Williamson's point is that if pleasure doesn't come easily to you, you can hide in hard things instead and call it meaning. I see that as overwork: always on, always doing productive-looking things at the expense of friends, family, and your own health and happiness.

I believe health is a composite of three categories, and that without all three operating in harmony and at optimal levels, we are not healthy. That's why I'm passionate about the body, the mind, and the spirit.

I think spirit is usually the most under-addressed. It's either woo-woo spirituality or dogmatic religion that people think of when they hear spirit, but I think of it as how we relate with ourselves, others, the world around us, and the sacred or the divine (that higher something we all sense and often call by different names). For me, the sacred makes the most sense as demonstrated in the life of Jesus and how he treated people.

Today I want to talk about something in that spirit category that a lot of us chew on: our purpose. I think purpose is heavily influenced by our worldview, by our perspective. Is this life all there is, or is there more to come after it?

That matters because if you think this is the only life we get, there's arguably less patience for the things that may not be experienced or enjoyed in this life but can wait until the one to come. At least from my own perspective, it's more tempting to follow the law of the jungle if you believe this is the only life we get: eat or be eaten, kill or be killed, survival of the fittest, or the fastest, or the richest, or whoever gets the most toys wins.

Then there's what I like to call the law of love. It's the long game. It says there's more to come, and the best is yet to come, because anybody in a loving relationship knows love gets better every day.

The quotes we started with are pretty profound, and I think there's a lot of data to back them up. The first is a paraphrase. In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl wrote that "the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure." Chris Williamson, who hosts the Modern Wisdom podcast, flipped it around and called it Frankl's Inverse Law.

I want to look at how this plays out for both men and women.

On the women's side, I'll tell you a quick story. My wife and I recently watched a friend's children, four of them, for a little over a week. There were five children in our house, and my wife and I had new empathy for large families.

She had a new appreciation for moms who struggle with identity. Motherhood is all-consuming, and the questions of purpose are real. Because the world doesn't celebrate motherhood like it should, moms often feel like they're not doing enough. They want to do more. They want an identity outside of just cooking and cleaning and caring and loving.

If anything, moms are working more and caring for kids more than they used to. Compared with 1985, mothers' paid work has risen 28 percent and their hands-on child care has risen 40 percent, according to the Surgeon General's advisory on parents. In 2023, 48 percent of parents said most days their stress is completely overwhelming, compared with 26 percent of other adults.

Meaning matters here too. A major review of the research on parenting found that parents are happiest when raising their kids gives them a sense of meaning and purpose. What drags them down is the strain around it: money problems, lost sleep, and a marriage under stress.

I believe a mother's work is a higher calling than that of the king.

These quotes hit men hard. So many men I know don't know the meaning of their life. They don't know their purpose. They've lost their bearings.

And the data is clear: we have a problem with addiction in the United States and much of the world today. Men are distracting themselves with alcohol and drugs and video games and porn and sports and sports betting.

In 2024, 79,384 Americans died of a drug overdose, and men died at more than twice the rate of women. After a 2018 Supreme Court ruling let states legalize sports betting, Google searches for gambling-addiction help rose 23 percent nationally.

A lot of times, these are all just an escape, a way to numb trauma or pain that hasn't been dealt with. Across 37 studies of more than 250,000 people, those who went through four or more kinds of childhood adversity had about six times the odds of problem drinking and ten times the odds of problem drug use, compared with people who had none.

I think that pain usually goes back to a father who didn't tell them he loved them or was proud of them. They bring all that baggage into a relationship, they don't cherish their wife, and then it becomes a competition.

It is extremely important to ask yourself: Is this the only life there is, or is there more to come? How does that influence my worldview, and what I think my purpose is in this world – in this life? Is it to get or to give, to be loved or to love? Can it be both?

The implications of finding our purpose for our physical and mental health are pretty profound. Here are some examples.

A study of nearly half a million people across the US, Europe, and Asia, followed for up to 32 years, found that people with more purpose had about a 24 percent lower risk of dying during the study, and all 25 groups pointed the same direction.

The brain shows the same pattern. Across more than 214,000 people in the US, Europe, and Japan, people with more meaning and purpose had about a 24 percent lower risk of developing dementia, and that link showed up in every study.

Among nearly 13,000 Americans over 50, the quarter with the most purpose had a 43 percent lower risk of depression four years later, compared with the quarter with the least.

Then there's the worldview question itself. Among about 66,000 women nurses, those who went to religious services every week had a 68 percent lower risk of dying from suicide, drug or alcohol poisoning, or liver disease, what researchers call deaths of despair. That's where the drinking and the drugs can end up. Among about 43,000 men in health careers, weekly attendance was linked to a 33 percent lower risk of those deaths, and about half the risk of suicide.

And on getting versus giving: in a survey of about 400 American adults, the givers rated their lives as more meaningful, and the takers rated their lives as happier. But look at what "happy" went with in that study: getting what you want and living in the moment. Meaning went with giving, caring for others, and thinking about the past and the future. I think taking can feel good for a moment, but giving is the long game, and that's what the law of love asks of us.

The first is my book, NINE70: Nine Ways to Measure and Grow Your Spiritual Health in 70 Days. It takes nine character traits aka the nine fruits of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control) and turns them into nine things you can measure, then practice for 70 days and measure again. You practice five disciplines every week, and one of them is "Give something away." It's on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. It comes with a link to the assessment, the audio talks, and ten weeks of emails - all free.

The second is brand new. Annette and I just launched the Flourishing Assessment, and it's ready for you to use. It's free, takes about seven minutes, and gives you one Flourishing Score across seven pillars of body, mind, and spirit, with a 90-day plan shaped by your answers. One of those pillars, Renewal, asks about peace, purpose, meaningful action, stillness, and time outdoors. If this issue hit home, that's the score to watch. Retake it in 90 days to see what moved.

Play the long game. The best is yet to come.

-Jared

P.S. - My wife Baddie Crocker has a beautiful newsletter where she shares her perspectives on tending the land, recipes, women’s health and more.

P.S. - This newsletter does not provide medical advice. The content, such as graphics, images, text, and all other materials, are provided for reference and educational purposes only. The content is not meant to be complete or exhaustive or to be applicable to any specific individual’s medical condition.

Here are links to things that have helped me improve my health:

Whoop - Track your HRV and REM Sleep

Function Health - Optimize Your Health via 160+ BioMarkers

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