Am I Living A Small Life?

Yesterday, I skimmed through three months of journal entries. Something uncomfortable emerged: I keep circling the same themes. Over and over.

My children’s lack of urgency frustrates me in a world that’s becoming faster and stranger. I’m disillusioned by how angry and divided the world has become. My company’s performance isn’t where I want it. Padel consumes too much of my life. I’m excited about my Hyrox race in May.

And I really look forward to going to bed early.

Every day feels the same. Same thoughts, same frustrations, same loop.

The question that haunts me: Am I living a small life?

The Lives I’m Not Living

A few weeks ago, I binged several episodes of Billions. Both rivals—Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades—live such full lives they barely sleep. They’re on the go 24/7, making moves, closing deals, destroying enemies. At the end of one episode, my heart was beating so fast I couldn’t sleep.

A few months ago, I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The fiesta scene in Pamplona remains ingrained in my mind: “The fiesta was really started. It kept up day and night for seven days. The dancing kept up, the drinking kept up, the noise went on... Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences.”

These are the lives that I sometimes measure mine against.

And yesterday sharpened my thoughts. I didn’t have much to do at work. No padel game. I was on my own with my day—and it felt empty.

Perhaps what’s missing is depth, walking in nature, transcendence, and a mission-driven life. All the things I talk about but don’t practice.

So my real struggle became: how do I expand the life I’m living?

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: that’s the wrong question.

The Life I’m Resisting

I have a tagline: “Awaken to Aliveness.” I wrote a book called The Midlife Shift. I speak at conferences. I’ve rebuilt my business after a very tough period. I’m surrounded by people who love me.

And yet I find myself dreaming of Hemingway’s fiesta and Chuck Rhoades’s singular purpose.

The word that keeps appearing is “small.” I’m living a small life.

The judgment in that word is crushing. This life isn’t enough. I’m not enough.

But what if I’ve been measuring the wrong thing?

The Telic Trap

I kept asking how to expand my life until I encountered the philosopher Kieran Setiya.

Setiya identifies what he calls telic activities—actions that are goal-directed, aimed at completion. Writing a book. Running a race. Building a business. Winning a case. I’ve spent forty years on projects with finish lines.

Here’s what Setiya realized: telic activities are “autosubversive.” You achieve the goal—the meaning is extinguished. You fail—you’re left with frustration. Either way, “fulfilment lies always in the future or the past”—never here.

This is why material gains mean nothing. Why the TEDx stage felt hollow. Why I feel so low after finishing a manuscript.

Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades are living intensely telic lives. All that 24/7 intensity? It’s just telic activity on steroids. Take down this rival, close this deal—then what? The next one. The fever pitch of Hemingway’s fiesta? Also telic. It builds to a peak, then collapses.

External intensity isn’t the opposite of a small life. It’s just a different flavor of the same trap.

My journal loop proves it. I treat everything as a problem to solve. If only my children would do things my way. If only my company’s numbers improve. Then I’ll feel purposeful.

But even if I solved every problem tomorrow, there would be new ones.

The loop isn’t created by the problems. It’s created by how I relate to them.

The False Solution

When I ask, “How do I expand my life?”—I mean: add more.

More depth. More nature walks. More transcendence. Stack meaningful activities on top of what I’m already doing.

But this is still telic thinking in disguise. “Achieve depth.” “Find transcendence.” Just more goals. More ways to fail.

In my journal, I wrote: “Something has to give. Either something changes—or I accept that this is it.”

What if acceptance is the change?

The Atelic Turn

Setiya offers an alternative: atelic activities—activities with no terminal point, no completion. Going for a walk. Not walking to somewhere—just walking. Spending time with friends. Thinking. Parenting.

These activities can’t be completed. That’s the point.

Setiya’s key insight: “An atelic end is realized in the present as much as it can ever be realized.”

You live it now, or you don’t live it at all.

I don’t need to change what I’m doing. I need to change how I see it.

My children’s resistance to my urgency—that’s not a problem to solve. It’s a relationship to inhabit.

The company’s performance—not a target to hit once and for all, but an ongoing practice of leading and showing up.

Even the “small life” itself—not a problem to fix, but a life to live.

What if the loop isn’t the problem? What if my desire to escape it is?

Maybe You Can Keep Circling

Setiya’s philosophy suggests: maybe you can keep circling—if you stop treating the circles as failures.

The themes repeat because they’re my themes. Children. Company. Meaning. These aren’t obstacles to my real life. They are my life.

And here’s what I’m learning: Axelrod’s life isn’t fuller than mine. It’s just louder. Hemingway’s fiesta isn’t more alive than my Tuesday. It’s just more frantic.

A small life—measured by external metrics—might actually be a rich life, measured by presence.

I Am Enough

This is the hardest acceptance: I am enough—here, in the loop, in the smallness.

This version of me. The one who looks forward to padel and bedtime. Who circles the same frustrations. Who talks about transcendence but doesn’t always practice it.

This person is enough.

Not complacency. Not giving up. But engaging differently. Not as projects to complete—as practices to inhabit.

Padel isn’t an escape from my real life. It’s where I’m most present.

When I read, I don’t need to hit 50 books. I just need to be reading—engaging with ideas, letting them change me.

At work, I don’t need to wait for meaningful tasks. I can be present in the mundane ones.

My journal circles the same themes. Setiya would say: “That’s not a bug; it’s a feature.”

These recurring concerns aren’t problems waiting for solutions. They’re the ongoing substance of my life.

The Small Life, Lived Large

How do I live a larger life?

I already am.

Not by doing more, but by being here.

The smallness I feel isn’t about the size of my life. It’s about living at a distance from it—always ahead, planning the next goal; always behind, regretting the last failure. Never quite here.

Aliveness isn’t a destination. It’s what happens when you stop treating your life as a project to improve.

This is the life. The one with generational friction, company struggles, and too much padel. The one where I look forward to going to bed early.

And it’s enough.

Not because I’ve achieved anything new. But because I’ve stopped measuring it against Billions and Hemingway and everyone else’s external intensity.

I am enough. Not as an achievement. But as the simple, terrifying, liberating truth.

Here. Now. In the loop.

“Something has to give,” I wrote.

And something did: the belief that external fullness matters more than internal presence.