And Then What?

This is a continuation of “Find the Meaning First”. If you’re landing here first, that’s the piece to read before this one.

“Man cannot stand a meaningless life.” – Carl Jung

I recently wrote a post about three of Jung’s quotes, including this one, and shared it with the UnderGround, a group that I am a member of. For some, this may be the first time seeing or hearing this quote. For others, we’ve come to know it as find your why, and the how takes care of itself.

In response to that post, Mika, someone in the Underground, commented in a group chat, “My why gets blurry because it’s a lifetime and lifestyle now. The goals and why’s are there but now ever changing.” Reading that made me stop and think. She wasn’t asking how to find her why. By her own account, she’d been living inside one for four years, watching it keep shifting into new goals and new meaning as she went. What she was asking now was something harder.

“And then what?”

From that simple, three-word question that she asked, this was born.

That question stayed with me longer than I expected, because I realized I didn’t have a clean answer of my own. I’m currently fifteen months into this, but I figured the why was supposed to hold steady a lot longer than that before it started moving on me. Yet here I am, still early by comparison, and it’s already gotten blurry, not because I lost it, but because it stopped holding still long enough to be just one thing.

Here’s what I didn’t realize until her question landed. I hadn’t been tracking any of this, not once, not in fifteen months. I wasn’t sitting somewhere checking in on my why every day, every week, or every few months to see if it still fit. I was just living it, one version at a time, never even noticing that there had been a handoff between one why and the next until her question made me go back and look. That’s the part that surprised me most. The progression was already there right in front of me, but I simply hadn’t noticed. So when I looked back and traced the pattern, I realized that I’d already been through what she was going through without even knowing I was living through it.

I didn’t need a calendar to see it. What I needed was to see the shape of it, and once I did, I couldn’t unsee it. My why didn’t grow the way a tree grows, one continuous trunk getting thicker. Instead, it grew the way a snake does, by shedding what it had outgrown. Each version did its job, got me to where I needed to be, and then stopped fitting. I didn’t grieve most of those versions when they left because I didn’t even notice they’d left. I just noticed one day that the reason I was showing up wasn’t the same reason I’d started showing up for myself.

As I continued to work through this, I went looking to see if anyone else had said something close to what I was noticing and I came across Viktor Frankl. He survived the Holocaust and devoted much of his work to the role meaning plays in how human beings endure suffering. He wrote: “The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day, from hour to hour.” What I understood from that wasn’t that meaning is random or unreliable but that the meaning that matters changes with who we are, what we’re facing, and what we’re becoming. The meaning that drove us in our twenties may not be the meaning that carries us in our thirties, forties and throughout the rest of our lives. He didn’t map out stages the way I’m about to, but he pointed at the same root idea, that meaning was never meant to stay in one shape for long.

Between the two of them, a fuller picture started to form. Jung was pointing to our need for meaning. What I took from Frankl was that the meaning itself doesn’t have to stay the same. Neither one canceled the other out, they were just describing two different parts of the same truth.

We think the why is supposed to be the fixed point. The thing that doesn’t move while everything else does. I used to think that too. Now I think the why is the thing that’s supposed to move, and the discipline is the part that’s supposed to hold steady while it does. What follows is my own attempt to trace what that movement has actually looked like for me.

Where it started

The first why wasn’t complicated and it wasn’t even noble, it was simply proving to myself that fifty-three wasn’t a wall. I’d look in the mirror and genuinely believe I was just being realistic, that slowing down, losing strength, letting things go soft, that’s just what happens when you get older. I want to be honest about how deep that belief went, because it wasn’t laziness dressed up as wisdom, I actually thought I was being reasonable. I wasn’t. That belief was the first thing that had to die before anything else could start.

So the early why was small but it was mine. Prove it. Not to anyone watching, because nobody was watching yet. Prove it to the mirror, to the bloodwork, to the version of me that had already decided how this story ended. That why got me moving. It got me into the gym at an hour that used to feel out of reach, back when I had a hundred excuses for why it wasn’t the right time. Turns out there was no better one.

“And then what?”

Where it went next

Once I proved it was possible, the why couldn’t stay there. Proving it’s not too late only works as motivation until we’ve proven it. After that it’s just a fact we already know, and facts alone don’t continue moving us forward.

What replaced it was harder to live inside. I’d spent a lifetime chasing things that were supposed to answer the question for me. The house, the car, the watch, sitting in the top one percent of income and still not being able to say yes when I looked in the mirror and asked if I actually liked the man looking back. All that external proof and none of it touched the internal question. That was the moment the why stopped being about what I could show people and started being about what I could live with when nobody was looking.

That shift is subtle and it’s brutal at the same time. It’s easy to perform discipline for an audience. It is a completely different thing to hold a standard when the only person keeping score is us. That’s the why that took over next. Not proving it to the world. Proving it to myself, in the mirror, with no one else in the room.

“And then what?”

Where it went after that

We can only run on internal ownership for so long before it starts to feel small too. Not because it’s wrong, it’s just not big enough to carry the weight forever. At some point the question stopped being about me at all.

I thought about my son growing up watching a version of me that either kept becoming or quietly gave up. I thought about my wife, and how many years I’d spent unable to fully receive her love because I hadn’t done the work of loving myself first. The why moved from proving something to myself into becoming something for the people who were watching whether I wanted them to or not. Not performing for them. Building something they’d inherit, one way or another, whether that inheritance was a habit or an absence.

That’s when I started saying the fountain of youth isn’t something we buy, it’s something we become. I meant it. The why wasn’t about staying young anymore. It was about staying present long enough that the people I loved got the best version available, not the one I’d have settled for if nobody else was in the picture.

“And then what?”

Where the mechanism became clear

For a while the why was emotional, it was about family and legacy and things I felt in my chest before I could explain them in my head. Then something shifted and I actually understood why the discipline worked, not just that it worked.

Once I understood the mechanism, why consistency rewires who I am and not just what I do, the why stopped being negotiable. It became structural. This isn’t a phase anymore, it’s a way of life, and that sentence means something different once I know why it’s true instead of just hoping it is. The why at this stage wasn’t inspiring in the way the earlier ones were. It was quieter. It was closer to knowledge than to fire. But it held weight the emotional whys couldn’t, because understanding doesn’t wear off the way motivation does.

“And then what?”

Where belonging entered the picture

I spent most of my life being the lone wolf. Self-reliant because I’d learned early that relying on other people usually meant getting let down by them. That worked for a long time, until it didn’t. Until I found people who didn’t need me to be less so they could feel like more.

That changed the why again, and it changed it in a direction I didn’t expect. It stopped being purely about my own transformation and became about the room I was standing in. I finally found people who didn’t need me to be less. That sentence still gets me. Because the why up to that point had been carried alone, even the parts that were for my family, even the parts that were about legacy. This was the first time the why included other people as participants, not just beneficiaries. Not people I was doing this for. People I was doing this alongside.

“And then what?”

Where it got hard to name

There was a stretch where a brother in the community asked me flat out, before we sat down to eat, what my purpose was. And I didn’t have an answer. I told him the truth. At this moment, I don’t really know, but I’m not going to fake one. It was the honest answer.

Staying in that uncertainty instead of rushing to answer it taught me something the earlier whys hadn’t. Purpose isn’t something we find, it’s someone we become. I started noticing the same lessons circling back in different forms, money, health, the way I kept isolating instead of letting people in even after I’d found people worth letting in. Those weren’t random struggles. They were curriculum. The why at this stage wasn’t a destination, it was the willingness to stay in the not knowing instead of forcing a name onto something that wasn’t ready to be named yet.

“And then what?”

Where community stopped being a resource and became the reason

Somewhere in there I stopped thinking of the community as a place I went to get support for my own why, and started understanding that the community itself had become part of the why. Different backgrounds, different goals, everyone showing up and doing the work anyway. Standards rise when we’re walking the road with people instead of walking it in front of them or behind them.

That’s a small shift on paper and a massive one in practice. The why went from solo, even when it included other people, to genuinely shared. Not because I needed the company. Because the growth stopped making sense as an individual project once I saw how much of it was happening in relationship to the people around me.

“And then what?”

Where I looked back and almost missed it

A year in, I sat down to mark it, and the strange thing about that milestone wasn’t the list of what had changed. It was how normal all of it had already become. The shift didn’t happen because everything lined up perfectly. It didn’t happen when the fear went away. It happened when I got tired of lying to myself. By the time the anniversary came around, the discipline wasn’t something I was gritting my teeth through anymore. It had become reflex. And a why that’s driving reflex instead of willpower is a completely different animal than the one that got us started.

The why that gets us through year one isn’t built to notice its own success. We’re too busy living it to clock the moment it stopped being effort and became identity.

“And then what?”

Where it sits right now

Going back to that Jung piece, I said a blurry why can feel like a warning sign, like something slipping, like the beginning of falling off. I still think that’s sometimes true. But I don’t think it’s always true anymore. When the why stops running on willpower and starts running on reflex, the loud, emotional version of it goes quiet. That’s not the same as it disappearing. It’s just not making noise anymore because it no longer has to.

When Mika wrote back, she pushed back on a quiet myth we carry around getting older, the idea that by fifty you’ve already settled into who you are, that you already know what you know and you’re set in your ways. “This is the time that I challenge myself more,” was how she put it, “and want to learn and want to grow and want to continue to change and not be stagnant.” Not a phase winding down. Evidence of one still opening.

Sometimes the why gets blurry because we’re losing it. And sometimes it gets blurry because it’s between names, because the version that got us here did its job and hasn’t been replaced yet with language for whatever’s coming next. Mika wasn’t trying to rediscover the meaning. “I don’t stop creating new meanings.” Plural, not singular. As the discipline compounds, she explained, the body and mind change with it, and you evolve into “someone that you’re unlocking that was waiting this whole time to become.”

Maybe the why doesn’t get blurry because we’ve lost our meaning.

Maybe it gets blurry because we’ve outgrown the idea that there was ever supposed to be just one.

For Mika, that’s been four years now, and it hasn’t slipped once. Before that, nine months was the ceiling, then old habits would pull her back. That’s not motivation holding the line. That’s identity.

I couldn’t have known a year ago that the why would move eight or nine times and I’d barely notice most of the handoffs. I definitely couldn’t have known that not noticing was the point, that a why in motion doesn’t announce itself, it just quietly becomes something else while we’re busy doing the work in front of us. Maybe the real shift isn’t learning to ask what’s my why one more time. Maybe it’s learning to ask what’s this season asking of me now and letting that question replace itself as often as it needs to.

So if our why feels blurry right now, before we take that as proof something’s wrong, we should ask the harder question first. Is it fading or is it just outgrowing the last name we gave it.

Mika’s own image for all of this is a little different from mine, but it lands in the same place. A little blurry, a little foggy, we make it through that fog, and then a whole new chapter is set in front of us to explore and to conquer. Fog clearing into a new chapter. A relay handing off mid-stride. Neither one of us is describing an ending. We’re both describing a threshold.

I think that’s where the real shift lives. Not in the finding. Not in the naming. But in the willingness to keep asking. And after looking back at how many times that question has changed for me, here’s where I’ve landed.

What I’ve Come to Believe

We’re taught to find our why like it’s a single object we pick up once and carry for the rest of the journey. Nobody tells us it’s closer to a relay than a destination. We carry it as far as it’ll take us, and when it hands off to the next one, most of the time we don’t even feel the exchange happen. We just look up one day, the way I did when someone in the UG asked me a question I didn’t have an answer for and realize we’ve been running with something different in our hand for a while now.

Maybe the goal was never to land on a why that finally holds still. It’s staying willing to keep asking the question that started all of this: “And then what?” Not once, at the beginning, when everything is new and the answer feels obvious. But again and again, every time the last answer stops fitting the person we’ve become since we gave it.

Maybe that’s the real discipline, not finding the why, but staying in relationship with it long enough to let it keep changing us.

And Then What?
A Reflection by Alexander Bush
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