My uncle retired at sixty-two and was dead inside by sixty-four. Not literally — he’s still alive, still sends forwarded emails — but something left him. He’d spent thirty years as a civil engineer, fixing drainage systems in small municipalities nobody cared about.
He complained about it constantly. The bureaucracy, the ingratitude, the low pay. And then he stopped, because he’d earned it, and he had absolutely no idea what to do with himself.
I keep thinking about him whenever someone asks me what I want out of life. The usual answers feel hollow — I want to be happy, I want financial freedom, I want to travel more. These aren’t wrong exactly, but they feel like things you say rather than things you actually believe.
The idea I keep coming back to — and I’m not fully sure I’ve earned the right to say this yet — is that the point of being here is to be useful. Not in a noble, self-sacrificing way. Not in the way people say it on LinkedIn with a graphic of a lighthouse.
Happiness as a byproduct
The happiness thing bugs me the most, honestly. We talk about happiness like it’s a destination — something you arrive at and then maintain, like a good posture. But I’ve never met anyone who was consistently happy because they were trying to be happy.
The happiest people I know are sort of… incidentally happy. They’re absorbed in something — a project, a person, an argument they care about. Happiness is a byproduct, not the goal.
What my uncle actually lost
He wasn’t unhappy at work because the work was bad. Towns stopped flooding because of him — the problems were real, and he was good at solving them. He was unhappy because he never connected the work to that fact.
He experienced the bureaucracy but not the outcome. And then in retirement, he lost even the bureaucracy. He lost the friction that proved he existed in someone else’s life.
What pulls me out of a bad stretch
When nothing feels meaningful, and I’m just sort of moving through days, what usually pulls me out isn’t a realization about my own happiness. It’s being needed for something specific — a friend stuck on a problem, a situation only I’m positioned to attempt.
The mood lifts not because I feel good, but because there’s suddenly a shape to the day. A reason the day has to go one way rather than another.
I realize this might sound like workaholism rebranded. I’ve had that thought too. But busyness and usefulness aren’t the same thing — you can be extremely busy and useless, and very slow and essential.
The problem with chasing money
Obviously, money matters — it buys stability, and stability is the precondition for almost everything else. I’m not romanticizing poverty. But I’ve also watched people organize their entire lives around accumulation, and the finish line keeps moving.
There’s always a higher number that would finally feel like enough. The goalposts aren’t moved by external forces; they’re moved by the accumulator, unconsciously, because the accumulation itself became the point.
What usefulness actually feels like
Usefulness has a different quality. It’s specific, particular — this thing, for this person or situation, done as well as I can do it. It doesn’t scale endlessly into abstraction.
It arrives, and then it’s done, and then there’s another one. That rhythm is stabilizing in a way that happiness-seeking never is — because happiness-seeking has no natural end state, no moment where you set down the tool and say: yes, that’s what was needed.
Hi, I’m Biliz.
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