What Are You Fighting For?

Renowned author and psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about something called psychic entropy: the diminished mental state we enter when forces seem to be working against our goals. We find ourselves in cycles of pushing and pulling, chasing and tugging, wondering if what we’re fighting for is worth the payoff, if the turmoil will one day lead to triumph.

There are times when life may feel like a battle to live, bringing us to a point where we have to ask ourselves if the pain of fighting is worth what we’re fighting for. To answer this requires that we actually be fighting for something.

This is how we breed resilience before an event breeds it for us—we identify what it is we’re fighting for. Life should not and need not perpetually feel a fight, but when it does, there must be something on the other side worthy of persistence. It is difficult to come back from something when you have nothing you want to come back to. Our task in an inevitably chaotic world is to identify the idea or pursuit so meaningful to us that no left-field occurrence has a real chance at thwarting it.

In the wake of frustrating news, what are you still motivated toward? What compels you to keep giving your best when it feels as though the world is handing you its worst? It doesn’t have to be lofty, but it does have to exist. Be it vague or concrete, this is what turns resilience from the exception in the individual to the rule—the standard by which we operate.

Resilient people have something worth being resilient for. This person, as Marcus Aurelius iterates in Book IV of Meditations, "makes use of [all] material to leap ever higher."

Know what you're leaping toward; keep leaping.

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