If You Must Optimize for Something, Choose Fulfillment
Also, don't die with unused tokens and skeeball tickets
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Growing up, birthdays meant one thing: going to Chuck-E-Cheese for pizza and, more importantly, the arcade. My siblings and I would eat as fast as we could so our parents would give us what we really wanted.
Tokens.
Tokens were as close to hitting the lottery as a ten year old could get, and we felt a moral imperative to spend them with reckless abandon.
But, even as kids, we knew there was a math to the arcade. Not all games were created equal. Video games were fun, but skeeball meant prizes you could take home. The more tickets you won, the more treasures you could claim from the glorious wall of stuff.
Of course, the worst possible thing was ending the day with unused tokens or unredeemed tickets, but somehow it would always happen.
I’d end up with a few spare tokens or a small fold of tickets—too few to trade in for that Spiderman kazoo, but too many to throw away. I’d shove them into my pocket and, after getting home, the leftovers would inevitably vanish into a forgotten corner of my room.
One year, when I was home from college, I was rooting through my closet and stumbled on a few tokens lost in a box along with some skeeball tickets.
At that point, they had been overlooked for maybe nine or ten years. While I’m sure finding them brought a smile to my face, I ultimately threw them away. They would never to be used or enjoyed. I would never get my Spiderman kazoo.
Don’t Die with Unused Tokens
People like to talk about optimizing their lives. Most of the think pieces I read these days echo culture’s obsession with having more and being more.
Usually, that means devoting our time and energy to accumulating a wealth of resources—tokens and tickets—so we can trade them in for meaningful and fulfilling experiences in the future.
It’s ironic, isn’t it? We start out as playful, carefree kids who must then grow up to hustle and grind our entire lives so we can, at some point, buy our time back to live a playful, carefree life that feels true to us. We call it retirement. It’s a cosmic joke/cliche at this point.
It’s a nuanced conversation, I know, and there is a balance between living now while also planning wisely for an uncertain future. Our culture, however, is anything but balanced in its appetite for more and bigger.
I’ve said before that humanity is having a midlife crisis, and there is an evolving collective realization that the way we live and work no longer works or delivers on its promises of fulfillment. And that is what we all actually want even more than happiness: fulfillment.
The truth is, many (most?) people will die with a lot of unused tokens and tickets because they don’t know how to find fulfillment here and now. They need a shift in perspective.
Net Fulfillment Over Net Worth
I recently discovered Bill Perkins’ book (2020), Die with Zero, in which he advocates orienting our lives toward Net Fulfillment as a measure of wealth instead of Net Worth.
If the idea sounds familiar, it’s because mystics and sages have been selling this idea since time immemorial. Money and status are not true wealth, fulfillment is.
What is fulfillment?
It’s the felt-sense of wholeness and satisfaction that naturally arises when you’re at home in your own life, and the need to improve your life through striving and seeking ends. Simply, it’s wanting the life you have.
That doesn’t mean you can’t be committed to growth and evolution. On the contrary, when you’re fulfillment-focused, you’re able to access more inspiration and energy to creatively expand your life, not less, because you’re clear on what ignites you.
Clarity is Key
I’m convinced that most people don’t clearly know what they want. They know what they’ve been told to want, but they don’t know for themselves what they want and why they want it.
What ignites you? Are you clear on that? If you don’t know, it might be helpful to ask yourself questions like:
What brings a sense of deep enjoyment to my life?
What fills me up emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, and physically?
When was the last time I felt supremely satisfied? What was I doing?
What do I love doing for its own sake?
What kind of person do I aspire to become and be?
Ultimately, fulfillment is a state of being/becoming and not a destination. Fulfillment can’t be bought, but you can use the tokens you’ve been given—your time, talents, health, and material resources—to create opportunities and experiences to deeply enjoy life in the only moment it can ever be known: right now.
Join other intentional humans in 105 countries who are committed to creating a life of freedom and fulfillment through Self-awareness.
If you’d like to support this work, please share this post with someone who might like it. You can also hit the ❤️ or 🔄 buttons below to help more people discover it.
Great post, Kevin. I've read Die with Zero, and it truly resonated. The strange thing is that my subconscious is slowly leading me down that path, though my egoic mind is fighting back bravely. :):):)
Great message. « I know, and there is a balance between living now while also planning wisely for an uncertain future. Our culture, however, is anything but balanced in its appetite for more and bigger. » Agreed! Thanks for sharing these thoughts.