I don't know what I want to do, but I know I want to do something meaningful.

It's a phrase I hear a lot from people at a junction in their professional lives, usually the antecedent or even cause of a mid-life crisis. It generally comes from those who have followed a conventional path: go to a good university, get a stable job, become incredibly bored. People who utter this thought have discovered that the life they were sold was not all it was cracked up to be and now want to look to bring meaning to their life. Given you'll work most of your waking hours, this means doing meaningful work. But oddly, finding meaning can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack for a lot of people. Here I want to offer guidance to those at this very juncture with a framework that will act as your compass to find meaning.

Before starting, I'd like to caveat that this is in no way absolute truth. Quite the opposite. This is my personal framework that I have used to find a sense of meaning and one that has worked for me so far. If it works for me, I imagine it will work for some subset of people out there.

The Peaceful Life vs the Meaningful Life

Jimmy Lai was, at age 12, a penniless stowaway in the wake of communism in mainland China. But through sharp business acumen he developed himself into a billionaire textile magnate. Despite his limitless wealth Jimmy started Apple Daily, a news organisation that has been a fierce critic of the Chinese Communist Party since it began in the 1990s. More recently, as the CCP's grip on Hong Kong has tightened, they've cracked down on free press, including Mr Lai's company. Jimmy Lai was then presented with a choice. Take his billions and live a peaceful life in a far region of the world or go to prison and live a meaningful life dedicated to opposing the forces of injustice and oppression. At the time of writing, Mr Lai is currently in prison serving a 14 month term.

When listening to Jimmy Lai's words, what struck me was the antithetical nature of peace and meaning. Is the relationship between peace and meaning really exor? The answer seems to be yes. If 'meaning' is somehow improving the world (we'll come to a clearer definition later on) and the greater the impact the greater the meaning, then having a life filled with meaning is not easy. Of all the people that changed the world, none of them had a peaceful life. Gandhi starved himself, was beaten and murdered. Mandela spent 26 years incarcerated on Robben Island. Anthony Fauci has saved countless lives in managing the pandemic, but I doubt it was a particularly peaceful job. Changing the world is hard work and those dedicated to the pursuit of meaning are unlikely to have a chilled time doing it.

The converse is the peaceful life. We'll all picture different imagined histories or futures when we think of the peaceful life, but I picture being in the mountains skiing or living on a beach in Hawaii to surf in the day and draw at night. No worries about MRR or bug fixes - just the quiet chilly breeze of the mountain air on my face. What these images represent is being away from society and its problems, and I suspect yours will too. Society feels broken and wanting to solve its problems is inherently stressful and hence inherently un-peaceful.

Whilst I do believe there are people that can find meaning in a peaceful life, and I am beyond ecstatic for them, for me when I think about the beach in Hawaii, it is quickly followed by, 'but I couldn't do that forever'. Picking peacefulness feels like I'm leveraging my bourgeois privilege of even having the choice in the first place and then opting to put my head in the sand. There are billions and billions of people that do not have that choice, who are in pain and struggling, and to select a future where I have peace but make little impact on the lives of others doesn't seem to be an option. The inaction to alter the imbalanced status quo, in which you are on the winning side on, feels like contributing to the problem. If this is something you have felt, then the next key step is to work out what meaningful means.

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Three Equations to Calculate Meaning

There are three key areas which I have found to be necessary and sufficient to derive a sense of meaning. They are reducing pain, extending life and delivering joy.

meaning = extending life OR reducing pain OR delivering joy

People who are devoid of meaning in their life are generally not making any notable achievement in any of these three paths, whilst people who have a deep sense of meaning are typically involved with at least one of them. I have purposefully excluded the human element in the categories, because working towards these goals for other species can also deliver a huge sense of meaning.

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However, these categories are not created equal. Some are significantly more challenging than others, and therefore deliver more meaning to our lives. Instead, they form a hierarchy which you can see below:

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I believe that extending someone's life gives a greater sense of meaning than delivering joy, though both can contribute to a sense of meaning. The hierarchy illustrates that the higher up the pyramid you go, the fewer people you'll need to reach the same sense of meaning as those lower in the pyramid.

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One issue is that a lot of work could be argued to fit into one of these three categories in some way. For example, a casino game designer could argue that the rush of a big win is delivering joy, and they can do this for thousands of people. So there needs to be a way to understand how to better define the extent of the meaning. Consider the following formula where p is proximity and n is number:

n ∝ p

Proximity is directly proportional to the number. In plain terms, the closer you are to the people you are impacting, the fewer the people needed to get the same level of meaning. For example a surgeon who is literally inside a patient doing a kidney transplant has a very close proximity to their impact and so the number of people a doctor needs to feel a high sense of meaning can be relatively small. A politician on the other hand is quite far removed from their impact. The climate change policies they introduce or infrastructure projects they clear may only reduce pain or extend life or deliver joy to people who aren't even alive yet. As a result of such a distant proximity, they need to impact a much higher number, in the millions, to feel the same level of meaning as the surgeon. This may explain why it is so difficult to get people to act on topics like climate change. The proximity to the impact is so incredibly far that it's only when the proximity becomes smaller, i.e. impacting the lives of people now, that they actually start to do something. The closer you are to experiencing the impact, the smaller the number you'll need to feel meaning. In most cases, people's proximity to the impact is so far, they won't feel any sense of meaning at all because n is too high.

The final equation is about the size of the impact. In the following, n is number and x is any of 'reduction in pain', 'extension of life', 'amount of joy':

n ∝ 1/Δx

The number is inversely proportional to the change in movement of x. The greater the movement of joy in something's life, the fewer the number of living beings you would need to achieve the same amount of meaning. We can use the analogy of a therapist as an example. Imagine a 10-point happiness scale where 1 is terribly unhappy and 10 is incredibly happy. Therapist A is working with someone who is really struggling, we'll put them on 2. Therapist B is working with someone who is doing pretty well, at 7. Therapist A takes their client from 2 to 6, a gain of +4. Therapist B takes their client from 7 to 8, a gain of +1. Therapist A has had quadruple the gain of pain reduction on their client compared to Therapist B. Consequently Therapist B would need to impact 4x the number of people as Therapist A to get the same sense of meaning (these numbers are for illustrative purposes only). It's why we believe saving the life of a child is more valuable than saving the life of an elderly person. Extending the life of a child by 60 years is more meaningful than extending the life of an elderly person by 1 year. The bigger the difference you make to an individual, the smaller the number of people you impact needs to be.

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Weaving it Together

The key components for calculating future meaning is based on the category, proximity and size of the impact. Those that have a very small impact on a few number of people far away may not feel a great deal of meaning and those that have a transformational impact on many people close-by will feel a huge sense of meaning. Whenever considering your next steps, think first about whether you are doing anything that is reducing pain, extending life or delivering joy. Then weigh up the proximity you'll be to the impact and the size of the impact you'll have on the lives of others. At the very least, I would suggest optimising for one of these variables. Either make a ridiculously large impact on a small group you are close to or a modest impact on an enormous population you're distant from. Settling somewhere in between each is unlikely to give you the deep sense of meaning you may be looking for. At the very best, go after a close, huge population and transform their lives drastically - if you're an entrepreneur, it's the only ideas worth spending your time on.

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Personalising Passion

There's one last issue I often find people still come up against which the above framework won't help with and that is finding what you want to work on. Calculating meaning might be helpful, but it still leaves open the question, 'but what should I work on?". Fortunately that's a much easier problem to solve. For each of the three categories above (reducing pain, extending life and delivering joy) reflect on your own life and try to think about the most extreme experiences you've had in each. When did you feel such intense pain that you wish nobody else would ever feel? Was your own life salvaged by the kindness of another? What comprised of the happiest moments of your life, and who played a role in delivering that? For me, it was the first category. Heartbreak and its aftermath, 'long heartbreak' you might call it, is a pain I'd experienced and wouldn't wish upon anyone. I knew that if I could play any role in saving relationships and families from being torn apart, it would feel like incredibly meaningful work to me personally. That has been unquestionably true for my journey with Blueheart. Everyone's life experiences are different and if you can find instances from your own life, you'll have quickly triangulated a few areas which you will be able to find the meaning you are looking for.