If you are feeling a bit unmoored and distracted, pushed and pulled by the chaos and rapid change of everyday life, you aren’t alone.
We know this for certain thanks to a new report from scholars across the political spectrum who teamed up to study trends in the developed world between 1990 and the present day. Perhaps their most striking finding was that economic improvement did not run parallel to improvements in life satisfaction and well-being.
For example, see this snapshot from the United States:
The United States may be a striking case, but it’s not the only place where economic and human progress have been decoupled. The same is true in many other developed countries. Economic excellence does not correlate with personal or societal excellence. These outcomes are complex and involve numerous factors, but we are particularly interested in two here at The Growth Equation: mastery and mattering.
Mastery means developing skills and making progress in activities you deem worthwhile. For some, it may be learning a trade or advancing in a knowledge work career, but it could also come from increasing the weight of your deadlift, improving your jump shot, building a table, making art, or learning how to play an instrument. Mattering is feeling that you are valued and that your contributions make a difference.
Decades of research show that both mastery and mattering are key to a life well-lived, and are prominent components of what psychologists call “life satisfaction.”
A big concern is that some of the primary forces underlying economic growth—in particular: automation, optimization, new technologies, and a culture that prides work above everything else—are crowding out opportunities for mastery and mattering.
The more jobs that become automated, the less opportunity there will be to find mastery in the workplace. Alternatively, there will be a rise in the number of what the late anthropologist David Graeber called ”Bullshit Jobs”: those in which you are either doing data entry or monitoring technology (instead of developing skills and doing meaningful work) or in a multi-layer management scheme, where the automated processes do all the work and employees go from one pointless meeting to the next to justify their existence.
If you think things are bad now, wait as artificial intelligence continues to improve. And because the culture is so focused on measuring personal value and awarding status based on traditional work, people are still slaving away and working longer hours—even if a greater portion of those hours are spent on sheer tedium.
This is happening in the corporate world, but it’s also happening in medicine (more time charting and documenting on a computer versus being with a patient), education (more time helping a student navigate their iPad than teaching), and even sport (more time stressing about analytics and data capture than gaining a feel for coaching and performing). In each case, the system may be growing more efficient and optimized, but the individual is increasingly alienated from the experience they crave most—genuine mastery.
Just as the ethos of the last two decades has led to more efficiency albeit less mastery in our work lives, it has also led to more efficiency albeit less mattering in our relational lives. The pursuit of authentic mattering has been replaced by developing a “personal brand” on LinkedIn or trying to become an influencer on Instagram. Instead of getting together in person and developing meaningful relationships, we fire off posts into the abyss and tap a heart on a screen. It’s the Instagramification of everything we’ve described in our work. The appearance of the thing, without the depth and substance behind it. It is an optimized version of mattering—pseudo-mattering—at best. At worst, it is ruining our brains.
This theory of declining mastery and mattering making us less happy and satisfied isn’t just my intellectual analysis. I know it based on personal experience too. When I am focused on writing a book or essay or this newsletter; when I am training for the deadlift and bench press without distraction; and when I am closely connected to my family, friends, colleagues, and community, I feel happy and fulfilled. In such cases, I have high degrees of mastery and mattering in my life.
This isn’t always the case, sometimes, I get sucked into trying to do everything possible to sell more books and be more relevant as a public thinker. I spend too much time doing shallow and superficial work and chasing numbers on social media. It may lead to better short-term results (at least on paper), but if it eats away too much at mastery and mattering, I become miserable. And I know I’m not alone. When I talk to people from all walks of life—doctors, teachers, attorneys, athletes, and even artists—they tell me their version of the same story. Everyone feels some pull toward optimization, automation, pseudo-celebrity, and shallow connection. It’s tough to resist.
But here’s the problem: if we become optimized automatons whose technology uses us (instead of us using it), then we end up with exact charts above.
Economy: great.
Mind, body, and spirit: in decline.
There may not be an easy answer or a top-down way to reverse this trend, but there is a bottom-up one, and it’s increasingly becoming the key to living a good life: Define sources of mastery and mattering, and pursue and protect them at all costs.
If you lack mastery and meaning at work, you could try changing how you do your job or maybe even changing your job itself. If that’s too daunting (or impossible), focus on finding mastery and meaning outside of work. This is the beauty of taking up a craft like powerlifting, running, gardening, guitar, watercolor, pottery, chess, poker, or sculpting. If possible, do these activities in a community, and eventually find ways to give back through volunteering, or coaching.
Spend less time worrying about being a celebrity on the internet and more time worrying about being a celebrity with the people who genuinely know you. Not know of you. But know you. Stop telling yourself you are learning from shallow social media posts and start setting aside time to read long-form work like newsletters, essays, and books.
Thankfully, we live in a world full of options for mastery and mattering. Unfortunately, the cultural current is flowing strongly in the opposite direction. Few people—perhaps nobody, unless you live in a monastery—are immune to the vicissitudes of modern life. But most of us have at least some agency to fight back with our actions. The time to do it is now. In a world of automation and isolation, do everything you can to build a life around mastery and mattering.
