The key to feeling more fulfilled can be summarised by the common idiom, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. We should have lots of things happening in our lives at any given time to create colour, challenge, and excitement, while also bringing balance, peace, and joy to our lives.
Think of it like this: you’re like a temple being supported by a number of pillars. Each pillar represents an aspect of your life - a relationship, a hobby, work, a side hustle, skills, spirituality and so on. A temple leans not only on one pillar, but on multiple. Because of this, even if one breaks, the temple will not collapse. Instead the other pillars will support it while in the meantime that broken can be repaired, or new ones can be built.
It’s important to have many things going on in our lives - events, social activities with friends and family, goals, work projects, personal projects… These things act together as the foundation of our fulfilment, helping us feel joyful and excited about life. The trap we can easily fall into is becoming reliant on one source of satisfaction and happiness like our flourishing job, or flourishing relationship, or flourishing skill; when something makes us feel good, we learn to keep coming back to that source to produce the associated feelings. For example, at primary school there is often the ‘nerdy kid’, ‘sporty kid’ or ‘popular kid’. Each receives praise for succeeding in that specific area, and it becomes ‘their thing’, linking to their self-esteem. They focus on being smarter, fitter, or more popular. It becomes a comfort zone.
In primary school, which kid were you?
However, if what we most invest into is ruined, it may feel like we’ve lost our whole sense of self. What would happen if you had an injury and couldn’t play the sport you excelled in anymore? What would happen if your girlfriend or boyfriend unexpectedly broke up with you? What would happen if we went into lockdown and couldn’t go to school or see friends much? In these kinds of situations, would you still feel stable?
Relying upon one source of fulfilment increases risk.
Look at Romeo and Juliet. All they have is their love for one another, and it literally kills them in the end. Maybe if Romeo and Juliet had more passions apart from love, they would have found reason to continue living, who knows! Of course, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is a dramatic example, but still, the lovebirds illustrate the dangers of investing everything we have into one person or one specific area.
How do you get to a point where you are continuously investing in a number of areas? By being proactive and pushing your own boundaries. For example, saying yes to that invite to go out where you could meet new people and spark relationships, or, we don’t always have to wait for the opportunities to come to us; we can make our own luck. Try joining a cooking class or a sports club, or start a cool side project. Every strengthened aspect of your life, like skills and hobbies, will become a source of fulfilment.
Live a multidimensional life filled with colour (the kind of life your friends will admire you for)
You may wonder, in this case, couldn’t I end up spreading myself too thin? How would I have the time to do all these things? This sounds tiring! Some of us may have that friend who is a busy body, running here, running there, always trying this new thing and that new thing. That’s not what we're aiming for. The healthy kind of busy is when you’re continuously learning, reflecting, challenging yourself, meeting new people, having new experiences, and so on. This is an all-rounded, flourishing lifestyle. Forget about activities you don’t genuinely value, waste your time, or drain your energy. Instead, try to invest in a few carefully selected key areas that will constitute you and your life. All you need is for each activity to ask yourself this: how is this activity helping me become the person I want to be? We should focus on doing things that reflect our ideal lifestyle and aspirations, enriching us.
Ask yourself: how is a particular activity helping me become the person I want to be?
Cut away the fluff.
Life will inevitably have its ups and downs, but we can maximise the factors in our control - like what we invest our time into - to feel more fulfilled and to create a colourful, well-rounded life we love. As tempting as it can be to fall completely into one area like one passion or person at times, staying within our comfort zone, we should aim to achieve balance in our lifestyle; this leads to stability. Now, go forth to identify and build your pillars.
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