Good morning UG, normally I share just one quote on Motivation Mondays, but while reading through some of Carl Jung’s work, I came across three statements that seemed to speak to the same idea. These aren’t three quotes from the same passage, they’re separate statements, but when you put them side by side, they seem to fit together into the same idea. I’d like to walk through what I think they mean and why they matter.
“Man cannot stand a meaningless life.” — Carl Jung
That’s the first one. There’s no mention of a hard life, or a painful one, only a meaningless one. I think that’s the whole idea, that we can handle difficulty and hard times, but meaninglessness doesn’t hit us all at once, it just wears us down. It happens slowly and drains us bit by bit until one day we notice we’re empty, even though nothing dramatic ever happened.
“Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable, perhaps everything.” — Carl Jung
Here he went further. He’s making a clinical comparison on purpose, equating meaninglessness with illness, not just discomfort. If meaning is what makes hard things endurable, then losing sight of it doesn’t just slow us down, it weakens the thing that helps us keep going. Missing macros. Falling short on steps. Skipping a workout. Losing consistency when life gets busy. None of that holds without something underneath it.
This next one is the one I keep coming back to.
“A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.” — Carl Jung
This may be the clearest expression of the connection Jung saw between psychological suffering and meaning. In today’s language, it relates closely to what many of us call “our why.” He wasn’t saying that every struggle could be solved by trying harder. He was suggesting that, in some cases, the deeper question was whether something essential, some sense of meaning, had been left undiscovered.
Here’s something I’ve noticed, and I think it applies to a lot of us in this group. We’re successful in certain areas of our lives, whether that’s why we show up for our families, why we grind at work, or why we chase certain goals. But there’s usually one area, our health, our fitness, where we started without ever making that why concrete. We made the decision, we went through the motions, but we never stopped to turn the feeling into something solid enough to hold onto. I think a lot of us end up without a clear why for a simple reason. We’re so busy taking care of our families, running our businesses, and showing up for everyone else that we quietly put ourselves at the bottom of the list. When that happens, our health and fitness stop being something deeply connected to who we want to be. They become another thing we’re supposed to do.
To be clear, I don’t think it’s about people joining without a reason. Almost everyone here joined because they wanted to get healthier, feel better, become someone they were proud of. But wanting to get healthier and having a why that’s strong enough to carry you through the hard, unglamorous stretches aren’t always the same thing. We had a reason. We just didn’t always stop to understand what it really was.
I’ve written before about how most of us never stop to understand why we became who we became, we just carry the patterns forward. I think the same thing happens with our why. We don’t lack one for everything, we just haven’t gone looking for it everywhere it actually matters. And honestly, that’s the real reason I’m sharing this. I’ve been seeing people in this group fall away from their macros, steps, or workouts, and sometimes step away from the group entirely, then come back asking for accountability. There are a lot of reasons that can happen, and I certainly don’t pretend to know everyone’s story. But I do wonder whether one reason, for some of us, is that the actions remained while the meaning behind them became blurry.
Accountability can help us restart, and sometimes we genuinely need it. To me, that’s what makes Jung’s point so compelling. The struggle itself may not be the whole problem. Sometimes it points us toward meaning we’ve lost sight of, or perhaps never fully discovered in the first place. So if we keep returning to the same place, another check-in, rule, or system may only address the surface. Somewhere along the way, the program may have become something we do without continuing to ask ourselves why we’re doing it.
So on this Monday morning, here’s what I want us to sit with individually. What are we filling our time with, and what are we filling it for? Because those are two very different questions. Being busy was never really the question, because we’re all filling the hours somehow, with work, training, family, entertainment, social media, responsibilities, whatever it is. The real question is whether what we’re doing actually means something to us, or whether we’re just staying busy enough not to notice it doesn’t.
When we find the meaning first, the discipline follows.
Maybe that’s why discipline fueled by a why stops feeling like a chore or an obligation. It starts feeling like something we’re becoming, not just something we’re forcing ourselves to do.
Our why doesn’t have to sound profound to anyone else. It doesn’t need to impress the group or belong on a motivational poster. It only has to be honest enough to matter to us. Sometimes it’s as simple as wanting to be present for our family, remain capable as we age, rebuild trust in ourselves, or finally show up for ourselves the way we show up for everyone else.
Whether we’ve fallen off or we’re still going strong, it’s worth asking ourselves the same thing. If we’ve fallen off, maybe it’s less about remembering why we started and more about finding a why that actually holds this time. And if we’re still going strong, maybe it’s simply about checking that the why is still there, and it’s still enough. Sometimes our why becomes blurry, and that may be one reason some of us have fallen off and had to come back. When it happens, we’ve had the guts to tell the group about it. To be clear, that’s not weakness. That’s honesty, and I believe honesty is one of the first things discipline needs if it’s going to last.
But if we find that we keep falling off the same wagon over and over, more accountability by itself may not be the answer. It’s not simply another check-in, another rule, or another system. It’s going back to the why. If that reason becomes fuzzy, everything starts feeling harder than it should, no matter how strong we were yesterday, last week, last month.
When we fall off, let’s not just look at what we did or didn’t do. Let’s reexamine what our why actually is. We can say it out loud in here if we need to, but let us hold each other to the why, not just the habit, because a habit without a why eventually becomes hollow. We keep going through the motions, but we stop remembering why they matter.
So let’s rediscover our why and protect it. Jung said it best, “Meaning makes a great many things endurable, perhaps everything.”
#MotivationMonday
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