A Life Worth Living: Pursue What Is Meaningful, Not What Is Expedient
“Rule 7: Pursue What Is Meaningful, Not What Is Expedient.” — Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules For Life
Today, choose to stop doing what you know you shouldn’t do. You’ve had whispers, quiet internal promptings calling for you to stretch yourself and pursue a more meaningful life. You have an ideal version of personal greatness, but something holds you back from achieving it. How often do you sacrifice a meaningful life to pursue what is expedient?
Clinical psychologist and best-selling author Jordan Peterson defines what it means to pursue meaning rather than expedience in his book 12 Rules for Life:
“Expedience is the following of blind impulse. It’s short-term gain. It’s narrow, and selfish. It lies to get its way. It takes nothing into account. It’s immature and irresponsible. Meaning is its mature replacement. Meaning emerges when its impulses are regulated, organized and unified. Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world. If the value structure is aimed to the betterment of Being, the meaning revealed will be life-sustaining. It will provide the antidote for chaos and suffering. It will make everything matter. It will make everything better.”
What would your perfect life look like? What would you fill your days pursuing? What ideal version of yourself would eventually become manifest? What must be sacrificed today to build a better tomorrow?
Our every day decisions present us with opportunities to choose expediency or meaningfulness. After a long day at work, you can log in to Netflix and mindlessly scroll through thousands of potential shows, eventually settling on re-watching Downton Abbey for the hundredth time. Downton Abbey might provide you with temporary satisfaction, maybe even some solace after a rough day. Does it, however, provide long-term meaning to your life?
A more meaningful decision would be to write the first page of that book you’ve been thinking about for the last decade. Maybe you bought a fancy Peloton bike last year but have yet to spin its wheels out of fear that you don’t deserve to be healthy and fit. You might even ask yourself, “how can I make the world a little better today?” and start doing good in your neighbors’ lives.
To pursue what is meaningful requires sacrifice. You sacrifice something of value in the present to improve the future. Consider the ideal version of your life. What needs to be sacrificed to move closer to that ideal? You already know what needs to go. Now make the sacrifice. These sacrifices can be small or large. The larger and more valuable the sacrifice, the greater and more abundant the reward.
The college student who wishes to excel in her courses will have to set aside her partying ways, possibly at the expense of friends. An overworked, underappreciated employee will have to sacrifice golf weekends and evenings binging shows in order to develop the skills needed to find a better job, or maybe even start that new business he’s been daydreaming about. Aging parents require a lot of attention, but think about how much more meaningful your life will be if you sacrifice your time and resources to care for them.
Delayed gratification is the hallmark of success. As Jordan Peterson puts it, “The successful among us bargain with the future.” You reap tomorrow what you sow today. What seeds are you planting and what do you hope to sow?
You won’t plant any good seeds wasting away your time embracing expedient forms of novelty. The world is constantly vying for your attention. The easy choice is to let it steal your attention. When your daily pursuits follow the path of least resistance, you waste away. Just like muscles atrophy without proper care, so does the soul. Regarding expediency, Jordan Peterson states, “There is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient.” Faith, courage, and sacrifice lead to improved character, which feeds the starving soul. Expedience does not satiate. It works for a brief moment and then disappears, leaving an empty void where it once occupied. To fill this void, those gripped in the pattern of chasing expedience must increase their consumption of novelty — junk food, video games, social media, celebrity gossip, just to name a few. You know your preferred vice. Something that seems relatively harmless, but when consumed in excess, deadens one’s soul, stripping life of true meaning. Capable of turning a once vibrant and ambitious soul into a hedonistic vapor devoured by nihilism if left to fester.
The pursuit of meaning is the path of responsibility. It requires carrying the heaviest burden you can bear and marching forward. When the burden begins to feel light, you will voluntarily increase it. The burden isn’t lighter, you’ve become stronger.
In strength training, this concept is called progressive overload. If you want to build strength and muscle, you need to gradually add weight and volume to your training routine. Overtime, as your muscles are challenged, they become acclimated to the increased resistance and can bear more weight. So it is with whatever burden you are called to bear. Meaning will come to you if you face the call with faith, courage, and sacrifice.
As Jordan Peterson so eloquently puts it:
“Meaning is what manifests itself when the many levels of Being arrange themselves into a perfectly functioning harmony, from atomic microcosm to cell to organ to individual to society to nature to cosmos, so that action at each level beautifully and perfectly facilitates action at all, such that past, present and future are all at once redeemed and reconciled. Meaning is what emerges beautifully and profoundly like a newly formed rosebud opening itself out of nothingness into the light of sun and God. Meaning is the lotus striving upward through the dark lake depths through the ever-clearing water, blooming forth on the very surface, revealing within itself the Golden Buddha, himself perfectly integrated, such that the revelation of the Divine Will can make itself manifest in his every word and gesture.”
A life of meaning beckons you forward in quiet and subtle ways. When you act on those quiet promptings by sacrificing the expedient meaning will begin to manifest itself. Usually not immediately, but overtime you will see it as you continue to make the right sacrifices. You can’t fully see into your future and it will take courage to carry your burden through the unknown, but as you continue on the path of meaning, a life worth living will manifest itself.
If you don’t know where to start, think about what character traits you admire in other people. Look at the sacrifices you see others make that inspire you. I doubt you admire anyone for how much junk food or social media they consume. The qualities and values of other people can guide you. They can provide the courage you need to leave your comfort zone, endure pain, and forgo certain pleasures.
Start today. Don’t put this off until tomorrow. Don’t think that you’ll be stronger tomorrow. That is usually never the case. Don’t put faith in tomorrow’s version of you to do what needs to be done today.
The influential Stoic philosopher Seneca said:
“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today… The whole future lies in uncertainty: Live immediately.”
Weekly Challenge: Here’s a short, daily writing exercise to help you “Pursue What Is Meaningful, Not What Is Expedient.”
- Choose a time each day that you will review your daily activities. Write at least 3 activities you did that day and rate them between 1 through 5 based on their level of meaningfulness (1 being least meaningful and 5 being most).
- Write next to each rating the reason you assigned it that number. Then make a commitment to sacrifice the activities that provided the least meaning.
- Write next to the least meaningful activities what meaningful activities you can replace them with.
Recommended Reading:
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos by Jordan Peterson -“The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.”
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