Why self fulfillment matters more than happiness
There are so many options that you have right now to be “happy.”
Eat sugar-stuffed cookies, watch your favorite show, have s*x, or scroll on Instagram… just to name a few.
But if you have tried almost all of them, you will know that the pleasure you experience from most of these things do not last.
They feel exciting when you are thinking about it, the spike gets higher and higher as you seek it, and the peak gets the highest once you first taste it.
But soon enough, the initial hit of happiness that you get dies down. You try to stuff more in to see if you can maintain the “hit.” Turns out you can’t and you start to think of another pleasure to seek for.
This is the hamster wheel of happiness that most people in the world are stuck in.
It’s shallow. It’s addictive. And the crazy thing is, a lot of this seeking is done unconsciously so some people are not even aware that this is what’s actually happening in the background.
To some, we are quite aware. But it’s easy to fall into this pattern when you’re bored, feeling “meh” or to put into words, feeling a “void” inside.
I used to be a victim of it myself at one point in my life– scrolling one youtube video after another and repeating that cycle for *hours* even though deep down, I want to change it.
It felt like falling down a landslide. I was trying to grab hold of it to finally “get my life together” but somehow I found myself unable to. And it wasn’t just about having the willpower– my willpower felt like a pebble crushed under a heavy rock that I don’t know what.
Now looking back, I realized that it was because I didn’t feel fulfilled inside…
I was chasing for temporary pleasures that were available at my grasp. When deep down, I was looking for something deeper that would satisfy me in all the ways I desire.
Turns out, it was because I was seeking for happiness that I thought was outside of me. When the truth is, the happiness that I was looking for only came when I eventually sought within myself… where I found self-fulfillment.
What is self-fulfillment?
If you’ve been in the personal development world, you likely have heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Essentially, it is a model proposed by a psychologist who stated that the peak of human experience comes from seeking our own inner potential.
That is to say, the source of our deepest fulfillment comes from actualizing one’s own potential. It is what we all ultimately long for inside–once our basic desires such as food, shelter, and love functions are met.
From my own experiences, I can say that life doesn’t get really good until you experience self fulfillment. In fact, it’s so good that fulfillment is what I strive for myself daily– through writing, through coaching clients, working out, etc. The feeling of fulfillment itself is what makes me more motivated to do what I do more than anything else.
Why self fulfillment makes you actually happy (and what happens without it)
And so I reflected… Why does self fulfillment matters a lot?
What I’ve realized is that without self fulfillment, we experience even more suffering. We become susceptible to experiencing mental suffering (which buddhists call dukkha) because it’s easier to fall into the grip of the ego mind.
I distilled down why that is the case. And what I’ve learned is that when you are not fulfilled, you are more likely to…
Try to control what you can’t
Not know what to do
Compare yourself to others
#1. Trying to control what you can’t control
I once had a friend whom every time we hung out she complained a lot about her relationship.
I was happy to get to be there for her, but at some point I saw that her unhappiness about her relationship stemmed from a deeper disconnection in her.
I asked her when was the last time she felt fulfilled… and she responded that it was like a decade ago when she was painting art and writing poems.
And that made me wonder “huh… maybe she’s settling for a relationship she didn’t feel happy in because she is not feeling fulfilled within herself!”
Which led me to the realization that:
When we are not feeling fulfilled, we are more likely to fixate on outside circumstances that we can’t control.
For example, blaming a man that the way he treated you made you unhappy (when the truth is, we can’t control how someone treats you, but we can control what we allow them to). And trying to change someone we can’t change is what leads to further unhappiness.
In business, this can look like being hyper fixated on outcomes that are beyond your control. Such as, being bothered by the algorithm, what a negative comment said, or whether someone buys or not etc. When the truth is, we can only control our creative input, but not always on the output.
Trying to change what we can’t is where suffering comes from. And when we are unfulfilled, we are more likely to do that because we haven’t found what’s within our own grasp.
#2. Not knowing what to do.
Recently, I found myself being spread out too thin on so many platforms… trying to decide which platform I should be on for more people to find my content.
And I realized that this frantic energy was coming from being disconnected to self fulfillment. It came from being overly concerned with the *numbers* that I started to overanalyze on what I should do, rather than what I most felt like doing.
This is what I’ve learned happens when you are unfulfilled. It leads to scrambling for answers, yet somehow finding yourself “stuck.” It leads to the feeling that what you are doing is not enough. In other words, a lack of self fulfillment only makes you anxious and uncertain of the process.
Instead, when I reframed the question and asked instead:
What would make me most fulfilled?
That’s when the answers came. That’s when I decided to hone in on strategies that are most simple yet impactful, filling, and nourishing to me. From there, I can then trust that what I am doing is enough and that the right people find me.
Which led me to also realize that we can only be unclear about our paths when we are not following the feeling of self fulfillment.
#3. Compare yourself to others
The last thing I realized about the psyche is that when we are unfulfilled, we are more likely to compare ourselves to others and fixate on things that we are “missing/ lacking.”
This is made worse especially in the current social media day and age when it’s so easy to compare ourselves to the “filtered” versions of someone else. And the more we compare ourselves with others, the more we feel unfulfilled.
I realized this pattern when I used to compare myself with “higher level” coaches in the past. I noticed myself feeling sad because I felt far behind compared to them. And when I did some deep self-inquiry what I realized was that this whole comparisonitis was happening because I was unfulfilled.
I was holding myself back from sharing my work (and my thoughts) fully online and so I felt unfulfilled. And because I was unfulfilled, I was focusing on how other people were way “better” than me (e.g. more popular, richer, more stylish etc).
The destructive cycle of unfulfillment and comparisonitis
However, when I finally focused on my own inner potential and fulfilling that, I noticed myself not only being more satisfied, but also comparing myself less with others. I became more focused on my own unique path.
Combined that with healing work (e.g. radical self-acceptance), now I barely ever compare myself to others. And I wouldn’t have come to this point if I didn’t focus on feeling full (and fulfilled) from within.
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What this all comes down to is that you can seek for “happiness” in a thousand different ways, but none will be ever-lasting nor transformative other than self fulfillment. Happiness can come and go, moment-to-moment but fulfillment stays with you, even in your low moments and challenges.
Ultimately, self fulfillment alleviates our inner suffering while bringing lasting peace, equanimity, and contentment. After all, your soul came here to fulfill her potential and feel fulfilled from living as that. For fulfillment is a feeling we get, when we no longer postpone our “dream reality” to a future moment, but instead bring it to the Here and Now…
