Comment by yoan9224
3 days ago
The premise is interesting but feels incomplete. The "Monday morning excitement test" doesn't account for the hedonic treadmill - even meaningful work becomes mundane once your brain adjusts to it.
Also, many people are genuinely burnt out from overwork, not just existential malaise. When you're juggling demanding work, family responsibilities, and barely have time for basic self-care, the problem isn't finding your "highest purpose" - it's structural.
That said, I agree that meaning matters. But meaning doesn't always come from work. Sometimes the healthiest thing is treating work as necessary fuel for a meaningful life outside of it - relationships, hobbies, community involvement.
The "go into politics" solution is fascinating though. Zero-sum games as existential fulfillment feels counterintuitive.
You get off the hedonic treadmill by getting into something deeper like politics.
I do feel like I'm an example of someone who's juggled marriage, kids, startups, etc. where how I finally got a clean source of sustainable energy was having a part of my life to truly chase my highest potential. And to me that's politics, and specifically anticorruption and Positive Politics.
Glad that the "go into politics" ideas piqued your interest!
Wow, politics seems the opposite to me. It has the morbid fascination of a train wreck. You can't stop it, you know it's going badly, yet you can't look away.
Family and building things are much more positive sources of energy to me.
That’s because you’ve become so accustomed to politics as tribalism and sports-like entertainment that you’ve completely forgotten why we even started the political systems we have today in the first place. Divestment of power, not accumulation. Serving others, not ourselves. You can still embody those things. But it’s better to admit to ourselves that we aren’t selfless enough to do that, than hide behind a learned helplessness.
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I bet if you stop watching national popular news outlets and instead focus on local politics you'll find them much more tame. Of course this depends on where you live.
IMO People focus way too much on national politics and not enough on local.
From the inside it looks different and is noway near as hostile as media and especially the internets make it look like.
Politics is like sex. Watching it feels quite different from actually taking part.
Politics can be so much more than elections!
Focus on one issue and one bill, like you would with a startup MVP.
You can solve some of these problems in weeks!
Raising my family and building lasting things for the world are my positive sources of energy too!
I'm just saying that after 15 years founding three startups, I've found my building instinct works incredibly well in politics!
join a party that you care about. The tides are changing, they always do.
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I love your “clean source of sustainable energy” metaphor. This is a great example of “eudaimonic” well-being, or the idea of “doing well.”
Would you mind expanding on what you do for anticorruption? It has been something ive been thinking about and wanting to get into lately. It seems like complete poison to democracy, and more should be done to bring it to light wherever it occurs
A good place to start is OSINT (open source intelligence) for your city/municipality because it requires little commitment, is scoped with regards to complexity and amount of information, and usually risk-free. Gather publicly available information about the companies in your area, who owns/runs them, your city council, any ongoing projects, the processes of funding stuff with public money and so on. Don't bother finding the best collection method or way to structure all the data, just start, you will figure things out on the way. Also be aware of your personal bias, which might make you dismiss important information or affect your judgement.
The next steps highly depend on where you live. Your HN profile says Australia, so at least safety-wise you are in a better spot. Connect to people in your area (preferrably offline), for example by organizing a local meetup, maybe there is one already. Activities can range from exchanging ideas to spreading awareness in your community to actively going against corrupt affairs. Make sure you know what and who you are up against, or you will have a very bad time.
Anticorruption is a group effort because it requires a lot of work and often special knowledge (info tech, law, finance, opsec, public relations and propaganda, ...) and, more importantly, a group provides safety from corrupt actors. On your own you will not be able to deal with lawsuits, misinformation, character assassination and worse.
I'd argue that the trend - that seems now deeply, deeply embedded - of alternative facts and straight lying is more important. As it opens the door to all manner of corruption.
Hedonic treadmill only applies to hedonia, not the eudaimonia that meaningful work typically brings. “Doing well” doesn’t have the same elastic snap back that “being well” does, and there’s some evidence it can provide a buffer on the hedonic treadmill effect.
> even meaningful work becomes mundane once your brain adjusts to it.
This seems quite wrong in my experience. Meaningful work stays meaningful and exciting, every single day.
> even meaningful work becomes mundane once your brain adjusts to it.
Not to demean your experience, but for me (5+ years now of daily grind for one purpose) that statement is very VERY real.
My thinking is - it's just another one of the struggles of doing real meaningful change - there's recurring, long and arduous timespans where no observable/exciting results manifest and one has to trudge forward.
If you know how to ease THAT part, please share (I'm begging you lol).
Perhaps it’s also the definition of meaningful work changes for an individual over time?
What I once found meaningful 20 years ago largely no longer feels that way. Both due to a lack of novelty and personal growth, and seeing how I was so naive regarding the outcomes and future I was supposedly building.
Those daily grinds back then for purpose were great - but sometimes the purpose never materializes since others (customers, business partners, society as a whole, etc) disagree with that purpose.
At least that’s how I tend to feel my life largely went. I thought I was building towards a different goal than what ended up happening, which makes me feel I wasted my life. Now it’s questioning whether or not I will ever find something that gives me that sense of purpose again without it ending up being a lie in the end. Why bring my “whole self” into a given task if it’s not going to end up with any sort of mental payback later?
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In Positive Psychology, the science of meaning in life (not of life) breaks meaning down into three dimensions: coherence, significance, and purpose. If your job isn’t affording you significance (because your actions don’t “matter” in your organization) then your ability to find meaning in that work is threatened.
Your work may have coherence and purpose, but if it doesn’t have significance then it isn’t the source of meaning you thought it was.
Certainly so if you are the one defining meaning.
"Politics as a zero-sum game" is a self-fulfilling prophecy that's only true if you see it as "competing over who gets all the power". In a more sympathetic perspective, politics is just how communities self-organize, make decisions and build compromise between the needs and interests of their stakeholders. Especially at the local level (where the feedback path between "make a decision" and "affect peoples' lives" is the shortest and most accessible), that can mostly involve people being available to do the work that needs to happen to build consensus and get anything done done to improve the lives of the community members.
I agree that the piece does feel incomplete, but it is a large topic to fully cover in a blog post. The author is stating that with purpose, life is a joy, not a chore. I feel like this is a message that many people need to hear!
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