The older I get, the less convinced I am that a meaningful life can be built around the self.
We live in a culture remarkably sophisticated at developing the self.
Find yourself. Become yourself. Express yourself. Optimize yourself. Fulfill your potential.
There is nothing wrong with this. I have spent much of my life learning, growing, pushing limits and trying to become better at what I do.
But what comes after self actualization?
I wonder whether we have confused an important part of human development with its destination.
A life can be successful, even highly developed, and still be too small if its ultimate reference point remains me.
I have worked with successful people for decades. Some become wider as they grow: more generous, more interested in others, less occupied with protecting their status or proving their relevance.
Others remain caught in their own gravitational field, however accomplished they become.
Success does not resolve this. Sometimes it magnifies it.
Viktor Frankl saw meaning as inseparable from self transcendence: turning toward someone or something beyond ourselves. Research points in a similar direction. Life becomes more meaningful when it matters not only to us, but to others.
Maybe meaning begins where the self stops being the center of the story.
Meditation has taught me something similar.
For almost three decades, meditation has been part of my life. In the beginning, it was only about me meditating. Becoming more focused. More aware. Advancing in my practice.
Another project of the self.
Today, mostly, meditation is simply happening.
Then it is not for me, because the “me” I am usually so busy maintaining is no longer at its center. Something opens beneath it: a ground that was always there, before all the stories about who I am and who I should become.
There can be a sense of oneness, of reconnecting with what has always been and will continue beyond this particular self. From there, compassion for other sentient beings is not something I have to manufacture. It becomes almost obvious.
I don’t want to make this more mystical than it needs to be. But I also don’t want to make it smaller than it is.
Self transcendence is not self sacrifice or the denial of ambition and individuality. It is freedom from making the self the ultimate reference point.
Perhaps this is one paradox of becoming more fully human: the less everything has to be about me, the larger life becomes.
For leaders, power makes this consequential. The more influence we have, the more we should ask what it is ultimately for.
But this is not really a leadership question. It is about how we spend the short time we are given.
We can spend a lifetime becoming someone.
Perhaps maturity begins when becoming someone is no longer enough.
When what matters is not only what I make of my life, but what my life gives back to life.
And whether the world, in however small a way, is better because I was here.