaning.
As it turns out, psychology offers another concept that has been given less attention but is gaining traction: eudaimonia. Where hedonia can in many ways be equated with pleasure, eudaimonia is largely about meaning. However, eudaimonia has the opposite problem. While hedonia doesn’t concern itself with meaning, eudaimonia doesn’t much concern itself with pleasure. And although you need to incorporate “unpleasant” meaning into your focus if you are to experience meaning at all, unpleasantness can’t be all there is if you care about anything resembling happiness.
Now, you could simply focus on bringing both eudaimonia and hedonia, meaning and pleasure, into your life. So why am I bringing in a third concept? What is richness for? Besides the fact that both hedonia and eudaimonia are a mouthful, the first big issue is that their definitions – as well as any approaches for pursuing them – are still quite fuzzy. Beyond that, I believe that the interaction of meaning and pleasure is of particular importance for what people think of as happiness, fulfilment, a good life, and so on. In other words: I’d like to argue here that not all pleasure is created equal. May I therefore direct your attention to the idea not of meaning plus pleasure, but of meaningful pleasure.
“a sense of abundant connection with the world”
In short, meaningful pleasure is pleasure that comes from the same sources as meaning does. This is different from pleasure that is simply felt at the same time as a sense of meaning. You can get great pleasure from enjoying the taste of your favourite fruit while also working on a project to make the world a better place, but you won’t necessarily experience it as meaningful pleasure. Pleasure that is meaningful is often more elusive but I believe it is at the core of what many people actually want when they think of being happy. It’s also at the core of what I think of as richness. Let’s see how.
Richness expresses itself not always as feeling happy, but as feeling fully alive. It has meaning at its core, but it goes beyond a sense of meaning: it is a sense of abundant connection with the world. Richness emerges from engaging with the aspects of the world that you resonate with and developing a network of complex, evolving, meaningful relationships with them. The more those relationships feel vital and vibrant, the more you experience a sense of richness. My hypothesis is that this vitality is created by developing a sense of meaning in those relationships along with a critical mass of meaningful pleasure.
Which brings us to: how do you pursue meaning, as well as meaningful pleasure? This requires a very different approach to that of diminishing the discomfort of uncertainty. Meaning is created in the interaction between you and the world around you as active partners, which means that instead of trying to be in control, you need to be exercising control. Importantly, this involves inviting the world to mess with your plans – so that you can allow it to enrich your life.
[Coming soon: the next article will look at what the enrichment approach actually involves.]
If you would like to talk about any of these ideas or to book a free introductory coaching session, get in touch.