Fulfillment Maxxing: Why Offline Is The New Online & How to Feel Alive Again

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1:03We seem to be suffering from a fatal case of self-optimization obsession. Everywhere you look, you see it. They enhance games, looks maxing, your morning protocol. We are in this cycle of surface-level gratification maxing. And what we should be doing is fulfillment maxing. I want to start by talking about what's happening in modern society right now. It's basically just hard to be alive. We're all daunted by our responsibilities, just getting through the day, meeting our obligations. This is driving a sense of malaise and anxiety that I think is pervasive. Meanwhile, we're being sold this book of lies that all of the happiness and the fulfillment and the lasting satisfaction that we're seeking is on the other side of the next purchase, the next comfort that is just outside of our reach, the next luxury good, the next premium experience.

2:07all of which, of course, promises to fill that hole in our spirit. And we're happy to be happy consumers and chase those things, the modern conveniences, thinking that if we can make our life a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more convenient by dint of mobile apps or premium goods, that finally we will feel a sense of satisfaction and lasting happiness. Of course, this never works. At the same time, we're also deluded that the hyper-connected world that we live in is going to deliver a sense of connection. We've all experienced that it's quite the opposite. The more tethered to our devices we are, the more engaged in our doom scrolling that we become, the more lonely, alienated, and isolated we feel.

2:53And yet we continue to return to this well because these devices are very scientifically designed to light up our dopamine sensors and activate an addictive compulsive response that keeps us online so that our technological overlords can continue to profit off of farming our data in the growing attention economy. Meanwhile, there's a widening of the socioeconomic gap, meaning that opportunities are more scarce than they have been in the past. And then, of course, our fears are impulsed by our social media feeds that then lead us to even trust our relationships less, drive us further apart, as this increasing divide and division around our various opinions continues to escalate and metastasize, while third spaces are continuing to disappear, meaning that not only do we not know our neighbors anymore.

3:54We actually don't really want to. And so within that, our community-oriented spirit that has always been part and parcel of the American experiment seems to be degrading quite precipitously. And with that, we become more and more focused on ourselves. What's important is what I want and how to get it. And this self-obsession, while packaged in a way that makes us feel like pursuing it is going to purchase the happiness, the real thing that we want, the meaning, satisfaction, the sense of our lives holding meaning. All of this self-obsession is actually antagonizing that goal, the real goal, finding true meaning and lasting happiness and satisfaction.

4:41And the bottom line is that all of this self-optimization, this enhancement maxing, all of this looks maxing. These things are proxies for our self-obsession, these indulgences of self-gratification that operate only on a surface level. We tell ourselves that these are the things that are going to move our lives towards the things that we might only unconsciously be aware that we actually want, which is this sense that like, we matter. My life has meaning. I have purpose. I have direction. But the thing is, all of those are oriented around what Arthur Brooks calls the three Ps. We make these decisions and we engage in these behaviors because we're on the chase for either power, property, or prestige.

5:30These material pursuits that we are convinced, even though we know better, are going to get us the happiness and the satisfaction and the fulfillment that we want. Because once we get them, then we will feel like we have transcended uncertainty, the need for constant work, and pain. These are the three truths that Phil Stutz talks about. Unfortunately, it never works. We know this. We keep doing it anyway. What does actually work is disabusing ourselves of this delusion that the pursuit of these three Ps is going to get us to the place that we really want to be. The first thing we need to do is to realize that all of this me, me, me is antagonizing our goal.

6:17And what we need to do is pursue another P, and that P is purpose. One of the ways to do that, first of all, is to understand what Arthur Brooks calls the three macronutrients of happiness, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. These are the things that we should be after. We shouldn't chase happiness. We should try to engage in behaviors that nourish us with those three macro nutrients. So essentially what you're doing is you're broadening the aperture on your life. You don't want to be swimming like a goldfish in a tiny little bowl. You want to think more broadly and you want to start to consider how you're investing in behaviors and decisions that are actually going to drive your life in the direction that you want so that you don't feel despairing, that you don't feel alone, and that you don't feel like your life is lacking meaning and purpose.

7:16So how do we do this? Well, it boils down to some pretty basic shit. The first thing you have to do is you have to do something different than what you have been doing. If you keep doing what you've been doing, you're going to get the same bullshit. Essentially, what you have to do is you have to take a contrary action. This is going to require you to get out of your comfort zone, but you can make the lift very low. What is one thing that you can do today, maybe right now even, that is different than the way you have always done things that will interrupt this pattern, even if it's ever so slightly, and something that you can repeat the next day and the next day after that.

7:58Something that you can sustain. That is the action you should identify and take. And it doesn't have to be some grand gesture. You don't have to declare that you're setting some crazy goal or that you're quitting your job or that you're finally going to do something about your life. Maybe it's just not putting sugar in your coffee, just some act of esteem building behavior that will engender your life with one grain of sand of self-esteem that you didn't have had you not taken it then you repeat that contrary action it's called next right action and then you build a muscle around that behavior sustaining it day after day until it becomes second nature and then you can turn the volume up on what your next contrary action is These are the building blocks of change.

8:51It's the only way any change is ever made. And it just boils down to these very basic elements. Repeatable, you set yourself up for success by making it an easy lift. And then you start to develop this reflex towards action that has nothing to do with how you feel about it, because you know, you are making an investment in your future self. What you want is consistency and consistency buys you momentum. And momentum is like this mystical spiritual energy that turns hard things into easy things. It's like a wave that you can surf effortlessly that then engenders even more self-confidence, more self-esteem to take that next step and handle that more difficult contrary action.

9:42Essentially, you're assembling all the pieces to build this foundation for your new life. And every day, you're inching your life more and more in the trajectory of the more aspirant future self. So what does this mean? It means you got to get out of your comfort zone. You got to put the fucking phone down and you got to touch grass, be in nature, roll in the dirt, break a sweat, push hard things around, ask a boy or a girl out on a date, set yourself up for failure, experience failure, learn from it, approach life with a greater degree of curiosity, venture to parts unknown, and start to develop the confidence and the reflex to say yes to experiences you have historically and always just reflexively said no to.

10:31Your life is not going to happen the way you want it to unless you make the decisions and engage in the uncomfortable behaviors that are going to get you there. Nobody else is going to do it for you. You have to take responsibility for this because it's between you and you and you only have one life to live. So, really reflect on what you want that life to be and however impossible it may feel, basically tripping out on the future and how unimaginable it is or how inaccessible it feels to you or reflecting upon your past and all the reasons why you're not going to be able to do that thing or the regret that you have about not making the decision that might have put you in a place better than where you are right now, all of that is irrelevant.

11:24Your life is only happening in the present. The present is the only thing that's actually real. And this moment is your only opportunity to actually do anything about it. All of these, again, are building blocks that are moving your life in the right direction, that are allowing you to claw ever so slowly out of whatever despair and disaffectation and sense of disconnection that you're experiencing. This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Despite the fact that fiber is absolutely essential to optimal physiology. Shockingly, 90 to 95 % of people are fiber deficient, which is insane and also creates increased risk for all kinds of things, including heart disease and colon cancer.

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14:32These behaviors, these decisions around discomfort have to be oriented around a few fundamental pillars. Faith, family, friends, and meaningful work. What is your relationship with spirituality like? What is the quality of your relationships? Are you investing in your friends? As Arthur Brooks would say, your real friends, not your deal friends. Are you showing up for them? Are you stepping outside of your self-obsession to invest in the people you care about, in your community, in meaningful work, in work, and in pursuits that are bigger than yourself, especially when that investment is inconvenient it's not about making sure that your self obsessions are intact it's about putting them aside and learning how to be of service to other people again especially when it's inconvenient because that is what is going to give your life meaning and the quality of your relationships are going to dictate the degree to which you feel connected.

15:39And that disconnection, that despair, that loneliness that is being provoked by our digital devices and our consumerism culture and our addiction to comfort, these things can all be overcome by engaging with discomfort, allowing yourself to be inconvenienced, and showing up for the people that you care about and that care about you and making sure that they feel seen and heard. And then how are you being of service to your community, to your local community, to the world at large, to the people that you care about? The more service-oriented you approach your life, the more purpose, meaning, and fulfillment you're going to experience.

16:22And service, of course, is orthogonal to self-obsession. It's the self-obsession that is driving all of the despair. All the cultural messages are around prioritizing your self-obsession. And I'm here to tell you based on personal experience that self-obsession is the enemy. The cure is service in which you're making your life about something other than yourself. The more you can do that, I promise you, the more fulfilled you will feel, the more internally satisfied you will feel. And then over time, this lends itself to getting some clarity on purpose and meaning. These are big, fuzzy, ephemeral words that I think are intimidating.

17:09What's my purpose? How do I get fulfillment? They seem impossible. And most people don't know what their purpose is. And I can say, you need a mission. Go get on a mission and that will solve everything. But what are you supposed to do with that if you don't know what your mission is? And all I'm saying is you don't have to worry about any of those things. It boils down to these little contrary actions. Contrary actions designed to step outside of yourself and your self-obsession that are oriented around friends, family, work, faith, or things that are more important and bigger than yourself. What is one thing you can do today on behalf of another person?

17:49What is one thing you can do today that is selfless instead of selfish? What is one thing today that you can do that's going to make you a little bit uncomfortable. It might embarrass you or it might set you up for a failure. Can you say yes to that? If not, lower the volume on it a little bit until you can say yes. It's all about willingness. What are you willing to do? You can talk theoretically about these things. One day I'm going to do this or next month I'm going to do this challenge. I don't care about that. None of that means shit. All that matters is what are you doing right now? What are you going to do today?

18:26What are you going to be able to tell yourself when no one's around and your head hits the pillow tonight? Did you follow through on any of these things that I am talking about here today? If so, you're going to feel a little bit better about yourself than you did the night prior. And that's what I want for you. These are the things we build upon that seem insignificant and small and meaningless and somewhat trivial, but I promise you when you build upon them day after day after day, the trajectory of your life starts to shift. And then suddenly you might stumble upon a purpose, or you might find a mission, a mission that you never would have even thought of otherwise, or you might start to develop a relationship with purpose that you didn't know was possible.

19:19but it is the daily tiny little things that you're doing every single day. So distill it down to the present, to these little bite-sized chunks, forget about the rest and just think about how do you want to feel when your head hits the pillow tonight? Did you live up to a promise that you made to yourself or did you let yourself down? What was the one contrary action you took that you couldn't take yesterday that you did today and allow yourself to feel good about that? And then tomorrow we wake up and we build. What this is, is fulfillment maxing. It is the opposite of looks maxing. Looks maxing is the pinnacle of self-obsession.

19:58Fulfillment maxing requires focusing on the opposite of self-obsession, the selfless acts that you take on behalf of others and the world at large that engender the self-esteem that you've always been searching for in these surface level self-gratification behaviors. And herein lies a great irony. By focusing on this, on fulfillment maxing, you're actually serving ultimate human performance optimization. So if this is the vernacular and the language that appeals to you, look at it this way as the white space. While everyone else is off looks maxing and enhancement maxing and engaging in all of these self-obsessive, self-gratifying surface level behaviors, you're actually going where no one else is going, where there's no competition.

20:51By doubling down on fulfillment, on purpose, on what you have to do to get that long-term satisfaction, your performance as a human being or whatever it is that you're like ambitiously chasing, that becomes more accessible. So it's actually, you could call it a life hack, I suppose. And I think it's part and parcel with this overall life philosophy that has served me well, which boils down to a phrase I like to repeat, which is the path of least resistance is actually volunteering for the most resistance. And this gets to the white space idea. So let me just explain it by dint of example. When I was a young swimmer, I was pretty good, but there were plenty of kids that were much more talented than me.

21:46And that is why I decided to focus on the 200 meter butterfly, because that is an event, uh, uh, notoriously painful that nobody else wanted to participate in. And I realized, oh, that's the white space. That's the place where there's the least amount of competition. And if I focus exclusively on that, that puts me in a better position to basically distinguish myself. And so, in order to do that, I was volunteering for a heightened level of suffering because that's a very difficult race to train for. But by doing that, I succeeded and was able to distinguish myself in that event. And that was a lesson that I learned early on that I've applied later in my life.

22:35I think looking back, it's also why I decided to go into ultra endurance triathlon rather than Ironman. I realized like, oh, there's so many fewer competitors at the double Ironman distance than there are in the Ironman distance. Maybe if I go over here, it gives me a greater chance of distinguishing myself, of trying to kind of access my inner excellence. And I was able to do that. Then same thing with podcasting. I started this podcast back in 2012. That was a period of time in which nobody thought you could make a living doing this. And it certainly wasn't cool. If you were to decide you were going to start a podcast back then, you were opening yourself up to ridicule of basically people being dismissive of you or making fun of you or just not taking you seriously.

23:26But that was the white space back then. There was very little competition. There weren't very many people doing it back then. And I had the foresight to see and to believe that it was going to grow into this bigger thing. And by jumping into it in that period of time in which there was close to no competition, I was able to distinguish myself early and develop a foothold and build an audience before it became so crowded and saturated. And I have benefited as a result of that. So the point that I'm making is that in terms of thinking about our relationship with discomfort and how that connects with our aspirations for ourself, it's valuable to contextualize your relationship with discomfort in the context of resistance.

24:18Where is there a lot of resistance? And where there's a lot of resistance, there's going to be less competition, less participants. and generally in my experience when that white space matches up with something i'm curious about or feel a natural gravitation towards i have developed a reflex to go in that direction by welcoming that degree of heightened resistance into my life i actually am setting myself up for a path of least resistance because it is there where nobody else is that you're going to be able to do your thing unfettered to grow to evolve to change to fail to learn and to improve in a way that is setting you up to distinguish yourself

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27:47Just to be clear, I'm not saying that we shouldn't engage in these self-optimization behaviors. Like we all wanna be better and there are effective ways to behave in a way that's going to make us better. I'm just talking about when self-optimization becomes self-obsession. So these are two different things. What we don't want is a life that is oriented entirely around me, me, me. When we're just thinking about what we want and what we need, that comes at the cost of the things in life that are truly most important and meaningful. So, fine to optimize, fine to basically be concerned about all the behaviors and decisions that are contributing to your well-being mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally, etc.

28:36um it's just the obsession part that you need to be aware of and be cautious of because as soon as you start making all of your decisions based upon what you want and what's important to you you start to erode your capacity for empathy and once you disconnect from empathy then it becomes very difficult to have a happy life you're not going to be able to connect with other humans There's a cascade of consequences to that. And I think making the choice to inconvenience yourself, to invest yourself in other human beings, even when that causes incursions on your self-optimization routine, you have to be okay with that because these are the investments that basically pay off over the long term to give you what you're actually after.

29:27So many of these optimization protocols are on their face fine, but if you think that they are going to deliver you fulfillment, happiness, and purpose, they're not. They might make you healthier. They might improve your mood and your cognition, et cetera. But the real juice, all of that is underneath. and what you're doing on behalf of yourself isn't necessarily connected to those things. These things require you to get outside of yourself, to invest yourself in the larger pursuits of life, the more selfless and community and connection-oriented pursuits. The ultimate self-optimization is self-mastery.

30:16And self-mastery means developing the capacity to emotionally self-regulate, to basically make the best decisions and engage in the behaviors that are going to move your life in the direction that you want it to move. And that means that you have to say no to a lot of stuff. You have to know how to put the phone down. You have to know how to pick up a book and read it. You have to know how to commit to doing hard things and following through and being a responsible member of society, self-mastery means you are in charge of your universe, your body. Self-mastery is essentially the discipline to say no to all of the things that are driving this despair, this loneliness, this sense of disaffectation and the emotional disconnection that so many people are experiencing.