Three Golden Meaning Opportunities: Service, Good Works, and Ethical Action

[This post is the fifteenth in a multi-part series called Everything You Thought You Knew About Meaning is Wrong. To be in touch about it, you can always reach me at [email protected] or visit me at https://ericmaisel.com/. Please enjoy the series!]

In the last post, I discussed how achievement and excellence might prove golden meaning opportunities. But we aren’t only built for ego rewards. Being of help can also feel meaningful.

Just answering someone’s question, pointing someone in the right direction, providing a useful service, or easing someone’s distress are acts that match our values and that meet our desire to connect with our fellow human beings. As with all of the meaning opportunities we’ve discussed, one heaping plate of service after another might not amount to a balanced meaning meal, any more than a constant diet of achievement or pleasure might. We would likely begin to feel that we were failing to actualize our potential and giving away too much of ourselves. But service is an excellent course on our meaning opportunity menu.

Formal volunteering is just one sort of service. It is also a great service to, for example, make things easier rather than harder for the people around you, to hold the vision and values of your community, company, or family when that vision blurs and those values stray, to stretch out your hand to a neighbor, or to spontaneously provide your expertise when your expertise is needed. Service is an attitude as well as an activity and it is available to you as a meaning opportunity at all times and in all places. When isn’t a good moment to be of some help?

Many of your meaning opportunities, for instance those having to do with excellence, creativity and experimentation, require that you stand up for yourself and assert your individuality. They are frankly individualistic. Others, like love, good works and stewardship, provide you with the opportunity to share your human wealth and enter into relationship with others. Life tends to feel more meaningful when we honor both aspects of our nature, both the individual and the communal. Remember to sometimes choose service as one of your golden meaning opportunities.

Service is active, and is living our life purposes. Dreaming of being of service is not the same as actually being of service and identifying our life purposes is not the same as actually living them. Taking action makes us feel more alive, as does living our principles and our values. When we marry those two ideas we get the idea of good works: real work of our own choosing that reflects our principles and our values. Good works are a form of service.

Maybe your everyday work feels short on real value but you need to stay the course because that work pays the bills. So be it. In that case, you might supplement that everyday work with good works of your own choosing. You might use your linguistic skills to write opinion pieces in the service of a good cause. You might use your carpentry skills to join with other service-minded volunteers and build homes for the impoverished. You might use your driving skills to deliver meals-on-wheels. Your pulse may crave the hairpin turns of a Formula 1 race and the feelings of meaning you might get as you took your victory lap. But there are also feelings of meaning to be had driving at a modest speed delivering meals to hungry shut-ins.

We have complicated drives propelled by our selfish genes, our ego needs, and our desire to act ethically. Serving our ego and our selfish genes through career, achievement, excellence, and so forth, amount to one set of meaning opportunities. But life

Is likely to feel more meaningful if we also honor and live our values. If we don’t, and if we have a conscience, our pangs of conscience will reduce our ability to find joy and contentment in life and may even prevent us from experiencing feelings of meaning. That’s a huge penalty to pay for not living ethically.

Living ethically in the real world of contradictions, complications, and competing values is no easy matter. What may seem right to us today about how to handle our parents’ healthcare issues, or some tricky situation at work, or our alcohol consumption, may not seem so right to us tomorrow. The circumstances may have changed; our own views may have changed; we may have some new insights or new information. This makes ethical action a dynamic, never-ending opportunity to experience meaning.

Service, good works, and ethical action are not the complete story when it comes to meaning opportunities. But neither is any other meaning opportunity we might name. Our goal isn’t to find the meaning opportunity, one that guarantees us a constant supply of feelings of meaning. That hope is wishful thinking. Rather, our goal is to understand our meaning opportunities so well that we begin to have an easy time knowing what to do when we crave meaning and where to look when meaning has departed.

Your life will likely feel more meaningful if you remember to include service, good works, and ethical action among your meaning opportunities. Right now, you may feel reluctant to look in those directions, maybe because you don’t feel you have the time, because you are down on people and aren’t feeling much like being of help, or because you doubt that you will get the meaning payoff I’m predicting. Understood. But consider my suggestion. If feelings of meaning have been proving elusive, being of service might be the exact way to procure them.