Welcome back, dear reader,

This week I’d like to explore a little question that has been gnawing at me: What is the purpose of our time on earth?

Okay, so it’s not such a little question. I just didn’t want to scare you away.

But don’t worry, you don’t have to answer just yet. For now, you can sit back, and let me share my hypothesis.

Here it is—not as doctrine, but an invitation:

Perhaps our purpose on Earth is to channel our talents, time, and energies toward building a better world.

Let me explain.

I was raised Jewish(ish), and although I’m not religious, something about the faith’s focus on the here and now—our earthly existence—has always resonated with me. Heaven and hell are not places we’re relegated to posthumously according to some cosmic naughty-or-nice list. They are realities we help create and experience here on Earth.

Related to this is the concept of Tikkun Olam—which roughly translates to “repairing the world.” It’s essentially Judaism’s answer to the question of our purpose—and happens to be the one that feels truest to me.

Tikkun Olam suggests our mission, as embodied beings, is to do what we can to improve our shared reality. To gather our energies and gifts to help nudge the world—however slightly—toward the heavenly rather than the hellish.

Whether one accepts this as a divine mandate is largely irrelevant. Orienting our lives around improving our collective reality is just good sense. It not only benefits the world; it seems to satisfy something deeply human within us—the need to matter, to contribute, to leave things better than when we found them. What Maslow termed “self-actualization” and placed as our highest order need in his famous hierarchy, which we explored here.

And yet, most of us don’t channel much of ourselves toward building a better world. Not because we’re selfish or indifferent, but because doing so isn’t easy.

Our societal stories and structures—particularly in America—often carry us in the opposite direction. Toward acquisition, individualism, and consumerism. Toward measuring success by what we accumulate rather than what we contribute.

In doing so, we orient away from service, community, and collaboration—the very things we need to flourish, both individually and collectively. And even when we want to contribute to our communities, there’s often no obvious way to do so.

Transforming those societal stories and structures is essential, and we’ll explore that work together in future posts. But we don’t have to wait for large-scale change to begin to live differently.

Each of us can find ways to move the needle of existence, however slightly, in the direction of heaven.

The Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield offers this simple piece of wisdom: “tend to the part of the garden you can touch.”

In other words, find some small way—within your reach—to serve the greater good. To take action beyond yourself.

The more people who do that, the more a better world begins to emerge. And the more our own lives are enriched in the process.

I’m trying to orient my own life this way. I started a local meditation group, volunteer in my daughter’s underserved public school, and commit (and fail and recommit) to practice presence and compassion when interacting with others.

And I want to do more, but that’s a start.

Okay, that’s my theory on why we’re here. Now I’d love to hear yours:

What do you think the purpose of our existence is?

Even if you’re unsure, do you think acting as if we’re here to build a better world will improve our individual and/or collective lives?

And finally:

What small actions are you taking—or might you take—to tend to the part of the garden you can touch?

Welcome back, dear reader,

After last week’s post about a future of flourishing, I can almost feel your skepticism pulsing through the interwebs.

You may think that discussing a future of flourishing is like arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. A frivolous distraction from the real task at hand: scrambling for our life-vests in hopes we can save ourselves and our families before this ship goes down.

If that resonates, I understand your skepticism—what you might call realism. I really do. Not only are there countless indicators we are steaming away from a future of flourishing, but much of our default thinking and societal programming block us from even entertaining the possibility.

Before we can begin imagining—or building—a future of flourishing, we must first adopt a few essential mindset shifts.

Just Because It Is, Doesn’t Mean It Must Be

We often treat the ways things are—or the way they have been–as expressions of some immutable truth. Proof that things could never be otherwise. That something better isn’t possible.

So we surrender to the way things are, even when they fall short of how we long for them to be. We stop imagining what could be, let alone trying to build it.

But this nihilistic capitulation is rooted in fallacy. As writer and thinker Maria Popova reminds us, we must not “mistake[] the limits of our imagination for the limits of reality”.

Human history is filled with examples of fantasies turned realities: going to the moon, illuminating our world with electricity, replacing monarchies with democracies, and dismantling entrenched systems of injustice like apartheid in South Africa.

As Nelson Mandela famously said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

The first step toward a future of flourishing is believing in it–even when it looks nothing like the realities we’ve known. Only then can we begin the work of making the seemingly impossible possible.

Collaboration, Not Competition

A future of flourishing cannot be one in which only certain groups thrive—the wealthy, the white, the Western. It must include everyone.

Because there is no stable world in which some flourish and others don’t. Any vision to the contrary is a mere mirage.

Consider the growing number of billionaires building elaborate underground bunkers in anticipation of societal and/or environmental collapse. They seemingly hope that if their bunkers are stocked with enough swimming pools, bowling alleys, and luxury amenities, they might survive—and even thrive—while the world above descends into chaos.

But as futurist Douglas Rushkoff observes, “the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim.”

Even the most luxurious bunker cannot satisfy the deeper human needs we identified last week. We need community, purpose, and connection, which a life spent isolated underground–no matter the amenities—can never provide.

And beyond the psychological limitations of life in a bunker lies the fact that our world is extremely interconnected—ecologically, financially, digitally. Trauma in one part of the world inevitably reverberates to others.

The simple truth is: We will all sink or swim together.

If we hope to flourish, we must act accordingly—adopting collaboration, rather than competition, as our default approach.

Simple but not easy.

But possible, as we’ll explore.

Improvementism, not Perfectionism

Another common mindset that stymies progress is perfectionism. The belief that the world we long for is too perfect to attain, so why even waste time imagining it, let alone trying to build it.

The word “utopia” itself reflects this tension. It derives from the Greek words eutopos (“good place”) and outopos (“no place”)—a place too good to ever be reached.*

And perhaps that’s true. We may never create a world in which every human fully flourishes.

But that does not render the vision meaningless.

Think of it instead as a north star—something that guides our direction even if we never reach it. Meanwhile, each step toward it can incrementally improve our reality.

Perfection tells us that if we can’t reach our desired destination, we shouldn’t embark on the journey at all.

Improvementism takes the opposite view: it’s worth the journey even if we never fully arrive because we’ll end in a better place than we began.

Conclusion

These mindset shifts—-believing the future can be different from the past, embracing collaboration over competition, and pursuing improvement rather than perfection—-can unblock our path toward a future of flourishing.

They are simple ideas.

But, as the title of this project reminds us, simple doesn’t mean easy.

Much of our culture–and even our instincts–pushes against making these shifts. Yet, the challenge is worth undertaking. Because even imperfect progress moves us closer to the world we want to inhabit.

In future posts, we’ll explore the practical steps along that journey.

In the meantime, I’m curious:

What are examples—either from your own life or history—of something that once seemed impossible but later proved possible?

Are there any other mindset shifts you think are essential if we are to build a future in which more people can truly flourish?

*For any MadMen fans, yes I did first learn this titillating fact on the show ;).

Welcome back, dear reader,

As you now know, the purpose of the Simple But Not Easy project is to imagine our way into a future of flourishing. Underlying this mission is a foundational belief:

It is the birthright of every person on this planet to flourish.

But, what does it mean to flourish?

While a broad term, the most salient aspect of flourishing for our purposes is the deep and abiding fulfillment that emerges when our human needs are met.

Okay—but what are our needs?

To answer that question, it’s helpful to consider the famous hierarchy proposed by psychologist Abraham Maslow:

At the base of the hierarchy are survival needs—food, water, shelter, air. Above these sit needs for safety, health, and social connection. But meeting these alone is not enough. To truly flourish, we must also live in alignment with our gifts, values, and sense of purpose.

Do we have what we need to flourish?

By this standard, most of us are not truly flourishing.

If we are fortunate, our lower needs are largely met. But the data suggests that for most of us, our highest-order needs are not.

A recent poll by Gallup found that while 62% of Americans feel their material needs are being met, only 48.9% feel they are “thriving”—a five-year low.

My lived experience chimes with this data. I’ve had countless conversations with friends and acquaintances, who, while healthy and materially secure, lack a sense of purpose or connection to something greater. As a result, they do not feel they are truly flourishing.

So how do we get what we need to flourish?

If flourishing is our birthright, we must orient our lives—and our society—around ensuring that everyone’s needs, from the most basic to the most aspirational, are met.

It’s a simple paradigm shift. But, of course, not an easy one.

Even if we never fully arrive at that destination, the journey itself can unlock greater flourishing for more people. That alone makes it worth pursuing.

So how might we begin?

Let’s consider three areas that are ripe for change: culture, institutions, and technology.

Culture

American culture often orients us toward the pursuit of short-term pleasures and gratification—the dopamine hit that comes with buying a new fancy car or gaining followers on Instagram.

The ancient Greeks had a word for this type of pleasure: hedonia.

But the pleasures of hedonia are fleeting. The surge of satisfaction quickly subsides, leaving us depleted and searching for our next fix.

Aristotle proposed a more reliable approach to the good life: eudaemonia.

Rather than short-term pleasures, eudaemonia involves cultivating a more abiding form of well-being. It emerges when we pursue meaningful work, nurture deep relationships, and develop our good character. In other words, when we attend to our highest-order needs.

Yet, our culture often keeps us running on the hedonic treadmill. Advertisements promise that happiness lies just around the corner if we buy the right car, the right clothes, or the right vacation. Cultural narratives suggest happiness is our prize for “winning” the rat race.

So we follow these recipes—yet the happiness they produce often comes out half-baked: looking right, but not tasting quite like we expected.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are many ways to reorient our culture toward eudaemonia, as we’ll explore in future posts. For now, suffice it to say, that shifting our culture—with all its downstream effects—is a powerful way to unlock greater flourishing.

Institutions

As philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued, “for people to live complete and flourishing lives”, societies must build a “set of institutions that support and nurture human capabilities.”

In other words, our societal institutions—education, healthcare, justice, welfare, finance, and others—should help people meet their needs at every level of Maslow’s hierarchy.

Yet anyone who has interacted with these systems can attest they often feel designed to degrade rather than uplift the human spirit.

The good news is that institutions are not fixed. They are man-made, not divinely instilled. And as their creators, we have the power to redesign them in ways that better support human flourishing.

For example, the education system could be reoriented from its current focus on creating future workers to cultivating whole human beings with curricula that include social and emotional education. The success of an economy could be measured not by GDP but rather on how well it causes citizens to flourish, much like Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index.

I’ll explore these examples further, along with others, in future posts.

Technology

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson once observed that humanity lives with “Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology”.

And that was before the age of AI.

This mismatch between the pace of technological progress and the development of human wisdom fuels much of the existential dread coloring our current moment.

But technology itself is neither inherently good nor bad. Whether it becomes our savior or destroyer depends on how we guide its development.

If designed with the goal of meeting human needs—ensuring sufficient resources, health, and opportunity for all—technology could become one of our greatest allies in realizing our birthright to flourish.

But doing so requires intention. We must design and deploy technology not to maximize profit or convenience, but to advance human well-being.

Conclusion

If we orient our cultural narratives, institutions, and technological development around ensuring that everyone’s needs—from the most basic to the most aspirational—are met, we can move closer to realizing our birthright of flourishing.

Simple.

But certainly not easy.

Still, it is a journey well worth undertaking.

And to begin, we must sit with some questions:

What would a culture that inspires eudaemonia rather than hedonia look like?

How might institutions be designed to ensure that everyone’s needs are met?

And how might technology help us build such a world?

I’m also curious:

Do you feel like you are flourishing?

If not, which needs aren’t being met?

What are the biggest obstacles to getting what you need to flourish?

Welcome, dear reader,

Thank you for being here.

I started Simple But Not Easy because I believe we are living through one of the most consequential moments in human history.

Climate change. Artificial intelligence. Political polarization. Rising economic inequality.

It’s easy to feel anxious—or even cynical—about the direction we’re headed.

Believe me, I get it.

But what if this moment is also an opportunity?

Simple But Not Easy is about embracing that opportunity by imagining—and building—a better future. A future of human flourishing.

The ideas we’ll explore here have been piling up on me for years, and this Substack is finally a home for them—a place to give these needy little ideas the attention they’ve been begging for.

Many of those ideas involve paradigm shifts—both personal and societal—that may illuminate a surprisingly simple path to that better future. Things like how we relate to work, leverage technology, structure our institutions and communities, and write our cultural narratives.

Of course, bringing about those shifts won’t be easy—-hence the title of this project. Yet, as JFK said of going to the moon, we choose to do things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

We do them because they are worth our effort. The journey toward a future of flourishing may be no less difficult than a moonshot, but it is just as worthy of our collective effort.

And I understand that believing in a better future is more challenging than ever given the direction things seem to be heading.

Yet, I remain optimistic.

Not because I think everything will work out on its own, but because I believe that through surprisingly simple paradigm shifts we’ll explore here, we can chart a new course.

It’s an optimism I hope will prove contagious. Because whether we believe a better future is possible or not, we’ll be right.

I’ll end each post with a few questions to help us imagine a future of flourishing. Because as George Bernard Shaw wrote,

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”

The future isn’t something that happens to us.

It’s something we imagine.

And then, together, something we build.

If you’re ready to join that collective project, subscribe below and I’ll see you next week as we begin exploring better worlds together.

With hope and gratitude,

Jenny