What Really Matters

Values, Purpose, Acceptance, Action, What Doesn’t Matter

I.

Values

What do you value? What do you stand for? What do you want out of life?

While these are seemingly simple and straightforward questions, few people can actually answer them sincerely. Even as I write these words, I find myself struggling to answer them.

Yet, it’s questions like these that shape the trajectory of our lives. The way we respond to them influences every choice we make—who we befriend, the work we pursue, the relationships we enter, where we live, whether or not we have children, how we spend our money, what we do with our free time, and so on.

Choosing your values and committing to them is not for the faint of heart. It’s far simpler to just adopt the values of others or to follow societal norms than to decide what truly matters to you. That’s because living by your own values requires the willingness to be different. Would you rather live in accordance with the shitty values of another, or risk standing apart from the crowd? Would you rather obey what the internet tells you, or trust in your intuition?

What really matters is knowing what you stand for—better yet, what you live for—and constantly adjusting your actions to match. To live by your values is to live the “examined life” that Socrates spoke of. And that’s a life worth living.

II.

Purpose

I believe we choose our lives long before we are born—we choose our families and our bodies and our circumstances. I believe we all come to Earth with specific lessons to learn and unique gifts to share, each of us designed for an irreplaceable role. Perhaps my gift is writing about stuff like this, and I’m still figuring out what lessons I’m here to learn (although temperance comes to mind). Maybe your gift is to be the caring father you never had or to help everyday people save for retirement or to comfort an aging friend or to grow organic food for your community—or perhaps you’re meant to do all of these things throughout various stages of your life. And maybe the lesson you’re here to learn is to find the will to continually change.

I believe we all have a purpose (or several) that is intertwined with our life lessons and our gifts. And given how insultingly short our lives are, I believe the best use of our time and energy is to figure these things out and dedicate ourselves to them. Because if we don’t figure out what we’re here to learn and do, we’ll end up chasing things that are meaningless to us. And when our lives lack meaning, we get bitter and depressed and start inventing problems just to feel some sense of purpose.

In the first episode of a Netflix docuseries on the world’s blue zones—that is, regions with the highest concentrations of centenarians—we discover why Okinawa, Japan, is home to some of the longest-living people on Earth. While diet and lifestyle are notable factors for longevity, another key factor among Okinawans stands out: the concept of ikigai. Translated loosely as “a reason for being,” your ikigai lies at the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs from you, and what you can offer in exchange for value. In essence, our ikigai is the reason for our gifts, and pursuing it is how we learn the lessons we’ve come here to learn.

In Okinawa, healthcare providers ask elderly patients if they still have their ikigai during routine checkups. If they don’t, it could indicate future health issues. Our bodies need a purpose to function properly. When we lose sight of our purpose and the meaning in our lives, we lose vitality. A lack of purpose affects us on every level—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

III.  

Acceptance

Accepting ourselves and our bodies is becoming increasingly more difficult in a world of Instagram and TikTok, plastic surgery and Botox. Some people spend most of their waking lives fantasizing about ways to change their appearance, and then they pour tens of thousands of dollars into gruesome procedures, only to still feel inadequate. But what would happen if people redirected just a fraction of that time and energy toward embracing and loving themselves and their bodies as they are?

Would we begin to free ourselves?

By choosing acceptance, we reclaim so much time and headspace. We see that obsessing over altering our physical appearance—our butts and lips and hairlines—is both foolish and vain. We remember that those who don’t love us as we are don’t deserve us. Then, we can focus all that time and energy on changing our life trajectory instead of changing a body that’s already designed perfectly just as it is.

IV.  

Action

We’re happiest when we’re actively engaged in solving problems. Happiness, therefore, is not something that happens to you; it’s something that you do. It’s ambition, application, action. It’s finally getting into a flow state while working on a problem you’ve been avoiding. It’s seeing tiny bits of progress as each day passes, and anticipating tiny bits of progress in the days to come. It’s about sowing seeds and savoring the fruits of your labor.

And while happiness comes from solving problems, meaning is found in solving the problems that we are uniquely designed to solve.

V.  

What Doesn’t Matter

Earlier this year, after my grandmother passed away, my father and two of his siblings discovered a shocking truth: their sister had orchestrated a new Will and Testament, drafted by her lawyers, that left the entire family estate to her. Whether my unschooled and elderly grandmother fully understood what she was signing remains uncertain, but it’s clear that my aunt, with the help of her crafty lawyer friends, masterminded the shift from an equal inheritance among four siblings to a Will that favored only one.

The revelation of this new Will had the same effect as dropping an atomic bomb on my dad’s relationship with his sister. He’s spent months picking up the pieces of this giant mess (all while knowing he won’t inherit any of them). While it stings to know he won’t inherit a sliver of his parent's $4 million farmland that the four siblings planted and pulled and plowed for decades, it pangs to know that his sister would make a deliberate choice to leave nothing to her three siblings. Unless legal matters require it, my dad will never speak to her again.

I share this story to make a broader point. My grandmother died in January 2024. My grandfather died a decade prior. I saw both of their lifeless, formaldehyde-filled, makeup-caked bodies lying in open caskets, and I watched as those caskets were lowered into the ground. The fate of my grandparents is a fate we all share. And whether we wither away in a box underground or are turned to ash and scooped into an urn or are used as cadavers for med school students to carve into, we can’t take any of our stuff with us. We can’t take our money or property or tchotchkes. And while we can take priceless jewelry, what sense does it make to bury precious gems in the ground when people died trying to get those gems out of the ground in the first place?

As Marianne Williamson so masterfully puts it in A Return to Love,

Meaning doesn’t lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When we attach value to things that aren’t love—the money, the car, the house, the prestige—we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It’s not that they’re bad. It’s that they’re nothing.

At the end of the day, while it sucks that my dad and two of his siblings won’t receive their inheritance, what hurts even more are the actions that led to this outcome. Their sister chose the meaningless over meaning; money over family. One could easily speculate what lesson she was supposed to learn during her short time here on Earth.

But at least I learned something.

I’d like to leave you with the Five Remembrances from Buddhist philosophy. They are:

1. We are of the nature to grow old

2. We are of the nature to become ill

3. We are of the nature to die

4. We are of the nature to lose everything and everyone we hold dear

5. Our only true possessions in life are our actions; we cannot escape the consequences of our actions