fulfillment systems
and a mental model for gratitude
There’s two checklists to my understanding of something: knowing and internalizing. As a kid, the amount of knowing was ever increasing. So much was thrown at me, I’m sure you can relate. The internalization is what I find so interesting because it opens up the path to important feelings.
For example, knowing physics is interesting, but understanding it makes one scared of heights and falling for obvious reasons. Similarly, hearing someone describe passion is less visceral than feeling deep passion for something. Internalizing knowledge can only happen through life experiences and it’s only past those life experiences can we unlock emotions that we may seek.
Today, I’m left with a lot of knowing and a bit more rationalizing than as a kid. The amount I know will always be greater than the amount I’ve rationalized, simply because I haven’t been able to live the life experiences needed to internalize all that I know. There’s also the reverse, where I lived experiences without knowledge preparation, only to have it all click when reading a book’s third person perspective. I’ve found that living the experience and then reading about it to be a more enjoyable experience than the other way around. The book allows me to fill in the gaps in the life experiences I’ve had.
The thing about fulfillment is that it’s something we’re all in pursuit of. We’re never guaranteed fulfillment and we never know how it’ll come at our doorsteps. There’s so much randomness to it—stumbling upon your dream job, the love of your life, a favorite hobby, or a stranger interaction you never thought you needed. And in the moment, it happens. And in some cases, an opportunity slips away because you didn’t know it was what you wanted until the door closes.
Accumulated such experiences are the ingredients to start rationalizing and internalizing the idea of gratitude for fulfillment systems. One top of mind example: work. I’ve worked in enough places to understand what’s a terrible job, what’s an average job, and what’s a dream job. When a dream job is all you know, you have no conceptual understanding of where the floor and ceiling is.
My work feels like a lot. Unlike many jobs, the minimum commitment is high. But the return in the form of fulfillment is so much higher than any other time commitment at the moment. It’s repelling for many but it makes sense when pursuing high fulfillment. And that’s because it’s so hard to find fulfillment systems with such a high ceiling for fulfillment.
Many jobs will have diminishing returns past a certain amount of time commitment. It’s vocalized as “I wish work could be more fulfilling” or “There isn’t enough interesting work”. And for many, the point of diminishing returns is the sweet spot because work is a priority, not the priority.
As someone who loves exploring extremes, it’s exciting to explore the ceiling of a high fulfillment system. There’s an infinite amount of things for me to be obsessed about. It’s easy for me to budget the majority of my headspace towards work and more importantly, to feel privileged to explore this ceiling that wasn’t exposed to me before.
The same mental model is unfortunately not translatable to other things such as social interactions. For example, if I made a new friend that I know I can be best friends with, they’ll think I’m psycho if I asked to spend 30 hours a day with them every day. For hobbies, you have the benefit of pouring as much time as you want but if you don’t have great people to do it with, the ceiling for fulfillment could be lower.
There are so many itches to scratch for one to feel fulfillment. It feels impossibly hard to find things that scratch them all: the people, the intellectual stimulation, the conversations, the energy, etc. So when it’s possible to pour as much time as you want without diminishing returns, let’s treasure the heck out of it.
We think about wanting to feel fulfilled at all points of our lives, finding our true passions, and finding our people. We look back fondly on experiences that have been extremely fulfilling, occasionally asking ourselves what we’d do to live something as fulfilling again. The life experiences we’ve lived teach us what’s fulfilling and what’s not, and how they look as a function of time and energy. It’s given us the opinion we need to keep what we want in our lives and reject what we don’t want.
These days, I ask myself why do I care about what I care about so much. Past life experiences have taught me that the “fulfillment systems” I have today have the highest ceiling and little diminishing returns for my time and energy and that they’re rare to have. I feel a level of gratitude I don’t think I could have felt before. The rationalized perspective makes decision making as easy as knowing that two is greater than one, and it makes me have no regrets in what I give energy to today.
Notes:
It feels odd to label things as “fulfillment systems”. However, it’s hard to compare apples to oranges so I’ve found that fulfillment is the best way to compare all time commitments as apples to apples.
This post assumes that there’s a rational way of looking at things. Obviously, there’s no such thing as “objectively diminishing returns” because of the randomness in life, but that randomness can also introduce indecisiveness. This post’s mental model aims to reduce that indecisiveness and increase conviction, appreciation and gratitude for what we have today (when those are feelings you want of course). Some days, you just want a little bit of variance and less predictability.
I believe that decisions should be made with just as much heart as rationalization and that pursuing life purely with a rational perspective does not make sense. However, a rational perspective is a highly practical tool for making decisions and feeling gratitude.