Meaning in Motion: Reclaiming Hardship in an Age of Comfort

We have more access to therapy, meditation apps, and self-help frameworks than any generation in history. We know more about the psychology of happiness than we ever have. And yet rates of depression, anxiety, and purposelessness keep climbing. We are, by many measures, the most comfortable and least meaningful generation of humans to have ever lived.

I don't think that's a coincidence.
I break this down into three parts:

The Ancient Record - Current Psychology – Invitation.

Part One: The Ancient Record

The impulse to find meaning through physical challenge is not a modern wellness trend. It is one of the oldest and most consistent patterns in human culture. Across time, geography, and tradition, people have deliberately imposed hardship on their bodies, not as punishment or performance, but as a way of becoming.

The ancient Greeks understood this intuitively. The original Olympic Games, beginning in late 700’s BCE, were not primarily a sporting spectacle; they were a sacred ritual embedded in religious observance, held in honor of Zeus at Olympia every four years. Athletes traveled from across the Greek world to compete, and the competitions themselves, running, wrestling, chariot racing, and the pentathlon, were understood as expressions of human excellence in the fullest sense.

The Greeks call this arete: virtue, excellence, the full realization of human potential.

The athlete who trained for years, endured, and competed was not just pursuing victory; he was demonstrating what a human being was capable of becoming. The wreath of olive leaves placed on the winner's head was not a trophy but a totem of transformation.

The Greeks were not alone in this understanding. Across Celtic and Norse cultures, stone lifting served as a formal rite of passage into manhood and community membership. In Scotland, the Clach Cuid Fir, or "manhood stone," was a boulder that young men were required to lift onto a wall to prove readiness for adult life. The Basques had their own tradition of harrijasoketa, stone lifting competitions with roots stretching back centuries. In Iceland, lifting stones at Husafell has tested strength since at least the 18th century, with records of specific lifts serving as marks of belonging and capability. These were not random feats but rather structured, witnessed, and socially meaningful wellness rituals. The young man who lifted the stone became someone different in his community's eyes and, more importantly, in his own.

Heat rituals tell a similar story from a different direction. The Finnish sauna tradition, which anthropologists trace back at least two thousand years, was never only about hygiene or relaxation. The sauna was where babies were born, where the dying were prepared for death, where disputes were settled, and where hunters purified themselves before going into the wilderness. The Russian banya, the Japanese onsen, the Native American sweat lodge: across cultures with no contact with one another, humans independently developed the practice of entering extreme heat together as a way to mark transitions, build trust, and produce states of psychological and spiritual significance. The shared endurance of physical intensity created bonds and generated meaning that ordinary life could not.

Wherever you look in the historical and anthropological record, you find humans deliberately choosing physical difficulty as a mechanism for becoming who they needed to be.

Part Two: What Psychology Has Confirmed

Paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman wrote in his book, Exercised, that humans did not evolve to exercise in the modern sense. We evolved to engage in effortful physical activity that was embedded in purpose: hunting, migrating, building, and surviving. When physical effort is disconnected from meaning, we resist it, which is why exercise for simply health's sake can be so challenging. However, when it is connected to something that matters, we are capable of extraordinary things.

Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, identifies three core psychological needs that must be met for humans to experience genuine motivation and well-being: autonomy, the sense that you are choosing your actions freely; competence, the sense that you are capable and growing; and relatedness, the sense that your effort is witnessed and shared. Deliberately chosen physical challenges, when structured well, satisfy all three simultaneously. You chose to be here; you are proving something real about your capability, and you often do so alongside or in front of others.

This convergence is rare in modern life, but when found, it produces an intensity of meaning that is difficult to replicate through cognitive or reflective practices alone. I would argue this is why 80+% of people who run a 100-mile ultramarathon do it again.

It’s identity-transformative and feels good in a paleo - meaning type of way.

It helps prove what researchers call narrative identity: the process by which we construct our sense of self through the stories we tell about our lives. Embodied experiences are among the most durable raw materials for these stories precisely because they cannot be faked or hedged.

You either finished or you didn't. You either lifted it or you didn't. The body produces facts that become the foundation of identity in a way that intentions and insights rarely can. When you complete something physically hard that you chose freely, you do not just have a memory. You have evidence about who you are.

Albert Bandura spent decades studying self-efficacy, the belief in your capacity to act effectively. His central finding was that the strongest source of self-efficacy is not encouragement, not visualization, not reframing. It is mastery experience: actually doing hard things and surviving them. The body keeps this record in a way the mind cannot fabricate.

You cannot talk yourself into the felt knowledge that you are capable of hard things.

You have to earn it through action. Every physically demanding challenge you choose and complete leaves a residue of self-trust that cognitive interventions can not fully replicate.

Part Three: The Invitation

If meaning can be generated through chosen difficulty, and if agency, the felt sense that you are the author of your life, is built through embodied action rather than thought alone, then a life organized around the avoidance of discomfort is a life that is actively undermining its own capacity for meaning. It’s often not a dramatic shift, but rather it happens quietly, day by day, through the accumulation of small retreats from challenge, the narrowing of what feels possible, the slow drift from offensive thriving into defensive surviving.

In my 15 years of mindset coaching, I have found that most people are not living badly but rather they are living carefully. And careful living, over time, produces a particular kind of emptiness that is difficult to name because nothing is obviously wrong.

Everything is… fine. The job, relationship, family, etc. But the felt sense of authorship, of being someone who does hard things and knows it, of having a body that has been tested and trusted, is missing.

The historical record and the psychological research point in the same direction: it’s in your biological nature to choose physically demanding challenges that are not reckless, but that put something real at stake and require something real in return.

The Greeks called it arete. For the Japanese, a Misogi. Self-Determination Theory calls it autonomy and competence…. I call it living your life on Offense.

The specific form it takes is less important than the choice itself. Be mindful of comparing your form to someone else’s as that is a road to disappointment that can rob you of the transformation.

Allow yourself to be inspired by others, but have the self-control to know when you have crossed the line. If you’re struggling to find your thing, it might be signing up for something that makes you slightly embarrassed to tell people about because part of you is not sure you can do it. That embarrassment is useful information. It usually points directly at the thing that would have a big positive impact.

The ancient stone lifters were not doing something separate from their psychological development…

They were doing their psychological development.

The Olympians were not setting aside their search for meaning in order to train…..

The training was the search.

You have access to the same biological mechanism. The question is not whether you are capable of hard things. The evidence of human history is that you almost certainly are.

The question is whether you are willing to stop organizing your life around avoiding finding out…