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Bright morning sun streamed through the coffee shop windows, dappling the tabletop between us. The distant hiss of a steamer lent a warm backdrop for this hopeful conversation.

My friend was dreaming of retirement.

Four decades of work had brought him to the cusp. Close enough now to say it out loud instead of merely tumbling inside his mind. He rattled off his retirement plans, with a broad smile.

There were projects around the house: a new bathroom floor, some landscaping, a deck. Three countries he wanted to visit with his wife. A stack of books he’d been putting off.

I mentally tallied the time he’d spend completing all of this. Maybe ten or twenty percent of his next three years.

I asked him about the other eighty. Hmm, maybe golf or hiking. Grandkids, hopefully, at some point. In other words: no plan for the other eighty.

It’ll work itself out, right?

Erm, no.

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When we wave goodbye to our full-time job, we’re relieved of meetings, alarm clocks, bosses, commutes, stress and deadlines.

We focus on these upsides and exactly one downside: we lose a paycheck. We plan for decades to survive without the automatic deposit. But the reality is that we lose much more than income. Our career exit also marks an end to forced structure, regular interaction with people, a place that recognizes our competence and receives our contribution. It dislodges a piece of our identity.

And let’s not forget about purpose. Workplace purpose is generally thin, but it’s something: problems to solve, people to help, skills to use.

Work meets a real set of needs, to varying degrees. And then, in a single afternoon, we subtract all of it.

That’s why retirement, so often, doesn’t stick. Roughly a quarter of retirees are working in some capacity. Surprisingly, it’s rarely about money: two-thirds give at least one non-financial reason for returning to work.

I’m no longer surprised when I hear the line: “I’ve decided to go back to work.”

Why? Boredom. Loneliness. The need to feel useful. A desire for more structure or life rhythm.

They don’t miss the job. But they miss something the job provided.

I’d argue that work rarely provides deep meaning. But, even if by accident, it does provide an imperfect version of each of our three sources of meaning: purpose, growth, and belonging. Without you asking, and often without you noticing until it’s gone.

That sets the conditions for an unseen meaning trap in retirement.

Golf, travel, house projects. It’s easy to make a list that satisfies pleasure, adventure, curiosity, and rest. It’s not wrong. But it isn’t nearly enough. A life built around leisure doesn’t provide any of the things that make life feel meaningful.

So, by all means, fill twenty percent of your time with to-do lists and hobbies and all the other things you’ve been waiting to enjoy. But we need to have a chat about the other eighty. A fulfilling life doesn’t happen by accident, it takes intentionality. Here are the three questions to answer:

1. Who do I want to become? (Self-Compassion & Growth)

2. Who will I know and be known by? (Authentic Belonging)

3. Who will I be useful to? (Transcendent Purpose)

Great answers to these questions will add vibrant color to your retirement canvas. These are the three keys. Not the trip to Portugal or the new shed.

Growth. We’re all works in progress. If you’re the same person a year from now that you are today, something has gone awry. Where do you have room to grow? Pick something. Make a plan. Work intentionally toward future-you. Ask yourself: Who do you actually want to become?

Belonging. Our relationships are also works in progress. Who truly knows you? Who do you let yourself be vulnerable with? Is it enough, especially with the loss of workplace connection? If not, make a list, force-rank it. Reach out to the person at the top of the list and make an intentional plan to deepen that connection. Who do you want to do life with, every week?

Purpose. There are countless ways to live out a transcendent purpose. But studies indicate the most fulfilling purpose in retirement is something called ‘generativity.’ This is when we take our accumulated experience and use it to help someone younger. Teaching, mentoring, coaching. You’ve got twenty years of Tuesdays coming your way. Who can you help?

Retirement often feels like the end of growth, belonging, and purpose. It doesn’t have to. The freedom of retirement isn’t just freedom from work. It can be freedom to build a life around the things that make it matter.

Don’t just plan what you’ll do when you retire.

Plan who you’ll become. Who you’ll know and be known by. Who you’ll be useful to.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. This newsletter develops the ideas behind my next book: a unified framework for understanding where meaning comes from and what to do when it breaks.

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Spoiler note: If you haven’t seen the movie, you should. I hope this article may help you appreciate the film’s exploration of meaning when you do see it. I intentionally avoid discussing most of the plot elements.

The tagline for Spider-Man: Brand New Day…

“The world may have forgotten Peter Parker, but he hasn’t forgotten them.”

For most of the film, we experience the visceral pain of Peter Parker’s lack of belonging. Several characters comment on how sad and lonely he seems. One scene shows him following the lives of his old friends on social media. It’s touching. Wistful. He knows them intimately, but they don’t even know his name. That might be the loneliest form of disconnection.

Peter’s experience is emotional, heart-wrenching, and relatable. Absolutely befitting the Spider-Man character.

Spider-Man has always been relatable, to me. He wasn’t born on another planet and his powers weren’t born of ego. He’s awkward and flawed. Like most of us. But better, purer. More humble and honorable than I would be in his position.

He’s driven by a defining principle: with great power comes great responsibility. Uncle Ben’s quote became a cultural touchstone in 2002, but those words trace back to a 1962 comic book. Every generation of Spider-Man is true to it, forming the basis of his transcendent purpose.

His purpose is portable and durable, independent of circumstance or recognition. Exactly the kind of purpose that feeds our sense of meaning.

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And it informs why, at the end of the previous film, he agrees to allow Dr. Strange to erase all memory of Peter Parker from the earth. Why? For the most Spider-Man of reasons: to protect the people he loves.

He chose to sacrifice all of his belonging, in an instant.

He spends the next four years trying desperately to fill the void. But his only available tool is purpose. He finds that some purpose isn’t enough, so he pours more and more of himself into protecting the city. And he succeeds. The city is safer because of Spider-Man. People cheer him in the streets. He is recognized, celebrated. Needed.

Yet he’s miserable.

We all know that loneliness is emotionally painful. Research shows that it’s also damaging to our physical health. Even the most compelling transcendent purpose can’t compensate for a lack of belonging.

This is the film’s most honest and revealing theme: even fictional superheroes need more than one source of meaning. Spider-Man is living his purpose with total commitment. It is genuinely meaningful. He spends four years trying to prove that it’s enough. But it’s not. It can’t be.

We need all three sources of meaning to be active in our lives: purpose, belonging, and growth. That’s how we flourish, how we fill the void.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I will say that it wasn’t tidy. Peter decides it’s worth the risk to establish some measure of belonging. He’s not riding into the sunset. He’s starting a journey. He doesn’t ask Dr. Strange to undo the spell. He orients himself toward putting in the work, choosing to move toward his people. Because the possibility of belonging is worth the risk and the cost.

It always is. For fictional superheroes and for us.

Most of us don’t know a wizard who can make us unknown to our people. But many of us have made smaller versions of the same trade. We dive into work or mission or purpose and we let our relationships thin and fade. We assume, or at least hope, that what we’re doing for the world will fill the space where people used to be.

It won’t, because it can’t. Purpose cannot substitute for people.

Who are your people? You need them. Nothing else can satisfy the role they play in your life.

Go call one of them.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. This newsletter develops the ideas behind my next book: a unified framework for understanding where meaning comes from and what to do when it breaks.

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A giant papier papier-mâché face of a woman hovered briefly in a park in NYC this summer, her blue eyeshadow framing a misshapen nose. She was constructed by a nascent group who call themselves neo-Luddites, accompanied by placards decrying technology.

The original Luddites revolted against the industrial revolution 200 years ago. They didn’t fancy the idea of competing against machines to make textiles, and imagined that if they wanted it bad enough they could stop progress.

The neo-Luddites have a decidedly smaller interest in weaving, but an equal disdain for technology. If you haven’t heard of these new Luddites, a specific generation may pop to mind: boomers. Oh, those boomers. So backward, so hopelessly deficient in technology.

But it’s actually Gen Z providing the biggest energy boost behind the movement. The giant lady-head was built for a Manhattan festival called the Summer of Ludd. On tap, among other low-tech and no-tech adventures, were lectures on the very Gen Z desire to learn how to flirt and date offline.

The festival’s spokesperson is named “Gowanus the media puppet.” Yes, it’s an actual puppet. According to Gowanus-the-media-puppet (a sentence I never thought I’d write), the festival’s organizers “have been coalescing around noticing similar problems of alienation and overreliance on Big Tech.”

Gowanus and friends are tapping into a growing sense of unease with technology among young folks.

Almost a quarter of Gen Z think it would have been better if smartphones had never been invented.

That would be absolutely terrifying to tech companies, except for one small detail: 98% of Gen Z own a smartphone. That’s right, one in five young adults wish smartphones had never been invented yet own one anyway.

The other 80%? They don’t hate smartphones. In fact, 26% of teen boys prefer romantic relationships with chatbots over real girls. An even higher number, 36%, say they prefer speaking to AI over family and friends.

Why? It’s easier. Bots ask less of them.

A pile of transistors is competing against human connection, and it’s putting up some strong numbers.

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Neo-Luddites and teens talking up chatbots are two reactions pointing at the same problem: a world of thin belonging.

We are wired for belonging. It’s a vital source of meaning, a fundamental need. Despite the occasional hermit insisting otherwise, belonging isn’t optional. We need deep, rich, authentic relationships with a handful of people.

Authentic belonging has never been easy and, unfortunately, it’s more difficult now than ever before in human history. Technology provides substitutes that are convenient enough to help us ignore our hunger for something more.

• It’s tough to maintain connection with an old classmate. Easier to read an occasional update online.

• It’s tough to invite neighbors over. Easier to like their vacation photos.

• It’s tough to work through disagreements with a family member. Easier to find an echo chamber online.

• It’s tough to navigate emotional complexities of a romantic relationship. Easier to have a chatbot validate your everything.

None of these products requires us to show up as our unfiltered, imperfect self. And none of them requires another person to sit with our imperfections and accept us anyway. We still have the need for vulnerability, but it has become trivial to avoid. So we do.

Our tenuous online ties and our invented digital relationships are like putting $5 of fuel in your empty gas tank and calling it full. They simply can’t satisfy.

Technology didn’t create the need for belonging. And it’s arguable whether it’s solely to blame for our lack of it. But it is clear that the solutions can’t come from technology. Its imitations are incapable of meeting the actual need.

The teen chatting with a bot isn’t broken. He’s lonely. And he found something that feels like connection without any risk of rejection. Studies show that this is misguided. People report feeling validated, but unfulfilled. Even among those who consider their AI relationships to be genuine, a large portion report feeling even lonelier than before.

The neo-Luddite feels the same need for connection but chooses the opposite solution: more friction. They put down their phone, go to the park, and engage with strangers. They choose awkwardness on purpose. Because they suspect the reward is worth the discomfort.

I think they’re on to something.

The uncomfortable truth is that we need more friction in our relationships, not less. Every meaningful relationship asks something of us: time, inconvenience, vulnerability, presence, patience.

Technology can remove the friction from almost everything, even from light connection like helping us stay in touch with acquaintances.

But not from genuine authentic belonging.

Belonging lives inside the friction.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. This newsletter develops the ideas behind my next book: a unified framework for understanding where meaning comes from and what to do when it breaks.

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I recall the scent of fuel drifting through the windows of my grandpa’s Jeep Grand Wagoneer, whenever we rumbled toward the recycling center. Delivering stacks of cardboard, newspapers, and crushed tin cans was a monthly ritual.

My grandparents had survived the Great Depression and WW2 rationing. Those memories galvanized them. Waste not, want not. They recycled, composted, gardened. Cooking and laundry and heating the house all required effort. There was no option to automate or just decline a task. It all had to get done.

They were always in motion. Unhurried, but moving. Methodical. I don’t recall either of them pausing to relax for more than about thirty minutes straight.

I live a much different life. Technology promised to make everything easier, faster. And it delivered. I have machines to smooth away the friction and drudgery. Compared to a century ago, the average American spends about 70% less time cooking and cleaning. And there’s a long list of other new efficiencies.

Technology handed us an astonishing gift. Time is precious because it’s the one thing you can’t make more of. Washing machines, water heaters, dishwashers, refrigerators, frozen meals, lawnmowers, GPS, the internet, search engines, ad-free streaming. Each dropped a fistful of time into our pocket.

In total, we have several hours more of free time every day than my grandparents did. We have less grind, less labor, less obligation. And medical advances have added 25 more years to the average life. Multiplying those new hours and years means we have tens of thousands more free hours than previous generations.

A century ago, a writer imagining our world would describe it as utopia, predicting a golden age of human flourishing. We should be thriving.

Yet we’re not.

We have fewer close friendships than any prior generation. We spend 80% less time with friends than in the 1920s. We read less. Talk face-to-face less. Sleep less. Feel less purposeful, on average.

We have all the freedom and none of the fulfillment. This is the paradox of the modern meaning crisis.

How did we get here?

Perhaps we made a poor assumption. We inferred that technological progress would make us flourish. But it never promised that. It only promised to remove friction. And it kept its promise.

We have a tendency to vilify it, or them. The tech bros made their apps addictive. Corporations keep all the productivity gains as profit. The algorithm!

There’s some truth in these complaints. But we need to own our share of the blame.

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As a thought exercise, imagine if your employer suddenly shortened your workweek from 40 hours to 32. Everyone gets Fridays off, with no reduction in pay. How would you spend that extra day?

Some thoughts probably popped to mind. Those first few Fridays would be full and fun. You’d visit friends, fix the fence, hike a trail. But after a few months, the novelty would wear thin. You’d likely spend the new free time the same way you spend your old free time. The average person today occupies more than two hours a day on social media and even more streaming. Then there’s TV, video games, browsing the internet.

None of these categories even existed two generations ago.

Every washing machine cycle, online purchase, and instant notification confirms the disappointing truth: most of our new free time gets filled with empty calories.

I see the choices we make every day. The choices I make every day. And I can’t help but wonder if maybe the problem isn’t technology itself. Because all it handed us was the freedom to choose how to spend our time.

A dishwasher can give me 30 minutes, but it doesn’t direct me to call a lonely friend, volunteer in my community, or read a motivating book. Technology was never capable of creating meaning. That work has always been ours.

There’s a version of this essay that concludes with a call to throw out your smartphone, cancel Netflix, and buy a clothesline. But retreating from technology carries a cost too high for most of us to bear.

The better question is: how do we thrive alongside technology?

Technology removed yesterday’s obligations and replaced them with a new one: deciding what deserves our time.

Technology did its job.

Now we need to do ours.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. This newsletter develops the ideas behind my next book: a unified framework for understanding where meaning comes from and what to do when it breaks.

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In the immortal words of the villain Syndrome from the Pixar film Incredibles:

“When everyone’s super, no one will be.”

Pixar returned to this idea later in an exchange between hero-mom Elastigirl and hero-son Dash, when Dash complained that saying everyone is special is the same as saying no one is.

Incredibles was one of our favorite family movies when our children were young. It was wildly entertaining. And it also nudged against a corrosive cultural narrative in full bloom by its 2004 release date.

Those scenes popped to the front of my mind during a pre-season chat for soccer parents. The gym was cool and fluorescent, and the league facilitator walked us through the teams, schedules, sites, and rules.

Then a parent asked: “Will there be any end-of-season awards? MVP? All stars?”

The well-meaning response: “Coaches and parents can coordinate end-of-season parties, but there won’t be any awards. They will say something encouraging about every kid. This league isn’t about the wins, losses, or scores.”

It’s a long way of saying: everyone gets a trophy.

In the moment, I was vaguely unsettled. Not enough to stage a protest. But enough to ponder whether stripping our kids of competition and failure was robbing them of something important. I thought about Dash. If everyone’s special, then what?

When I grew up, coaches certainly didn’t coddle us. The best players were lauded. Most of us weren’t. I wouldn’t say it was fun, exactly. But it was honest. And it was delivered with a message that felt true: sport prepares us for the uncomfortable realities of adulthood.

The self-esteem movement gained serious momentum in 1986, when California decided to officially promote it. The premise was appealing: if we convince kids to believe in themselves, that they can become anything, that showing up deserves the same reward as success… they’ll be happy and fulfilled and thriving.

In the decades since, merit-based awards declined. Awards for everything else became commonplace. The participation trophy was given its day in the sun.

Carl Jung died long before this ill-fated experiment, but he might’ve predicted the tragic outcome. He warned against what he called “ego inflation” – the state of believing you’re special, above criticism, incapable of error. He said: “An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future.”

He cautioned that the inflated ego cannot grow because growth requires humility and the willingness to confront your limitations.

Jung’s thoughts remained largely theoretical in the 1980s. I suppose the scant research allowed schools and parents and coaches to happily ignore him.

But recent research supports Jung’s concerns.

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Kristin Neff spent 20 years studying psychological resilience and found that self-compassion predicts better mental health than self-esteem.

These may sound like similar ideas, but they’re very different.

Contingent self-esteem is fragile. It rises and falls based on outcomes, feedback, and how you think you measure up to others. One setback or criticism threatens to topple the conception you’ve built of your own specialness.

Self-compassion, however, is stable. It doesn’t depend on your output or outcomes. It depends only on your willingness to be honest and kind with yourself when things go sideways.

Brené Brown’s early work focused on the self-esteem paradigm. She describes a transformative moment in her 2010 book The Gifts of Imperfection: for many years, therapists had worked to convince her that the solution to her shame and fear was high self-esteem. She just needed to feel better about herself, to believe more in herself.

But the deeper she dug into the data, the more convinced she became that the therapists got it wrong. She came to see that the people who were resilient and thriving weren’t the ones with high self-esteem. The most resilient people were the ones willing to be vulnerable, admit failure, ask for help, and treat themselves with compassion amidst failure.

People whose identity depended on maintaining high self-esteem often proved brittle when life challenged it.

Brown had arrived at the same conclusion as Jung, from a very different direction.

We’ve spent forty years convincing people they’re special, that feeling good matters more than learning from failure, and that the world owes them a trophy for showing up.

The uncomfortable truth: when you lose a game or screw up at work… it should sting. The failure does not diminish your value as a human. But it should hurt. That pain is honest. It tells you there was something important at stake, and it presents you with a choice about how to respond. The path to resilience looks less like protecting your self-esteem and more like practicing humility: honesty about your failures, compassion toward yourself.

Elastigirl and Dash were special. So are Lionel Messi and Warren Buffett. Lady Gaga has astonishing musical gifts. Elon Musk is the closest thing we have to a real Iron Man.

Good for them. Their gifts should be admired and celebrated.

Most of us will never become world-class at anything. And that’s perfectly fine. Because meaning has never been reserved for the extraordinary few. It belongs to all the ordinary people who love their families, show up for their friends, serve their communities, strive, fail, apologize, grow, and try again.

The bad news is that you’re not special. The good news is that a life of meaning never required you to be.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. This newsletter develops the ideas behind my next book: a unified framework for understanding where meaning comes from and what to do when it breaks.

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It was an overcast morning in southern Utah. We arrived at Zion National Park well before the shuttles started running, to beat the heat to the top of Angels Landing.

After crossing the Virgin River, a wide set of switchbacks offered our first views of the canyon. Pine trees wedged their roots into impossible crevices. Birds soared overhead against puffy grey clouds. Every hydration stop offered a better view than the one before.

The final leg, past the park ranger checkpoint, was arduous and sometimes alarming. The safety chains are more than mere suggestion, often just a few feet from sheer 1,500-foot drops.

At the top we were rewarded with a 300-degree panorama of reds and browns and yellows and purples. It was the most difficult, most rewarding hike I’ve ever done.

It was breathtaking. Awe-inspiring.

More than that.

For a brief moment, I felt part of me wash away. The daily stresses, goals, plans, worries. Replaced by something wider. My self shifted from the center of my thoughts to the periphery. I became a small part of a big world. More aware that there’s a larger story than my own.

This was a singular moment. A lifelong memory. The one experience that stays with me from an entire week of remarkable vistas in Utah.

Transcendent moments like this can arrive through prayer, meditation, nature, music, or contemplative practice. They’re rare and brief. We spent only half an hour atop Angels Landing, and my conscious awareness of transcendence measured a fraction of that time.

Emily Esfahani Smith, in The Power of Meaning, identifies transcendence as one of four pillars of a meaningful life, distinct from purpose, belonging, and storytelling. She describes a transcendent experience as one in which we feel we have risen above the everyday world to connect with something vast.

The surprising thing is how lasting the effects of these brief moments can be. A single moment can permanently alter how we see ourselves and how we move through the world.

She reflects on how a stargazing night in West Texas or an astronaut’s first glimpse of Earth from orbit left people forever changed.

Neuroscience offers a partial explanation. Transcendent states are associated with reduced activity in the brain regions responsible for the constant narration of the self. When that narration dims, a feeling of connection to something larger becomes more prominent. The grip that ordinary concerns have on our attention loosens.

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These brief, captivating transcendent moments differ from the enduring trait of self-transcendent purpose that defines our vertical source of meaning.

Self-transcendent purpose is something we practice every day. We show up for the people who need us, orient our lives toward something beyond ourselves, build our lives toward something that will outlast us.

These actions produce integrity, continuity, direction.

Transcendent experiences do something different. They don’t give us a purpose; they remind us why our purpose matters.

Psychologist David Yaden describes transcendent experiences as existing on a spectrum, from subtle states of flow and gratitude to rarer, more intense moments of ego dissolution that mystics across centuries have struggled to describe.

What these states share, regardless of intensity, is the temporary expansion of our viewpoint beyond its usual boundaries. The ordinary self steps aside and something larger briefly enters.

That stepping aside allows us to fully experience the reality of our connections, our purposes, our smallness in relation to something vast.

The experience doesn’t give us meaning. It reveals the meaning that was already there, by clearing away the noise that hides it.

It can also expose our lack of meaning, motivating us to build more.

This is why people who’ve had transcendent experiences often report returning to their ordinary lives with renewed vigor.

It’s difficult to curate or even predict a transcendent moment. They tend to arrive on their own schedule: at the top of an improbable hike, in the middle of a piece of music, or during an intense prayer. When they arrive, recognize them. Treasure them. Reflect on what they expose about the meaning in your life.

And use them as motivation to invest anew in the things that matter most.

What’s the most transcendent experience you can remember? Did it alter anything in how you lived afterward?

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. This newsletter develops the ideas behind my next book: a unified framework for understanding where meaning comes from and what to do when it breaks.

Notes

Newberg, A., & Waldman, M. R. (2008). How God changes your brain: Breakthrough findings from a leading neuroscientist. Ballantine Books.

Smith, E. E. (2017). The power of meaning: Finding fulfillment in a world obsessed with happiness. Crown.

Yaden, D. B., Haidt, J., Hood, R. W., Jr., Vago, D. R., & Newberg, A. B. (2017). The varieties of self-transcendent experience. Review of General Psychology, 21(2), 143–160. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000102

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7… 7… 7… Winner!

It was my first time in Las Vegas. My first time hearing the thrum of quarters cascade into metal troughs. Cigarette smoke hung in the air of a windowless casino. I was thirteen years old, wide-eyed.

Rows of slot machines, filled with bleary-eyed gamblers inserting quarters and cranking levers. Over and over. Certain that their next big win was right around the corner.

Horrifying. Intoxicating.

When I was thirteen, gambling was forbidden fruit. Of course I wanted my shot at the one-armed bandits. But by the time my age finally crossed the legal threshold set by the Nevada gaming commission, I had a much clearer picture of the math. I saw not just what fell into the trough, but how gambling pried something from a bettor’s soul. There was no joy, and only fleeting happiness. Sometimes winning money, never finding fulfillment.

But I have no room to judge.

Because I’m a gambler.

Every. Single. Day.

And I’m betting you’re just like me.

One of my favorite games of chance is Facebook Marketplace. It seems so benign. Random second-hand stuff listed for sale. It has no business being interesting. Except that, it turns out, is the entire business model.

It pulls me in. There’s always a next trinket awaiting my next swipe. A popcorn maker in the shape of Darth Vader’s helmet. Scooby and Shaggy salt-and-pepper shakers. A rusty shovel with a broken handle. I don’t need any of them. I rarely buy. But I’m still compelled to see what’s next.

It’s endless. Literally. That’s the entire point.

The algorithm of every app is designed to show something just interesting enough to make you swipe one more time. Again and again. Forever.

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Your phone is a slot machine in your pocket. That phrase was popularized by Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist. He gave a TED Talk about the moment he realized he was helping build something deliberately engineered to colonize your attention.

He was among the first to highlight that apps are built using variable reward schedules, the same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines grip people by the collar. Every swipe might produce something wonderful. Or nothing. That uncertainty makes apps irresistible.

He said: “Every time I check my phone, I’m playing the slot machine to see what I’m going to get. I know exactly what’s going on. But it doesn’t leave me with any choice.”

That was a decade ago, before TikTok, Reels, or YouTube Shorts even existed. The cynical psychology of tech companies has grown even more precise since.

The variable reward mechanism is only part of why we’re so drawn to our phones. We’re also leery of being alone with our thoughts.

Researcher Timothy Wilson asked participants to sit alone for 15 minutes. They had the option to have no stimulus or… give themselves electrical shocks. A surprising number chose the zaps.

Now, in fairness, only 67% of men and 25% of women zorked themselves. So there’s still around half of us who could tolerate 15 minutes alone with our thoughts just fine, thank you very much.

Which camp would you fall into?

It matters because we need the uncomfortable, wandering, occasionally tedious kind of thinking that happens away from a screen. That’s when our brains process. Consolidate memory. Stitch together unexpected connections. Work through problems they can’t solve head-on.

We need our minds to wander for them to stumble across anything new.

That unhurried, undirected interior space is exactly where the seeds of a meaningful life can germinate. Where we can do the deep work of figuring out what we believe, who we want to become, and whether we’re investing enough of ourselves in the people who matter most to us.

If the slot machine in your pocket merely stole your time, that would be bad enough. Lost productivity is a real cost. But the deeper, more fundamental danger is that it systematically eliminates the reflective moments in which our minds wander, our convictions deepen, and a meaningful life is built.

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If you’d like to support my writing without a paid subscription: Buy me a coffee

About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. This newsletter develops the ideas behind my next book: a unified framework for understanding where meaning comes from and what to do when it breaks.

Notes

Harris, T. (2017, April). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day [TED Talk]. TED Conferences.

Wilson, T. D., Reinhard, D. A., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert, D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., Brown, C. L., & Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345(6192), 75–77. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1250830

I was 17 years old. Invincible. And then I nearly died.

I was in the passenger seat of my friend’s Pontiac Fiero on a section of backroad highway with sharp curves, plunging hundred-foot cliffs, and no guardrails. My friend was annoyed by a car riding his bumper, so he goosed the throttle and sent us hurtling into a corner.

By the time the car spun to a stop, we had crossed oncoming traffic onto the opposite shoulder, two tires inches from the edge. Heart pounding, all I could see from my window was down. Down. Down.

My friend had made one mistake that nearly killed us both. I didn’t have to make that mistake to learn the lesson. I developed, rapidly and permanently, a clear view of my own fragility. And a lot more respect for the physics of mountain roads.

That kind of lesson arrives like a crack of thunder. A screech of tires, the smell of hot rubber, two inches of gravel separating you from a long way down.

Other lessons are more subtle. Inaudible, with a fainter scent. They’re much easier to miss, but no less important.

Bronnie Ware spent years caring for people in the final weeks of their lives, listening to what they said as death drew near. What struck her most, and inspired her to write a book, was the consistent pattern of regrets which surfaced from her patients.

Separately, researchers surveyed hospice and palliative nurses. They too found that regret is among the most common themes of those nearing their end.

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We have a remarkable opportunity to learn from their mistakes. To avoid having the same regrets as countless others.

One common regret is this:
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

In their final days, many people find themselves mourning the things they’d never said to their loved ones. The feelings withheld. The honesty avoided. Decades of “I’m fine” when they weren’t fine at all.

Does this seem too small to fret about? It did to all of them, too. Until it was too late. Being on death’s doorstep brings sharp clarity. And in that clarity, a large portion of dying folks wish they’d navigated this differently. They regretted making a habit of hiding their true feelings.

But who are they hiding their feelings from? It often originates deep within, with what we fail to acknowledge even to ourselves. Because before we can honestly express our feelings to others, we have to actually know what they are.

Developing that internal honesty takes work. It requires what I call inner curiosity: the habit of asking yourself why you reacted the way you did, what you actually believe, whether the feelings you carry are worth examining.

This internal work is foundational to our inner source of meaning: self-compassion & growth. When we honestly understand ourselves and treat ourselves with compassion rather than judgment, something loosens. We become less defended, less armored. Which makes us capable of something the dying often wish they’d practiced more: genuine vulnerability. The willingness to be truly known by the people who matter most.

Vulnerability is the price of admission for authentic belonging. Not the polished, curated version of yourself. The real, uncertain, unfinished you. Meaning springs from the bond between two people who’ve allowed themselves to be known by each other. That, ultimately, is what prevents this deathbed regret from forming.

And it doesn’t stop there. When we know ourselves and allow ourselves to be known, we become capable of something deeper still: positively affecting and shaping the people closest to us. That’s the kind of mattering that often feels most significant, both during our lives and when the end is near.

At 17, two inches of cliffside gravel taught me something about my own fragility. I’d like to learn the subtler lessons too, before I run out of time to act on them.

What feeling have you been holding back from yourself, or from your loved ones?

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. This newsletter develops the ideas behind my next book: a unified framework for understanding where meaning comes from and what to do when it breaks.

Notes

Cabrera, P. R., & Chestnut, S. R. (2020). The most common end-of-life reflections: A survey of hospice and palliative nurses. Death Studies, 44(4), 213–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2018.1539053

Ware, B. (2012). The top five regrets of the dying: A life transformed by the dearly departing. Hay House.

“How much is enough? What’s your number?”

The reply: “$10 million.”

I paused mid-chew, my mouth hanging open a beat. Not just because of the sizable number, but because it was delivered with such confidence. He’d thought it through. He had a spreadsheet that oozed with planning and intentionality. He described rows for health care, travel, vehicles, home. That’s unusual, in my experience, and refreshing.

And yet, as he listed his rows, it didn’t sit right with me. Like being three sips into a mug of hot chocolate before noticing the milk was slightly spoiled.

It was just a subtle feeling at the time. It took years of asking this same question of others, and also studying the sources of meaning, to understand what was missing. His numbers were solid; the foundation beneath them wasn’t.

What’s your number?

Most people, when I ask, don’t have a number at all. “I don’t know” is the most common response. Others simply say “more,” which is the socially acceptable form of “never enough.”

It’s an important question to ponder. Everyone should have a number.

But, that being said… it’s the wrong place to start.

The personal finance industry is built on helping people navigate their way to enough. But advisers tend to stop short of challenging people to understand the more important question: enough for what?

A thoughtful advisor will ask for your list of anticipated expenses, and they’ll offer insight about how much folks tend to spend on things like medical care, travel, and assisted living.

Useful information. Necessary. But we need more than that. Because none of it tells you whether your next chapter will feel like fireworks or fizzle.

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Ask yourself: Do you want a fulfilling retirement? Everyone says yes. Of course! Almost reflexively. But here’s the trickier follow-up:

What’s your plan for building meaning into that season?

Money is a tool. It can’t manufacture meaning. But it can fund the conditions where meaning has room to grow. That’s rarely our first instinct. More often, money gets spent chasing the bright sugar-high of new cars and big trips, where happiness arrives brash and loud but quickly slinks away.

Psychologist Cassie Mogilner found something useful: people who frame their planning around time, rather than money, make choices that more reliably produce fulfillment. In one study, simply prompting people to think about time before making a spending decision caused them to prioritize relationships over possessions.

Her work urges us to pivot from how much money will I spend to how do I want to spend my hours?

So instead of budgeting dollars per month, start by budgeting hours per week. Some of that time might go toward the trip you’ve been putting off. That’s fine. But the bulk of your hours deserve a higher bar: investment in purpose, in honest self-growth, in the handful of your favorite people. And in contributing to something beyond yourself. Plan for each of these in the same non-negotiable, recurring way that you plan to pay your taxes every year.

Build these into your time budget first. Then work backward to fund them.

It’s highly individual. For example, my wife and I have chosen to keep a too-big-for-just-us house because we want to prioritize belonging by entertaining and hosting visitors. We spend more on food than most people, for the same reason. If our boys scatter to cities a plane-flight away, we’ll add a recurring line-item for airline tickets.

These are the unglamorous, irreplaceable costs of staying known by people who matter to us.

I think about that dinner discussion often. The breadsticks, the confidence, the ten million dollars sitting there like a fortress with no rooms built inside it.

If I had it to do again, I would’ve asked one more question.

Ten million for what, exactly?

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. This newsletter develops the ideas behind my next book: a unified framework for understanding where meaning comes from and what to do when it breaks.

Notes

Mogilner, C. (2010). The pursuit of happiness: Time, money, and social connection. Psychological Science, 21(9), 1348–1354. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610380696

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Where did your search for meaning begin?

Mine began aboard a tour bus outside of Beijing. I watched high-rises give way to outlying settlements, then to bristly windswept hills. In the distance, atop those hills, a silhouette came into focus.

The Great Wall.

The scale of it only became clear as I began ascending the ancient stones. When my legs finally asked for a rest, I paused to take in the view. Spectacular. A stranger snapped a photo of my bucket-list moment.

Looking at that photo, I expected awe. Accomplishment. Something.

Instead, I felt empty.

Why?

That question became a years-long obsession. I wanted to understand why some moments fill us and others leave us hollow. Because I wanted my bucket-list to brim with meaningful experiences.

As well as my average Tuesday.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

There are exactly three sources of meaning. Not two, not seven. Three. Picture them as overlapping circles, with a well at the center that only fills when all three contribute. Each source can pour into that well. But none can fill it alone.

The Vertical Source: Transcendent Purpose

This isn’t what motivates you out of bed on a weekday. It’s not even the energizing flow state that dissolves time. This is what your life points toward that’s independent of your income, age, or title. It’s both a compass needle and a following-wind for your life that moves you forward. Enduring, often eternal. And it doesn’t retire when you do.

Viktor Frankl, during his time in Nazi captivity, observed that those with a ‘why’ that extended beyond their own survival could endure their torment far better than those without. Modern research has underscored his observation by showing that people with strong transcendent purpose live longer, recover from illness faster, and hold together better under loss.

The vertical question: What are you for, beyond yourself?

The Inner Source: Self-Compassion & Growth

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Self-anything? This one can feel uncomfortable. Some have been taught that self-compassion is dangerously close to pride. Others have absorbed the message that self-focus is indulgent. Neither instinct understands this source.

A healthy relationship with yourself isn’t self-obsession. It’s the capacity to have an honest understanding of who you are and still maintain kindness toward yourself. Not excusing your failures. Just refusing to condemn yourself.

Psychologist Kristin Neff found that the people hardest on themselves after failure are actually less likely to grow from it. Your inner critic doesn’t sharpen you; it flinches you into defensiveness. Growth requires an inner coach: honest about what went wrong, stubbornly invested in what comes next.

The inner question: How do you treat yourself when you fall short?

The Horizontal Source: Authentic Belonging

Not a busy social calendar or a bustling LinkedIn network. This is the rarer and far more valuable experience of knowing and being fully known by a few favorite people.

Smoking kills. So does loneliness. Research has shown that a lack of belonging has the same mortality risk as half-a-pack-a-day. Sadly, most adults struggle to name even two people who genuinely know them. And the trend is moving in the wrong direction.

Proximity isn’t enough. Belonging isn’t formed by being neighbors, churchgoers, or officemates. It only forms through honest, vulnerable exchange. It’s a relationship void of social platitudes and mouth-only smiles. Where two people feel comfortable carrying each other’s discomfort.

The horizontal question: who knows the real version of you?

Where Circles Overlap: Expressions of Meaning

Coherent Identity lives at the intersection of purpose and growth. This is a stable self that knows what it’s for. You act based on who you know yourself to be, rather than performing for external approval.

The question: When you strip away the roles and accomplishments, do you know what you’re for?

Communal Contribution emerges where growth and belonging meet. This is the developed person who genuinely affects the people closest to them, not through role or obligation but through who they’ve become.

The question: Who in your life is genuinely affected by who you actually are, not by your role?

Prosocial Service is healthiest when purpose and belonging work together. Care that extends beyond your intimate few, motivated by something larger than yourself, toward people who may never know your name.

The question: What are you giving to people beyond your closest few that would still matter even if nobody thanked you for it?

The Autonomy Halo

A source or expression can appear strong from outside yet feel hollow inside. The difference is almost always ownership. Meaning isn’t generated by a purpose you inherited, relationships maintained out of obligation, or growth driven by someone else’s standard.

Autonomy’s question, asked of every domain: does this feel like mine?

The Great Wall was everything I imagined, but nothing I needed.

Purpose. Growth. Belonging.

They’re not in the wall, the promotion, the award, or the shiny new car.

They travel with you.

Or they do not travel at all.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. This newsletter develops the ideas behind my next book: a unified framework for understanding where meaning comes from and what to do when it breaks.

“So, remind me what you do for a living?”

Outside, I offered a mouth-only smile and a socially acceptable answer. Inside, I grimaced.

I’ve always hated that question. Even when my inbox is bustling and my answer fills people with interest, I just don’t want to be reduced to my occupation.

In America, sadly, it’s the second thing everyone wants to know. Name and job title. You’re sized up and filed away. Because we’ve somehow agreed that what we do is the same thing as who we are.

Most of us know this is wrong. But most of us believe it anyway.

This is hazardous. Because your career has a clock on it. It’s spooling down right now, whether you can hear it or not. Tick. Tick. Tick. Whether that feels exciting or terrifying, it’s happening. Every career ends.

On that final day, the answer changes.

“I’m retired.”

Consider that term, and all it encompasses. You’ve run your race. You’re done. There’s certainly a positive dimension, involving well-deserved rest. But there’s also a dark undertone. A whisper that says the world is done with you.

We don’t think of it like this when we’re in the trenches, but work is an identity machine. It churns out status, structure, social relevance, measurable progress, and the daily confirmation that someone somewhere needs us. Over decades, work gets enmeshed with our selfhood so tightly that we don’t notice how much of our identity it’s carrying until the machine is switched off.

Research shows that retirement adjustment is significantly harder for those who’ve firmly intertwined their professional identity with their sense of worth. This is true for most of us, but especially executives, physicians, founders, and others whose work became central to how they understood themselves. And for men, who are more likely to have built their self-concept around providing and producing.

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I admit, my focus narrowed. Hugs could wait.

Burger firmly in hand, we turned our attention to the display of pictures and highlights carefully curated by the beaming parents hovering nearby. We listened to stories amidst the wistful mix of pride and sadness they wore. It felt familiar. We had celebrated many graduates this season, including one of our own. Each party carried the same combination of excitement for the future and fondness for a past that will now only live in pictures and memories.

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We tend to think of commencement ceremonies as endings. Capstone events. Recognition of dedication (and of antics). But have you ever considered that word? Commencement literally means the time when something starts.

The speeches and balloons aren’t there to conclude a four-year journey. They signal that something new is coming.

We implicitly honor that with a question asked over every burger in every backyard this time of year:

“Have you decided what you’ll be doing next?”

It’s a fine question. It bears asking. But I’d like us to consider a different one:

“Have you decided who you’ll do life with next?”

Because meaning doesn’t live in an occupation or a title. It lives in the people we choose to do life alongside. Research indicates that we’re built for genuine belonging, and that the quality of our close relationships matters more than almost anything else we will choose.

It’s hard to see it when you’re inside high school or college, but schools are social engines. Proximity, shared schedules, common challenges, unplanned interactions. These are building blocks of friendship, handed to us on a platter engraved with our school mascot. Most of the hardest work of friendship formation is done for us.

That engine sputters to a halt when the caps are tossed in the air.

Most graduates hope their friendships are strong enough to survive the transition. Some are. When transitions like this happen, though, research tells us that around half of our close social ties will drift away simply because the structure supporting the network dissolves. This is normal. It’s not a failure. But since it’s probably coming, it’s worth thinking about before it arrives.

The summer after my own graduation felt magical. Independence without responsibility. Late nights and laughter, movies and music, the freedom of that time between finishing up one thing and starting the next. That summer seemed like it would last forever.

Until it didn’t.

We scattered.

We all went to our next things. Work and college and trades and cities. The group that had gathered so easily that summer never gathered again.

I couldn’t have known, that summer, the names of the people I would come to love in my next season of life. But I wish I’d been more intentional about two things: deciding what kind of person I wanted to become, and deciding what kind of people I wanted to grow alongside.

Making new great friends requires action that school made unnecessary. Research says that proactive initiation is the single strongest predictor of friendship success after a major transition. Reaching out, planning, having that uncomfortable conversation about wanting to be closer friends.

One of the most common mistakes graduates make is to wait for connection to form the same way it always did in school. The previous infrastructure is gone. It must be replaced with intentionality.

So here’s what I’d tell the graduates standing in all the backyards: this summer will be one of your best. Enjoy every late night of it.

And then, before fall arrives, spend some time with this question:

Who do you want to do life with next?

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. This newsletter develops the ideas behind my next book: a unified framework for understanding where meaning comes from and what to do when it breaks.

Notes

Mollenhorst, G., Volker, B., & Flap, H. (2014). Changes in personal relationships: How social contexts affect the emergence and discontinuation of relationships. Social Networks, 37, 65-80.

Franco, M. G. (2022). Platonic: How the science of attachment can help you make and keep friends. Putnam.

(Because, gosh-durnit, swimming pools aren’t for horseplay!)

My boys were three, five, and seven years old. They were doing age-appropriate splashy things in an otherwise empty Palm Springs pool. Some of the locals were not amused. They eyed us warily, like invaders of their sanctuary.

These particular folks weren’t full-time desert dwellers; they were nomadic. Snowbirds, to be precise. They wore the label like a gleaming badge of pride, packing up every fall to escape the northern cold for the dry sunshine of Southern California. Then pulling up stakes to RV back north by late spring.

To be fair, they weren’t all Grumpy Gusses. Most were lovely. I still remember one kind, elderly woman. She adored children and seemed sad to be away from her own grandkids. I asked her how she builds and maintains relationships while snowbirding. Her eyes lost a bit of sparkle, and the corners of her mouth ticked down.

“It’s hard.”

It was an honest, human moment. Her retired life was good, but not quite as good as she’d like. Something was missing.

I’ve had this same discussion several times in the fifteen years since. The pause, the softening of a smile. The wistful confession: It’s hard.

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Listen, I get the snowbirding appeal. Weather affects us. It affects me. On bright Oregon days, I stand at my window and linger, soaking in a rush of happiness and energy and motivation. On grey days, I shrink from the same window, overcome by lethargy and melancholy.

Life in the Pacific Northwest is a tale of two seasons. Summers here are glorious. We revel and frolic in warm glowing comfort from 5am until 10pm. But the winters? The winters test our mettle. Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) snuggles right in and sets up camp from November through March. We drive to work in the dark and return home in the dark. The sky spits and dribbles on us, sometime for weeks on end. During those dark months… motivation, schmotivation.

This is when snowbirders are especially active on social media, mocking those of us left behind. Tanning in December, golfing in January. Mocking, teasing, taunting! At least it feels that way.

Because I’m sad and wet.

So, I deeply understand the urge to flee to Arizona or California half the year. I’ve considered it.

But I never will.

Because I know what it feels like to be distanced from my relationships. Our Palm Springs swimming pool encounter happened in the middle of a year-long RV adventure to explore America. It was amazing. Except… we dearly missed our people.

Research shows it takes around 200 hours to develop a single close friendship, plus consistent investment afterward to maintain it. In the best of circumstances, it’s hard. Building and balancing two sets of deep relationships 1000 miles apart is nearly impossible.

Snowbird and sunbird relationships are like an accordion. Squeezed tighter, pulled apart, repeated every year.

You return to old friends feeling a bit more distant than before. Hey, remember me? How we used to grab coffee or hike together six months ago? Wanna do that again?

A study tracking retired Canadians who wintered in Florida found that many stopped snowbirding because their social ties had weakened in both places.

Acquaintances in two regions, close friends in neither.

That heaping helping of sunshine, glorious though it may be, seems like a poor trade for the toll it takes on our connections.

To be clear, travel is terrific. Even frequent travel, for a couple weeks at a time. But being away from your closest relationships for several months has a cost. If you’re committed to the idea, I have a suggestion: bring your people.

Our RV travel year was amazing. And I’d do it again if we could bring our favorite people with us… a wagon train of Authentic Belonging storming down the interstates. Otherwise, no.

So, who are your people? Which few relationships matter most? And, crucially, where is the best place for you to be, to invest in them well?

Personally, the warmth of my people easily overcomes the moist melancholy of an Oregon winter.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. If this resonated, the best thing you can do is subscribe. Weekly essays on everything related to meaning, like: friendship, purpose, money, retirement, parenting, service.

Notes

Hall, J. A. (2018). How many hours does it take to make a friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(4), 1278–1296.

Tucker, R. D., Mullins, L. C., Beland, F., Longino, C. F., & Marshall, V. W. (1992). Older Canadians in Florida: A comparison of those who return versus those who remain. Canadian Journal on Aging, 11(1), 34–44.

My wife has a way with words.

We sat on our fraying living room couch on an overcast autumn day, having our hundredth discussion about retirement. She’d been slowly warming, over the years, to the idea that I might retire young(ish). When I say slowly, I don’t mean wood-fired-oven slow. Or even crock-pot-set-on-low slow. More like boil-a-pot-of-water-with-a-single-candle slow.

But there had been movement.

At least she’d stopped squinting her eyes at me as if trying to decide if we’re the same species. Now she was inviting a conversation about what retirement might look like. And, crucially, what it might feel like. For both of us.

In that moment I realized something that should’ve been obvious: I’d been thinking about retirement my entire adult life, yet I had no plan for the day after we celebrate with a coconut cream “Congrats” cake. (Yes, that is a thing. And, no, you can’t have any.)

I’d stacked plan upon plan for our finances but given almost no thought to what the money was actually supposed to buy. I was in good company, it turns out. Fewer than a third of people engage in any retirement planning beyond the numbers. (And, no, ‘travel more’ isn’t enough.) Like so many, I’d treated retirement as an end unto itself.

I’d hoped a meaningful existence would spontaneously materialize the moment I no longer had to clock in.

Time and my wife have joined forces to temper that expectation.

Her next sentence: “You don’t have to earn money, but you do need to contribute to the world somehow.”

She had a point. She wanted me to retire well, to feel motivated and engaged and useful. I wanted that too.

So, we made an agreement. It wasn’t enough to walk away from the thing I didn’t enjoy. I needed to find something important to move toward. And I needed to find it before I waved goodbye to the corporate world so I had some meaning-filled momentum on cake-day-plus-one.

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I made a list of my productive interests. The activities that came immediately to mind were reading and working on project cars.

I reflected, imagining a future where I spent 40 hours every week in my garage and my recliner. I shuddered. It seemed uncomfortably close to my wife’s fear of a shriveled husband merging into a fraying couch.

This wouldn’t do. Not at all.

I thought about what I'd be losing the day my retirement cake gets served. In addition to income, work provides structure, status, and people. All of those things get collected with your badge as you walk out the door. Research on retirement shows that social networks shrink significantly in the first two years after leaving work, particularly for men. I’d seen this happen to others, and didn’t want it for myself.

I needed something different on my list that would feed my need for purpose and belonging, not just my need to stay busy.

So I examined the moments when I’d felt most alive. When joy and delight were most pronounced.

Teaching bubbled to the top.

I enjoy sharing my hard-won life-experience with my kids and all the random friends of theirs who filter through our living room. Watching eyes brighten at new realizations, helping nudge a life in a healthy direction. Those are the best feelings in my world.

A second passion is personal finance. I considered teaching or coaching in this realm. I took a life coach certification course and helped teach a personal finance class at our church. But I came to believe that the need for finance guidance was being met well enough by others.

My search continued.

I volunteered at a food bank, did manual labor at our church, announced football games at our local high school. All meaningful, but not enough to really sink my retirement teeth into.

What other expertise did I have? What problems had I actually solved in my own life?

Friendship. Connection. Meaning.

And I could see that my particular insights weren’t obvious to most people, which meant there was something worth saying. A book worth writing.

When I told my wife I’d decided to write Why We Ask, her reaction was, shall we say, inscrutable. Her words sounded encouraging, but her non-verbals conveyed something more like, “Really? Ohhhkayyy.”

I chose to ignore the non-verbals.

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As I drafted that book, I added one more idea to my list: public speaking. I’m passionate about teaching, and I’d written a book about meaning, purpose, and connection. Why not teach those topics in-person?

And that’s what put me on a stage, speaking about friendship to a room full of strangers, exactly thirteen months after my wife challenged me to find something important to move toward. It felt surreal, watching people scribble notes as I spoke. Watching them nod in agreement. I believed in what I had to say, but I didn’t quite believe I was a worthy vessel to say it.

What in the world was an engineering manager doing in front of all these people?

But I wasn’t just an engineering manager anymore. They had my book in their hands, so I was an author. They were listening to my insights, so I was a speaker.

I was adding new aspects of identity. The full internal shift wasn’t microwave-quick, but at least it went faster than a candle boiling water.

Through all of this, one thing that surprised me was how thoroughly energizing it felt. I was still working full-time. And writing. Speaking at events. Investing in my kids. Nurturing my friendships. Connecting intentionally with my wife. Volunteering.

I was busier than I’d ever been.

And loving every single minute.

Researchers have a name for this process: ‘the preparation window.’ People who explore post-retirement identity while still employed report much higher wellbeing in retirement than those who wait.

I didn’t know that at the time.

Now I’m a data point.

Whether your retirement is here, looming near, or far beyond the horizon, here’s the essential question most people never ask themselves:

Who do you want to be on the day after the cake?

Because even if you ‘travel more,’ there will still be a lot of Tuesdays to live.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. If this resonated, the best thing you can do is subscribe. Weekly essays on everything related to meaning, like: friendship, purpose, money, retirement, parenting, service.

Notes

Kalmijn, M. (2012). Longitudinal analyses of the effects of age, marriage, and parenthood on social contacts and support. Advances in Life Course Research, 17(4), 177–190.

Hershey, D. A., & Mowen, J. C. (2000). Psychological determinants of financial preparedness for retirement. The Gerontologist, 40(6), 687–697.

Wang, M. (2007). Profiling retirees in the retirement transition and adjustment process: Examining the longitudinal change patterns of retirees’ psychological well-being. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(2), 455–474.

It was my third coffee with my tennis buddy, Jon. We sat outside a little shop in a small Oregon town on a cool Saturday morning. Steam gently drifted atop our paper-cupped cappuccinos.

We’d played tennis for years, sat near each other at work, shared meals. But our gatherings hadn’t been oriented toward close friendship, they’d been metered by obligation or shaped around activity. I was hoping to change that.

I’d been thinking about this moment all week. I knew what I needed to say. It shouldn’t have been that difficult.

But it was.

We openly discussed family and politics and religion and work. Conversation flowed easily until our coffee ran dry, and it was time to part… but I hadn’t said the thing yet. I put up a finger to stop him from standing to leave, gathered myself, and finally said:

“Jon, here’s the thing. I really enjoy our time together. And I’d like us to be better friends. What do you think about gathering for coffee every week, with or without tennis?”

His eyebrows arched. I could tell this was an unexpected turn. Adults don’t talk like this. He paused a beat. Then he smiled.

“Yeah, I’d love that.”

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That was eight years ago. And you can still find us in that same little town every Saturday, rain or shine, chatting over cappuccinos. We prioritize our time every week, precisely because of that one awkward moment long before.

Back then, I had no idea what the research said about friendship. I knew that I liked Jon. That we shared important values. And that he was curious and humble, two of my favorite traits. In short, he was friendship material.

And I knew that if I didn’t change how we thought of our relationship, we’d keep treating it as an afterthought. That’s why I had the awkward conversation to define our friendship and why I suggested a regular coffee rhythm.

Friendship research calls these things intentionality. With Jon, I had stumbled onto the exact recipe for making a light friendship tighter.

How would this look in your friendship world?

Your first and most important step is to understand what friendship material feels like for you. Don’t just settle for the person nearby, the one who seems easiest. It takes around 200 hours to form a close friendship. You’re choosing a person to invest a huge amount of your life into. Describe them. Define a list of traits, values, and beliefs that you’d like them to have.

Imagine a few ideal days with a friend. What feels important about those days?

Think of a few names. Reach out, and schedule time together. Whenever you gather, put a next meeting in your calendars. Shoot for regular intervals, every week or two is ideal. Don’t just hope it’ll naturally happen when you’re both magically free. Prioritize it.

After a handful of cappuccinos, you’ll know if a relationship is worth the effort to deepen. This is the moment you take a deep breath, tell your anxiety to just chill for a minute, and name your desire to be close. Something like what I said to Jon.

It’s vulnerable. Risky.

And also…

It. Just. Plain. Works.

Is it worth the risk, to you? How much of your time, energy, and authentic self are you willing to share, to develop a close friendship?

Not sure? Consider how your current slate of friends feels to you. For some of us, the feeling is deep fulfillment. For many of us, though, the feeling is sadness. Emptiness. Loneliness.

How important is it to change that feeling? Because there is a way forward, to a better place. Are you willing to put in the work?

If so, I’ve got a practical suggestion.

One of the easiest and most reliable methods for building depth is to read a nonfiction book together. Pick a good one that raises important questions you wouldn’t otherwise think about. Sit together at a coffee shop, every week to discuss. Paper pages and warm mugs set a comforting tone to spur open conversation.

The format is the key: two people, meeting regularly, being honest and vulnerable.

So, think of one person you’d like to know better. Not a hypothetical. Someone who exists in your life right now. Someone who might possibly be friendship material.

Text them.

Sometimes an awkward moment is all that stands between friendliness and friendship.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. If this resonated, the best thing you can do is subscribe. Weekly essays on everything related to meaning, like: friendship, purpose, money, retirement, parenting, service.

Notes

Way, N. (2011). Deep secrets: Boys’ friendships and the crisis of connection. Harvard University Press.

That’s a big number. Daunting, perhaps. But it’s also empowering. Friendship requires a boatload of focused time, but at least it isn’t mysterious. We have a goal and a way to measure.

From there, it’s really just basic math.

To help you math it out in your own life, here’s an example from mine. With one of my closest friends, I play tennis every Saturday and we spend time at a coffee shop afterward. On average, we spend about 3.5 hours together every week. We may skip a week here or there, but we more than make up for it with an occasional trip together. All told, we’re pretty close to 200 hours per year.

Cut that pace by half and you might establish a close friendship in two years.

Or plan a handful of intense weekend trips to see the relationship deepen within several months.

Friendship is cumulative.

But not all time spent together counts the same. Close friendships are disproportionately built and grown one-on-one. Just you and one other person. Focused, intentional.

A monthly group dinner will just solidify casual friendship status indefinitely. Because, in a group, attention is diluted, conversation distributed. And people tend to filter themselves more carefully.

Groups are useful for creating memories and for maintaining connection. But, when you have the choice, one-on-one is almost always the better time investment for building depth, because:

Close friendship is mostly built in pairs.

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Bonding postures

One-on-one time together creates opportunity. But not all one-on-one time is built the same. Research points to two distinct modes of bonding.

Side-by-side: shared activity. Building, hiking, working, cooking, watching a game. The activity minimizes social pressure, and conversation fills the spaces between action.

Face-to-face: direct conversation, eye contact, intentional exchange. This facilitates vulnerability and mutual knowing, where relationships deepen.

Both modes have their place, but they don’t contribute equally to friendship depth.

Side-by-side activity is how we work together to accomplish goals like building skyscrapers and killing mammoths. These things require teamwork, but not close bonds. They’re useful for creating shared memories, but… I need to really cement a point here:

Killing a mammoth won’t help you feel less lonely.

That requires the vulnerability, trust, and authenticity that’s more at home in face-to-face exchange. Where we ask each other great questions and answer honestly. Knowing and being known. Connection.

For many, this may feel awkward at first. But choose it anyway, over and over, because there’s simply no alternative.

So, after you’ve dragged your mammoth back to camp, take time to sit around the campfire and be authentic with each other. Because close friendship requires a significant amount of direct, personal, vulnerable exchange.

Conversation architecture

How you orient yourself within your conversations determines whether the friendship deepens or plateaus.

Here are three practices embraced by people who build close friendships.

First, they ask open-ended questions. They invite story, rather than brief responses. Story is an essential building-block of connection. It took me years to understand this.

Second, they approach conversations, and relationships in general, with humility and curiosity. This keeps them open to hearing and valuing their friends’ unique perspectives.

Third, they seek depth. They don’t spend much of their social time at the two shallowest levels of conversation, Small Talk and Medium Talk.

Very close friends might sometimes stir the waters of Deep Talk, but I find that the sweet-spot for friendship is Medium-plus Talk. Medium-plus questions lean into values, emotions, personal history. This is where vulnerability and knowing begin. Where we start to feel like we matter to each other.

“What’s something you believed as a kid that you’ve since changed your mind about?” creates a completely different conversation than “What did you have for lunch today?”

Use your time together wisely. A focused hour of meaningful conversation can build more connection than many hours of surface-level interaction.

200 hours is a long time.

But the first one starts the clock.

And friendship is worth every minute.

Next in this three-part friendship series: Awkward start of a new friendship.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. If this resonated, the best thing you can do is subscribe. Weekly essays on everything related to meaning, like: friendship, purpose, money, retirement, parenting, service.

Notes

Hall, J. A. (2018). How many hours does it take to make a friend? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 36(4), 1278–1296. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407518761225

Hall, J. A., & Merolla, A. J. (2020). Connecting everyday talk and time alone to global well-being. Human Communication Research, 46(4), 294–319. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqz014

• To my right: you feel like you have too many friends.

• Middle: you feel content with your friendships as they are.

• To my left: you’d like more friendships, or deeper ones.

About 75% of the room moved to my left, signaling they want more.

These weren’t people in crisis. The biggest draw for most of them, to be honest, was probably the BBQ dinner.

(To be fair, the BBQ was delightful.)

My point is that this was an ordinary group. A range of ages and occupations. Some accomplished, some just getting started. Calendars full of work and family activities.

And three-quarters of this normal crowd moved to the corner that said: not satisfied.

As they stood, nervously wondering what I might ask them to do next, I shared my story.

When I was newly married, I naively thought we had ‘too many’ friends. His and hers friends from high school, college, church, and our new jobs. Most of them weren’t deep friendships, of course, but the social calendar was positively bustling. Back then, I didn’t understand two crucial realities: deep friendships are very different from casual ones, and people naturally socialize less as they age.

So we intentionally pulled back from many of our friendships. With tragic results.

Within a few short years, after moves and career shifts and the general inertia of adult life, I was suddenly, thoroughly, ‘not satisfied.’ I had zero close friends. And I had matured enough to fully, viscerally, understand what I lacked. My casual friendships weren’t enough to fill my need for belonging. I felt it in my marrow.

This lasted far too many years.

At the time, I had no idea how common my experience was.

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Loneliness has become normal

Minutes per day spent socializing in person. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There has always been some loneliness, of course. But the scale of disconnection has accelerated dramatically over just these past few decades. Social media, short-form video, and AI have all contributed to the decline, but the cursed-digital-puck-in-our-pocket isn’t the only cause. Some structural issues predate those technologies: loss of stable community, suburban sprawl, geographic mobility, decline of third spaces.

Taken together, it’s a toxic stew that makes this current era uniquely hostile to close friendships.

In 2024, Cigna found that more than half of Americans report feeling lonely. Other studies across multiple countries show the average adult has few close friends. Zero, too often.

This is an extremely important trend for each of us to understand and confront. Because loneliness doesn’t just make us sad. It dulls joy, amplifies stress, and increases our mortality risk. And the rather disastrous ‘bonus,’ as discussed in our Authentic Belonging essay, is that it erodes the sense that we matter and thereby poisons our sense of meaning in life.

One thing that surprises many people is that loneliness statistics really don’t vary much by gender. The nuance worth noting is that men tend to report a lack of close friendships, whereas women tend to report having friendships that aren’t supportive enough.

The result is the same.

We’re lonely.

And despite how common it is to feel lonely, we still tend to have a stigma about it. Few people feel comfortable divulging that they’re lonely. The result is that most lonely people think they’re the only lonely one. That’s what I thought for most of my adult life.

Newsflash: you’re not. Not even close.

You’re downright normal.

Think of your neighbors, workmates, church acquaintances, and all the other light connections in your world. I’d venture that more than half are ‘not satisfied’ and would welcome the chance at friendship if someone made the first move.

It’s harder for adults

Robin Dunbar studied human social networks extensively. He found that we naturally cultivate layered social circles. At the center: an intimate group of about five people. Beyond that: roughly fifteen friends, fifty regular contacts, and about 150 less frequent contacts at the outer edge.

Most adults maintain reasonable outer regions: acquaintances and casual connections from work, neighborhood, gym.

The problem, specifically, is the central few. On average, we’re not doing a great job of cultivating that small group of deep friendships.

In childhood, the inner circle tends to fill without much effort. Same school, same block, same summers. Proximity and repetition, year after year. Adolescence adds teams and clubs and the unique knitting of lives that can happen with burgeoning independence.

I don’t want to imply that friendship is easy for every young person, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s easier than when we get a bit older.

Because when adulthood arrives, we focus on being responsible. We shift our priorities from friendship to career, marriage, and kids. And many of us move to new cities, wrongly assuming it’ll be easy to find friends wherever we land.

The cruel irony is that life gets harder exactly when those early friendships tend to fade. More pressure at work. Family challenges. Aging parents. In a word: life.

Then we glance around and realize that no one is there to help shoulder the weight.

That’s when an unspoken plea rattles through many of us: How would I even go about making a new friend?

The question feels impossible to many, verging on rhetorical. Because nobody teaches adults how to build a close friendship from scratch. We’re expected to somehow just know. Most of us don’t.

I certainly didn’t.

Then, in my early forties, I decided to try to solve my personal friendship crisis. I needed to learn some things about how connection works. I had to grow, and to realize that some of my instincts around relationships weren’t all that helpful.

I needed to change. It wasn’t quick and it wasn’t comfortable, but I did the work and came through to the other side.

And I can say, wholeheartedly, that it was worth every ounce of effort. Because now I’m solidly ‘satisfied.’

Fulfilled.

If you’re in the ‘not satisfied’ category, I want you to know that it’s solvable. The behaviors that give rise to healthy friendship aren’t innate, they’re learned skills. Everyone can learn to be a great friend, to identify future friends, to nurture light connections into deep meaningful ones.

There’s plenty to say about the practical actions and attitudes of friendship, but we’ll save that for another day.

For now, just know that most of us feel less connected than we’d like. You’re not the only one.

And it’s a problem that’s 100% solvable.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. If this resonated, the best thing you can do is subscribe. Weekly essays on everything related to meaning, like: friendship, purpose, money, retirement, parenting, service.

Notes

Cigna Group. (2024). Loneliness in America. The Cigna Group.

Cox, D. A. (2021). The state of American friendship: Change, challenges, and loss. Survey Center on American Life. https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/the-state-of-american-friendship-change-challenges-and-loss/

Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), 469–493.

Dunbar, R. I. M. (1998). Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language. Harvard University Press.

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614568352

Modern life feels hollow. What now?

When someone asks for an example of who I’ve admired most in my life, I have a ready answer:

Tom.

Tom had a natural leadership quality. He had presence. Bearing. In any room, he was the one everyone just naturally looked to for either insight or agreement. That quality made him a highly successful executive in corporate America. And when he retired, he retired well. Well enough, in fact, that he could’ve lived on a cruise ship for a few years or filled his garage with Ferraris.

But Tom chose a different path. He organized his retirement around people. And service.

The two things I remember most about Tom are his smile and his toolbelt. Whenever there was a building project at our church or in our community, Tom was there. I don’t think he was ever assigned the role of site leader, exactly, but he naturally adopted it.

I have so many vivid memories of this silver-haired retiree smiling and swinging a hammer. And teaching. Guiding. Helping. Encouraging. The picture of a generous servant leader.

He had the money to fund these projects. He could’ve just written a check and hired professionals and foregone all the dust and grime and ache. But he chose to give us his presence instead.

I’m so glad he did.

Tom passed away some years ago. I miss him. But I treasure the memory of what it looks like when a person’s Transcendent Purpose and their Authentic Belonging to a community come together in a single expression.

That giant toothy grin wearing a well-used toolbelt is the epitome of Prosocial Service, the topic of this essay.

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Completing the Meaning Map

The previous two essays introduced two of our three expression domains, where two source circles overlap to generate something neither produces alone.

Coherent Identity emerges at the overlap of the vertical and inner sources. This is the stable, integrated self who knows what it’s for.

Communal Contribution is where the inner source overlaps with the horizontal, where the developed self affects specific individuals in your intimate circle.

Now we’ll cover the final expression, Prosocial Service, where the vertical and horizontal sources overlap. This is where care moves beyond your closest relationships, pulled by something transcendent, sustained by relational grounding.

Think of Tom. He belonged to a faith community and was drawn by heartfelt love for the people in it. He was energized by those close relationships and motivated by his self-transcendent desire to help people. Many of whom may never have known his name.

I never asked it quite like this, but I like to imagine him putting on his toolbelt because of his felt purpose and putting on his smile because of the joy he experienced from community.

Prosocial Service, Explained

Psychologists have studied volunteerism and prosocial behavior for decades. They’ve noted that people who sustain generous giving share two qualities: they’re moved by something larger than their own interests, and they’re connected to a community that affirms and reinforces that giving.

These are among the strongest predictors of sustained, healthy generosity.

If a person has only one of these, they may happily give for a short while. But over time, the absence of the other becomes limiting. Purpose without belonging tends toward burnout. Belonging without purpose feels directionless.

These findings map cleanly onto how Prosocial Service is structured in The Meaning Map.

Transcendent Purpose provides direction. It’s what allows service to continue when it’s inconvenient, invisible, or difficult. Without it, service tends to collapse inward toward what’s easier or more immediately rewarding.

Authentic Belonging provides relational grounding. Service isn’t just about tasks. It’s about people. And the people who sustain our service are often not the ones we serve, but the ones we serve alongside.

A volunteer at a food bank may not develop close relationships with those receiving food, but the shared mission with fellow volunteers creates a sense of connection that sustains the work.

Purpose gives belonging its outward orientation, preventing a community from becoming self-contained. Belonging gives purpose its human face, preventing service from becoming abstract or performative.

Prosocial Service isn’t defined by an organization. It’s defined by direction: care that moves beyond your inner circle, pulled by something larger than you, and sustained by people who keep you connected to it. Mentoring, coaching, feeding, clothing, teaching, shoveling, or simply showing up.

How It Differs from Communal Contribution

To avoid confusion, let’s take a moment to underscore how this differs from the previous expression.

Both Communal Contribution and Prosocial Service involve giving, but they are distinct.

Communal Contribution is personal: you give your developed self to people who know you.
Prosocial Service is directional: you give your effort outward, guided by purpose and sustained by community.

A parent who brings their developed self into an honest conversation with their child is expressing Communal Contribution.

But a parent who organizes a neighborhood food drive because they believe in something larger than themselves is expressing Prosocial Service.

Prosocial Service on The Meaning Map

Transcendent Purpose provides direction: the beyond-self orientation that can outlast inconvenience or discomfort.

Authentic Belonging provides the relational grounding that replenishes what service gives away. What flows out needs to be restored. Without belonging, depletion arrives before long.

Three Ways It Can Break

Compassion fatigue: service without belonging. Charles Figley identified compassion fatigue as the cost of caring: the exhaustion that accumulates in those who give sustained care to others. The research shows that people experiencing compassion fatigue often still believe in what they’re doing. Their purpose is intact, but their relational grounding isn’t.

The service circuit is wide open. Energy flows outward, but nothing returns to replenish it.

This is common in helping professions, pastoral ministry, and nonprofit work. I’ve seen this play out in the lives of several missionary families. Missionary work can be especially challenging because of the total immersion in another culture which makes deep friendship formation difficult. It’s not helpful to remind them of the mission. They believe in the mission. They need belonging to keep them full and energized for the work they believe is valuable.

Undirected mission: service without direction. Imagine a person who volunteers regularly, but is driven primarily by the social rewards. They enjoy the camaraderie and connection. This kind of service rarely lasts.

Serving isn’t easy. It requires sacrifice. The work is often difficult and unglamorous. When the friendships get harder or the work gets inconvenient, there needs to be something underneath the experience to keep you moving forward. Transcendent Purpose is what helps you push through those stretches so the service endures.

Coerced service: no autonomy. A person may have purpose and belonging but feel that serving is obligatory. A teenager, for example, may be required to volunteer regularly. From the inside, this feels like duty in contribution camouflage: they go through the motions but experience none of the meaning.

A more subtle version of limited autonomy is misaligned service: when you don’t yet understand yourself well enough to know how you should serve. This person may be serving a meaningful cause, with people they feel connected to, and still feel a bit distant from it. Because the role doesn’t quite fit who they are.

What it Looks Like When It Works

Tom strapped on his toolbelt because he was pulled by Transcendent Purpose: it felt worthwhile to give his time and energy. He smiled because his Authentic Belonging refreshed and replenished him. And, despite the many ways he could’ve spent his time, he chose to serve.

That’s the picture of healthy Prosocial Service. It looks like joyful generosity.

It’s care flowing outward from a person drawn by something larger than themselves, connected to a community that sustains them, and freely choosing to be there.

The people around Tom, including me, were affected by more than his labor. We were inspired by his example. That’s the secondary gift of healthy Prosocial Service:

It teaches what generosity looks like, and invites others into it.

The Complete Map

The full architecture of the Meaning Map is now in view.

Three source circles, each independently generating meaning: Transcendent Purpose, Self-Compassion & Growth, and Authentic Belonging. Vertical, Inner, Horizontal.

Three expression domains, at the overlap of each pair of circles: Coherent Identity, Communal Contribution, and Prosocial Service.

One modulator: Autonomy, pictured as a halo that runs across all six domains.

At the center: Flourishing, when all domains are healthy and active.

The question raised by the Prosocial Service expression:

Is there something you’re giving, or could give, to a group beyond your closest relationships, motivated by something that would still matter if no one thanked you for it, and grounded in belonging?

Tom answered that question with a toolbelt and a smile.

Next time: what happens when the sources are present but the expressions are blocked.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. If this resonated, the best thing you can do is subscribe. Weekly essays on everything related to meaning, like: friendship, purpose, money, retirement, parenting, service.

Notes

Figley, C.R. (1995). Compassion fatigue as secondary traumatic stress disorder: An overview. In C.R. Figley (Ed.), Compassion fatigue: Coping with secondary traumatic stress disorder in those who treat the traumatized (pp. 1-20). Brunner/Mazel.

Penner, L.A., Dovidio, J.F., Piliavin, J.A., & Schroeder, D.A. (2005). Prosocial behavior: Multilevel perspectives. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 365-392. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.56.091103.070141

Batson, C.D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a social-psychological answer. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Modern life feels hollow. What now?

In 1998, Esquire magazine needed to rehabilitate the reputation of their most caustic writer, Tom Junod. Junod was famous for ruffling feathers, to say the least, and he’d just been boycotted by Hollywood. The magazine’s solution? Assign him to profile the beloved TV icon Fred Rogers, of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

This was, as assignments go, something like sending a food critic famous for savage takedowns to review a soup kitchen.

Junod wasn’t enthusiastic. He was, at best, skeptical. What Junod found, however, was someone so astonishingly present and attentive, it caught him off guard.

Rogers didn’t hide behind shallow inspiration or TV-personality charm. He gave Junod his actual self. Every question Junod asked, Rogers turned into a question back. Over the ensuing weeks, Rogers remembered things Junod had said and followed up. He prayed for Junod, by name, every morning for years. Most surprisingly, perhaps, was that Rogers grew to legitimately trust Junod.

Junod wrote about it years later: “He trusted me when I thought I was untrustworthy… a man had seen something in me I hadn’t seen in myself.”

The friendship that emerged from that assignment lasted until Rogers died in 2003. Junod has said it changed how he wrote and how he understood goodness. He credits Rogers with making possible what became some of his best work.

What Rogers gave Junod wasn’t therapy or mentorship. It was the offering of a developed self into a specific relationship, which changed that other person.

That is what this essay is about.

What the Circle Overlaps Generate

The Meaning Map source circles generate something distinct where they overlap. That overlap isn’t merely the sum of two sources, but a new expression of meaning that neither circle produces alone.

The previous essay introduced Coherent Identity, which emerges when Transcendent Purpose and Self-Compassion & Growth work together.

Communal Contribution is the second expression domain. It emerges where Self-Compassion & Growth and Authentic Belonging overlap.

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Communal Contribution, Defined

Erik Erikson described generativity as a midlife adult’s concern for guiding and contributing to others, especially the next generation. Dan McAdams later showed that this impulse isn’t limited to midlife. It operates across adulthood.

Communal Contribution overlaps with generativity, but is more specific. It’s not contribution in general. It’s intensely personal. It’s the offering of a developed interior self into a relationship that’s specific and irreplaceable, where it has real effect on the other person.

This is the form of meaning where who you’ve become genuinely matters to someone specific.

So what, specifically, is that developed self?

A healthy Self-Compassion & Growth circle generates, over time, interior depth. Honest self-knowledge. Processed experience. A settled relationship with your own history. The ability to be present without performing.

In a single word, you might call it maturity, or depth, or integration.

People who’ve done this work aren’t trying to manage how they appear. They can be known without collapsing or needing to perform. They bring something substantial into a relationship because they’ve become something solid.

Rogers didn’t give Junod a technique. He offered a lifetime of cultivated attention, humility, and curiosity. It was the accumulated interior of someone who had done decades of honest inner work. It was the quality of Rogers’ developed self, specifically, that affected Junod. Not merely that Rogers knew him, but that who Rogers had become was capable of seeing him.

What This Is Not

Not all care is Communal Contribution. And not all relationships involve contribution. Let’s illustrate with a few examples.

Consider a parent. Role-based parenting means the diapers get changed, the meals get made, everyone is properly shuttled around. This is all real and necessary, but changing a diaper is different from changing a life. Communal Contribution might look like this: you recognize that your own upbringing left you emotionally distant, and you do the work to grow past it. Then you bring warmth, curiosity, and presence into the relationship with your children that wouldn’t have been possible before that inner work.

Or a friend. Connection means asking about their world, listening carefully, following up. But real Communal Contribution might look like you overcoming an addiction which later allows you to have a difficult and credible conversation with a friend headed in the same direction. It affects them specifically because of your lived experience.

A mentor. Generosity looks like asking about career goals and helping identify paths toward them. Communal Contribution requires more. Taking the time to understand who this person is, sharing honestly how you’ve navigated your own shortcomings, offering guidance based on your story rather than your professional knowledge.

Helping can be effective while remaining impersonal, of course. But it isn’t Communal Contribution.

Communal Contribution requires you to give your authentic self in a way that has noticeable effect on the other person.

Communal Contribution on The Meaning Map

Why Both Circles Are Required

Self-Compassion & Growth provides what is given. When the inner circle is depleted or hollow, there’s nothing substantial to offer. The care is genuine in intention, but not in substance. It comes from role rather than from self. And the people receiving it can often sense the difference even when they can’t quite name it.

Authentic Belonging provides the relational context in which that offering can deeply affect another. Without belonging, you may influence people. But you won’t experience the kind of mattering that comes from being fully known.

The two circles interact continuously. Self-compassion creates the internal safety required for honest self-disclosure, which deepens belonging. Belonging provides the relationship in which your developed self can be expressed and affect another, giving inner growth somewhere to land.

The result is a completed circuit. The self is developed, offered, received, and further formed through relationship.

Three Ways It Can Break

Communal Contribution has three distinct failure modes.

Thin Belonging: burnout. A person is giving sincerely. Real care, real presence, real investment. But no one in their intimate circle truly knows them. What they give can’t fully be received because no one knows them well enough to receive it. And nothing returns to replenish what was given.

This is common among exhausted caregivers, pastors, therapists, and parents. It can appear like a purpose problem. But the person experiencing burnout often doesn’t need a better reason to give. They need someone specific to give their actual self to, and to be affected by in return.

Thin Inner Circle: hollow giving. Belonging is present, but the self hasn’t been developed. What is given is the role, not the real person. The care is sincere but it comes from a performed self.

This failure mode is more subtle than burnout, because it doesn’t feel as depleting. It feels like going through the motions. It doesn’t exhaust you, but it doesn’t satisfy either.

Thin Autonomy: compelled giving. Both circles may be present, but the giving isn’t chosen. It’s driven by internal pressure. The feeling that it’s impossible not to give.

This is where codependency lives. It’s the feeling that to stop caring or to be needed less feels like a threat rather than freedom. The person’s sense of worth has become so contingent on being needed that reducing their giving feels like self-erasure. From the outside, it looks like care. From the inside, it feels like compulsion.

A Pivot

A friend of mine was a self-described workaholic. Competent, respected, and almost never home. His son was six when my friend realized, in a terrible moment, that the boy didn’t fully recognize him. To his son, he had become slightly abstract.

My friend had self-knowledge and sincere values. He had a child he loved, and he was certainly willing to contribute to the boy’s life. But without substantial presence in that relationship, there wasn’t any opportunity to truly affect his child.

That moment of realization was motivating. He made a dramatic career shift, because the contribution he was making at work wasn’t the one that mattered most.

What It Looks Like When It Works

Junod once arrived at Rogers’ studio and found Rogers surrounded by laughter. When he asked what was so amusing, Rogers said he’d been telling them about a question Junod had asked weeks earlier, about whether he’d ever been angry, and that he’d been thinking about it ever since.

Rogers had been affected by Junod in return. He was moved by a question from a person who was present enough to ask it well. That’s the two-way quality of Communal Contribution when it’s fully alive. It’s not one giver and one receiver. It’s two people shaping each other.

That’s what this expression makes possible: not just care, but the kind of meaning that comes from knowing that who you’ve become deeply matters to someone. And that who they are matters to you.

The question this raises:

Is there someone in your life who is genuinely affected by who you actually are, not by your role or your performance? (And are you affected by them?)

Next time: the third expression domain, where Transcendent Purpose and Authentic Belonging work together.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. If this resonated, the best thing you can do is subscribe. Weekly essays on everything related to meaning, like: friendship, purpose, money, retirement, parenting, service.

Notes

Erikson, E. H. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton.

McAdams, D. P., & de St. Aubin, E. (1992). A theory of generativity and its assessment through self-report, behavioral acts, and narrative themes in autobiography. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62(6), 1003–1015. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.62.6.1003

McAdams, D. P., Diamond, A., de St. Aubin, E., & Mansfield, E. (1997). Stories of commitment: The psychosocial construction of generative lives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(3), 678–694. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.72.3.678

Junod, T. (1998, November). Can you say... hero? Esquire. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27134/can-you-say-hero-esq1198/

Modern life feels hollow. What now?

Andre Agassi was my absolute favorite tennis player. I bought his neon Nike shoes and his neon Head racquet. I had his poster on my childhood bedroom wall.

All the other tennis personalities seemed positively boring by comparison. He made tennis seem modern. Fun. Even counter-cultural.

It didn’t hurt that he was one of the greatest tennis players to ever pick up a racquet. He won eight Grand Slam titles and spent 101 weeks as the number one player in the world.

And also, for most of his career, he bitterly hated the sport.

He said so, explicitly, in his memoir. He didn’t choose tennis. His father, a former Olympic boxer, had decided that one of his children would become a champion, and Andre was the ‘lucky’ one. From early childhood he was drilling against a ball machine his father called “the dragon,” hitting thousands of balls a day. He was sent to a tennis academy he described as something close to a prison. He became a professional at 16 without having really chosen any of it.

At his peak, he was the most recognizable athlete on the planet, both for his play on the court and for an advertising tagline he didn’t write: “Image is everything.” He wore hairpieces to maintain a public persona he hadn’t chosen. Both the tagline and the hairpieces were someone else’s idea of who he should be.

He described winning a Grand Slam tournament and knowing, almost immediately, that a win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad. Reaching number one yet feeling empty. Building an identity around excellence in a sport he hadn’t chosen.

Something was fundamentally broken. The achievements arrived. The meaning didn’t.

Then something changed. Late in his career, he founded the Andre Agassi College Prep Academy in Las Vegas, a charter school for underserved children. He describes this as his life’s real work. He felt motivated by his own lack of formal education, his own sense of how closed doors shape a life, and his conviction that children without options are children without hope.

His purpose finally became an expression of his actual self, shaped by his own wounds and longings, rather than a role imposed from outside. He has said he believes the second chapter of his life will be bigger than anything he accomplished on a court. Helping to shape a future is far more meaningful than winning a Grand Slam. That purpose has since blossomed: Agassi has helped build more than 120 schools serving tens of thousands of underserved students.

The difference between those two halves of his life is precisely what this post is about.

Achievement can build a résumé. It can’t build a self. Coherent Identity is what happens when purpose and self-knowledge speak to each other honestly, and their story holds together across time.

What the Circles Generate

We’ve previously discussed the three source circles: Transcendent Purpose, Self-Compassion & Growth, and Authentic Belonging. Each generates meaning on its own. But the Venn diagram does something more than place three circles near each other.

Where two circles overlap, something distinct is generated. Something that neither circle produces alone. This essay is about the first overlap, the first of three expression domains.

Coherent Identity is what emerges when Transcendent Purpose and Self-Compassion & Growth work together.

And Agassi’s story illustrates, with unusual clarity, both what happens when this expression is absent and what it looks like when it finally arrives.

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What Coherent Identity Actually Is

Psychologist Dan McAdams calls this narrative identity: the internalized, evolving story we tell ourselves about who we are, where we've come from, and where we're going. It's not a list of traits or accomplishments, but a living account that gives our life coherence and direction through time.

Strong narratives, McAdams finds, often include redemption sequences: moments where hardship or failure becomes the source of something valuable. These sequences show up with notable consistency in people who report the sense of having lived a life that contributed to something beyond themselves.

McAdams has found that this kind of narrative self isn’t simply given to us. It’s actively constructed. We build it from the chapters of our experience, integrating what’s happened to us into a meaningful arc. And that integration is the psychological work that makes a self stable.

In the Meaning Map, Coherent Identity is built on exactly this foundation. It’s the stable self that emerges when two things are working together: a genuine sense of beyond-self direction (Transcendent Purpose) and an honest, compassionate relationship with who you actually are (Self-Compassion & Growth).

When it’s functioning, you have something like vocation. You’re being called by something larger than yourself, and you know yourself clearly enough to answer honestly. Your sense of who you are and your sense of what you are for merge into the same conversation. You act from your actual self rather than from the role you’ve been assigned.

Having a Coherent Identity doesn’t mean you have everything figured out. It’s more like an ongoing, honest integration:

The self and the purpose pointing in the same direction, toward something important.

Two Ways It Can Break

Coherent Identity has two distinct failure modes. They look different from outside and feel different from inside. Both are common.

The hollow identity happens when purpose is present but self-knowledge is absent. A person can be truly purpose-driven, working toward something larger than themselves, and still have no honest inner life underneath it. The role is clear. The self beneath the role isn’t.

This was Agassi’s situation for most of his career. He had an identity as tennis champion and global celebrity, but it had been assembled for him rather than by him. He had purpose-adjacent activity at an extraordinarily high level. He lacked, for a long time, any honest account of who he actually was beneath the identity he was performing.

From outside, this looks like legitimate thriving. As a tennis fan in the early 90s, I never sensed Agassi’s inner turmoil. People like this are accomplished, driven, purposeful. But what it feels like from inside is that achievements arrive and feel surprisingly empty. The work gets done but the satisfaction doesn’t follow. There’s a persistent, nagging sense of disconnection between what you’re doing and who you are.

The self is accomplishing real things, yet the self somehow feels unfamiliar. The common experience is of being high-functioning but hollow.

The unanchored identity is when self-knowledge is present, but purpose is absent. A rich inner life, genuine self-awareness, and honest engagement with the question of who you are. But no transcendent orientation to give direction. The person knows themselves deeply but still can’t answer what they’re for.

McAdams would describe this as a story with vivid chapters but no discernible arc. The narrative has detail, honesty, and self-reflection, but it lacks a direction that extends beyond the self. And without that, even a well-developed inner life can feel like it’s spinning in place.

Unanchored identity is common in midlife and post-role transitions. It shows up when people either don’t have a strong purpose or have directed their purpose primarily toward themselves, their achievements, or their roles. When your purpose is tied to something that can shift, it isn’t a durable anchor for identity.

Each chapter of your life can appear rich, but the story doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Coherent Identity on the Meaning Map

How the Circles Interact

Purpose without self-knowledge tends toward performance: you become whoever the mission needs you to be, which produces hollow identity.

Self-knowledge without a transcendent direction produces a self-story without an arc, yielding an unanchored identity.

Neither of these is coherent. Coherent Identity means being yourself in service of the mission.

The specific dynamic the model proposes is this: self-compassion creates the safety that makes honest self-knowledge possible. When you know that acknowledging your failures won’t produce a verdict against your worth, you can look at yourself clearly. And honest self-knowledge, in turn, is what makes it possible to recognize a true purpose rather than performing someone else’s version of one.

The two circles aren’t merely adjacent, nor are they simply added together. They interact. Each creates conditions for the other. And these conditions are exactly what’s necessary for a Coherent Identity to form.

Autonomy

We discussed in a previous essay how autonomy modulates the sources of meaning. It also matters in the expression domains. A person can have Coherent Identity in its full form (purpose and self-knowledge integrated) and still experience it as unowned.

A coherent story that isn’t freely chosen feels like someone else is writing your biography. The plot may hold together, but it won’t feel like your own life. This produces a different kind of hollowness than either failure mode above, and it requires a different kind of attention.

What It Looks Like When It Works

Late in his playing career, something shifted for Agassi. He described it not as having solved anything, but as finding that his purpose and his actual self finally had something to say to each other.

His own experience of closed doors, his own lack of formal education, his own awareness of what it costs a child to have no options. All of this became the material for a purpose that was genuinely his, shaped by his own history, pointing outward toward something beyond himself.

He didn’t stop having a complicated relationship with tennis. It didn’t suddenly make tennis easy. But it did feel more honest. For the first time, his story and his direction weren’t at war with each other. And the result wasn’t just better feelings. He describes this chapter as the one that matters most, the one that will outlast his tennis records.

The sense of self and purpose were finally moving in the same direction.

That’s what Coherent Identity makes possible: the capacity to act from your actual self in the service of something beyond it. Not performance. Not a manufactured version. People around you notice a different quality of presence when you act from your actual self rather than your role. And from inside, it tends to feel less like achievement and more like expression.

The question raised by this expression of meaning:

When you strip away the titles, the roles, and the things you accomplish, is there a self within you who knows what it’s for?

Not the version that performs well. The version that actually exists.

Next time: the second expression domain, when Self-Compassion & Growth and Authentic Belonging work together.

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About this newsletter: I’m Dirk Bellamy, author of Why We Ask. I’ve spent years studying purpose, connection, and what makes a life feel meaningful. If this resonated, the best thing you can do is subscribe. Weekly essays on everything related to meaning, like: friendship, purpose, money, retirement, parenting, service.

Notes

McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.5.2.100

McAdams, D. P., & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721413475622

Agassi, A. (2009). Open: An autobiography. Alfred A. Knopf.