Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be. -Miguel de Cervantes

Studying extraordinary people who accomplish things that change the entire world forever makes me sad. I loathe the truth that my adventure, the goals, opportunities, choices, and struggles that characterize my life, is ultimately inconsequential. It is inconsequential both in the sense of its having no extended effect on the lives of other people and its paling in comparison in terms of scale and excitement to the adventures of extraordinary people. How can I return to my own adventure with the whole of my enthusiasm after immersing myself in the epic lives of those extraordinary people who changed the world forever? 

To answer this haunting question and prevent myself from resigning to the belief that my life is meaningless, I must first conclude what variables measure the “meaning” of one’s life relative to another’s. I take for example the people in my own life who have the most impact on me: my close friends and family. The actions they take on a daily basis have a direct impact on me and others close to them, more specifically our emotions. When my father chooses to endure the stress of his work so he can afford to support our family it makes me, my mother, and my brother happy. The meaning of his struggle is to provide for his family so that their emotions may be made more positive. When my mother completes housework, cares for my brother and me, and cooks meals for the family she improves our happiness. Beyond improving my present happiness their actions have the extended effect of improving my general propensity for happiness. My father’s work ensures I’ll have some extra money to ease the burden of my future student loan debt and my mother’s housework ensures guests retain a high opinion of our family so that I may make connections with others. Their actions are meaningful because of the resulting effects on my well-being. This suggests that the meaningfulness of an individual’s life can be measured by the extent to which their actions affect the past, present, and future emotions of others. 

By this metric, those extraordinary people whose achievements I cannot help but envy are shown to be far less meaningful in my own life than the actions of the people closest to me. Despite my loved ones being far less impactful on a grand scale, their effect on my happiness is infinitely greater. They don’t do anything that changes the entire world, but the things they’ve done have certainly changed my entire world. One’s impact does not have to be broad to be significant. I might not affect every person in the entire world, and my adventure may not be a glamorous thing to look at, but my actions will certainly be meaningful because they’ll improve the experience of life for other people. 

If the meaningfulness of one’s life is determined by the effect their actions have on others’ experiences, then the most meaningful and virtuous life is lived in service of as many people as possible with as much positive consequence for those people’s lives as possible.  In order to achieve the full potential for meaningfulness which my life has to offer, I must evaluate options for what service I should provide, how I should provide that service, and which people I should serve.

It bewilders me how many people resolve to live their lives with relatively meager ambitions. As a young person, I suppose I know much more about the opportunities of life than I do about the harsh realities which one must face to seize those opportunities. However, this recognition of my own ignorance does not ease my bewilderment. Many opportunities are so alluring that I cannot even fathom a hardship which could possibly dissuade me from attempting to seize them.

The recognition of hardships which must be faced before achieving one’s goals represents the “sanity” which Cervantes warns us of in this quote. If we consider the future carefully before taking action we act with sanity. “Sanity”, can then be identified as the seeing of life as it is in most practical and realistic terms. Cervantes equates using too much of this seemingly logical thinking to madness. If we only ever think of the world in terms of what we know and what we can most logically expect then naturally we will never achieve anything extraordinary. We must see the world “as it should be” despite the obstacles which stand in our path to achieving that end.

I’m not saying that all sanity should be thrown to the wind. Merely that a little insanity is necessary for people to reach their full potential. Without any sanity, one might seek to achieve their dream of flying by jumping off a cliff, with too much sanity they would dismiss their dream of flying as a ridiculous goal, but with some sanity and a little bit of insanity they might invent the airplane. Extraordinary things are only accomplished by people who seek to make their extraordinary dreams a reality. Spend less time thinking about how you would achieve a certain goal and more time achieving it.