by Phil Ossefie (with contributions from Pierce Ng and Todd Ler)
TLDR: to add value.
What’s value?
A) Odds of survival – the probability of us staying alive.
AND/OR
B) Motivation to live – different from motivation to not die or survival instinct.
Whether it’s more for ourselves or others, ideally no one should have to suffer a decrease in value for a net increase.
Intro
To be fair, “the” means there’s only one specific point of being alive, which has to be universal and timeless, so that everyone who’s ever been and ever will be could theoretically achieve it.
We think the actual answer to “the” point of life is probably enlightenment—your ego dissolves, you’re free from all worldly attachment and nothing can hurt you anymore, in turn you can’t hurt anything either.
This probably requires deep study and practice of Buddhism or Hinduism, involving lots of meditation and maybe some psychedelics.
But since we’re also commoners who know nothing of mysticism, the point of being alive is just to feel like there is one. We suggest that
adding value is a reliable way to generate this feeling.
Since life goes on, change is constant and everything fades, we too have to change. Renewal is necessary to keep adding value. We could change priorities by pursuing new things, or review what we’re already doing with a different appreciation. Both can be called growth.
Having some understanding of how we feel motivation may help us do better at adding value to ourselves and others, in a way that counts as opposed to wasting time and effort being unappreciated. Life might feel more worth living.
Value in The 10
10 ways to add value or measure it:
I. Career and II. Money
Pursuing wealth and authority—like gunning for that promotion, pay increase, job of our dreams, etc.—give most of us a sense of purpose. Obviously, these improve our odds of survival, so of course we see the value in it.
They can also serve as motivation to live, because it’s about realising our own potential and exploring our limits,
“Is that the best I can do?”
For those of us who like to compare, we’re motivated to work for proof that we’ve out-competed others, but this is a questionable foundation of motivation.
III. Impact
Making a difference to our world—e.g. providing for our family or helping clients solve problems—is value that can be brought by Career and Money, but if we’re not doing it on purpose, it’s more of a by-product.
Intentionally wanting to have a positive effect makes it about Impact.
It could feel like our life’s mission or a just a top priority, complex and grandiose like “create the next internet” or simpler and smaller like “help my parents retire at 59.”
The main value to us is motivation. Striving for an impact makes all our actions and sacrifices toward it feel purposeful. Most of the value in the results should go to others, it could be both odds-of-survival and motivation for them depending on what were doing.
It’s only after we succeed that we may get a boost to our own odds of survival as a due reward for the work we put in, and of course more motivation to keep doing it from seeing how we’ve helped people.
IV. Romantic Relationship(s), V. Family and VI. Friends
Is being emotionally supportive of and loved by our partner, friends, children, parents, about Impact too? Sure, there will be times when we have to be effective for our close community. But more often, when we bond and relax in their presence, it’s not about effectiveness.
Relationships improve odds of survival because we are social animals. Not having any human connection affects brain chemistry negatively.
More importantly, relationships motivate us to keep living so we can continue interacting with those we feel close to.
In fact, we’re probably more willing to withstand hardships in all aspects of life (Career stress, Money problems, existential crises etc.) because we’re motivated by the care people have for us.
VII. Physical and VIII. Mental Health
Health is directly about our odds of survival, its the chief metric, especially mental health (even though it’s more difficult to measure and nourish).
Pursuing mastery in fitness goals, exceeding the bare minimum needed in modern times, can be motivation for some of us to live.
e.g. deadlifting 300lbs, doing 15 muscle ups on demand or running a marathon.
Mental fitness might be developing addiction immunity, attention control and emotional mastery.
Generally dropping phone/certain app usage, highly sweetened and salted food and drink, doing some non-religious meditation daily are possible indicators of it.
IX. Spirituality and X. Fun
Since both of these usually can’t be proven to be constructive or are straight up unproductive, the only substantive value left that they offer us is that they feel good—they motivate us to live. Arguably we should find our Career fun, it would make work less unbearable so we’re less reliant on external sources of motivation like family or something.
Spirituality can overlap a lot with Impact and doing good in the world. Fun is the invincible, indisputable, unreasonable reason to do anything. Because these help us to stay active and engaged in living, they also work in conjunction with Mental Health, not letting our mind and senses slip away as easily. In that regard, it increases odds of survival too.
Some examples of Value
The following is a more concrete (but NOT comprehensive) list of things that have value in both senses of A) and B), they can generally fall into two categories:
1. Things we can touch or are physically affected by
- Basic necessities. Food, hydration, air literally increase our odds of survival for some time with every consumption
- Infrastructure. Housing, energy, transport, supply chain (grocery stores, deliveries), temperature regulation
- Goods. Cars, electronics, fashion, jewellery, diamonds, medicine, toys, art, books
- Services/actions. Surgery, washing the car, mowing the lawn, doing the dishes, laundry, working out, abstaining from unhealthy dopamine addictions (smoking, drinking, snacks), eating healthy food we may not enjoy
2. Things we can’t touch
- Services/directions. Consulting, management
- Platforms. Social media, software
- Knowledge/information. E.g. education, news, therapy, publications, videos
- Entertainment. E.g. shows, movies, e-books, videos, music
- Emotions. E.g. art, word choice, tone, hanging out with our friends, heart to heart conversations, expressions of acknowledgement, gratitude
Based on the above, it would also seem that the bar is low and there is value in almost everything. Maybe having a greater appreciation of the world around us is good for us. Perhaps there’s an argument to be made that no, stop saying everything has value, that doesn’t help us, but that’s a debate about Competition for another time.
Why don’t we need motivation to live to want to boost our odds of survival? Because survival and living are two distinct states of being alive. Generally, survival is more necessary, living feels better.
A) Basic survival instinct
Staying alive is a force of nature largely out of our control. This refers to the almost universal avoidance of pain.
It’s fairly safe to assume that most of us fear or at least dislike pain, and that the process of dying is mostly painful. Since our body aims to minimize pain, we are “forced” to keep living to not suffer dying.
Even if some of us don’t fear death itself or think that life is “important,” reducing pain trumps all that.
This suffering most often refers to physical pain, but it can include our emotional pain, not wanting to leave loved ones early and such.
Some might say that minimizing pain or boosting odds of survival itself could be motivation to live. If we truly feel fulfilled doing that and it doesn’t result in us feeling empty after a while, then sure, it could be.
B) Motivation to live
Let’s not overcomplicate this. What motivates us to live? Whatever we immediately thought of from the mention of these three words in this order, it’s that.
Saturday breakfasts with our parents or kids? A date with our favourite person in the world? Getting a promotion? Building a new Lego set? Hitting 1 million subscribers? Recovering from addiction?
So a workable answer is: things that feel good motivate us to live. Or at least things that help us feel less:
- Terrible
- Bored
It’s safe to say anyone would want that. Less of just those two things would probably lead to our life feeling better anyway.
Of course, we’d want to have something better to look forward to than the lowest acceptable reward. We probably want something that brings a smile to our face, or excitement, joy, satisfaction.
And these emotions only come from particular experiences that we’ve decided are interesting, enjoyable or important to us.
Most of the world isn’t going to care about volleyball, doing a backflip or the person we’re spending our life with, for example.
Those that care about the same things as us don’t care the way we do. So, our motivations belong only to us.
Hope and feeling purposeful
The more accessible point of being alive is just to feel like there is one. Things that feel good are a source of motivation, but things that feel purposeful are even stronger. Things that feel purposeful tend to be our actions, whereas things that feel good can be just experiences, e.g. doing deadlifts vs watching a movie.
Purposefulness feels stronger because
- we’re directly responsible and acting on the changes we want to see in our lives
- we have hope that things will get better than they are
But it sounds hard to execute because how can we sustain things getting better indefinitely?
To begin with, there has to be room for growth. That can be in:
- Scalability of our Effect
- Mastery of a field/practice/craft
Most onlookers will more or less correctly identify the first one as traditional success,
like a podcast averaging 700k listeners per episode or an e-commerce business doing $40,000 a month in take-home profit.
We can easily understand why success could be something to hope for. The focus is on our, not anyone else’s, effect on others and more importantly the magnitude. It’s respected because reaching scale is often less within our control, and therefore difficult to achieve.
In the second case, it’s something we want to get really good at (even if we can’t due to some technical limitation)
it could be Taekwondo and blackjack to cardiothoracic surgery.
This is much more within our control. However, while onlookers generally understand excellence, what we choose to excel in may not get equal appreciation. It’s at that point that we know if we were truly motivated by what we were doing, or by what people think of us for doing it.
Realistically, effect and mastery aren’t mutually exclusive. Striving for mastery may garner attention, expanding our effect may require mastery. Regardless, room for growth is necessary for hope to happen. We can see the potential for things to get better, a version of us that’s better at what we’re doing.
To be honest, in terms of “sustaining indefinitely,” it’s entirely subjective to those of us personally practicing something. How long we can stay motivated and still have hope, despite not seeing much improvement or payoff, is up to us. We could be bothered by lack of results, or we could be happy taking our own sweet time to get better, relishing in the process. The trade-off is really between results and contentment.
— continued in Could we be determining value more accurately? #4 —
Live well,
Phil