Excelsior: Why Human Beings Are Drawn Upward

Modern people speak endlessly about happiness. Yet when most people use the word, they usually mean some combination of pleasure, comfort, and positive emotions. The good life, we are told, consists of minimizing discomfort and maximizing satisfaction.

As artificial intelligence and machines increasingly perform tasks once reserved for humans, some technologists—including Elon Musk—have speculated about a future in which work becomes largely optional and some form of universal income replaces employment. Yet if our material needs were fully met, would we finally be fulfilled—or would we still need something to strive toward?

But who do you know whose life is devoted primarily to comfort and consumption yet radiates fulfillment? Who strikes you as deeply alive when their highest aspirations are entertainment, leisure, and convenience? Perhaps fulfillment has less to do with comfort or even success than with the willingness to strive. Michael Jordan once remarked, “I can accept failure… But I can’t accept not trying.” Many of us fear failure, yet it is often the roads not taken that haunt us most.

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle observed that happiness in the deepest sense was not merely pleasure, but eudaimonia—human flourishing. A flourishing life is one in which a person develops their talents, cultivates virtue, and becomes what they are capable of becoming.

Perhaps this is why comfort so often disappoints us. Human beings seem built for something more. We are naturally drawn toward goals, purposes, and ideals. We do not merely seek ease; we seek direction.

This leads to an uncomfortable possibility. Many people imagine three trajectories in life: growth, stagnation, and decline. But what if stagnation does not actually exist? An unused muscle atrophies. A language that stops being practiced is forgotten. A civilization that ceases to renew itself declines.

Perhaps there are only two options after all: growth or decline. We imagine fulfillment lies at the summit—that once we complete the degree, find a life partner, or achieve financial security, we will finally arrive. Yet the satisfaction often fades surprisingly quickly.

After ten years of post-secondary education, I finally completed my residency training and licensing examinations. I had reached the goal that had oriented much of my life for as long as I could remember. Yet within months, I found myself looking back on that demanding final year before independent medical practice with a surprising degree of nostalgia. Why did I feel less engaged despite having more freedom than ever before?

The experience is far from unique. Retired athletes often struggle after leaving the sport that gave structure and purpose to their lives. Combat veterans sometimes report that civilian life can feel strangely diminished after years spent pursuing a mission larger than themselves. Some Apollo astronauts likewise reported profound feelings of disorientation after returning from the Moon. If reaching the Moon does not permanently satisfy the human need for meaning, then perhaps meaning was never located in the achievement itself, but in the striving.

I had not yet found my next mountain. The summit had never been the point. The climb was. It was in the striving itself that I felt most alive. Elon Musk has remarked that reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as a teenager helped him arrive at a similar conclusion: the answer was not the destination, but the journey itself.

The Latin word excelsior means “ever higher.” Nietzsche called it Selbstüberwindung—self-overcoming. Viktor Frankl found meaning in striving toward worthwhile goals. Different traditions use different language, but they point toward the same phenomenon: the refusal to remain what one already is. The same impulse is why people climb Everest and why humanity reaches for the stars.

Achievement without a new horizon creates a vacuum. Excellence is often the by-product; meaning is the reward. The challenge is determining which mountains are worth climbing. Not every ambition deserves our devotion.

The Seven Criteria of a Worthy Aim

1. It should be higher than where you are now.

2. It should be realistically attainable in your next stage of growth. People do not orient themselves toward a Nobel Prize, but toward today’s experiment.

3. It should require sacrifice and delayed gratification. If a goal demands nothing of you, it will not transform you.

4. It should develop your character or capacities. Money, prestige, and influence can be worthwhile by-products, but they cannot be the aim itself.

5. It should connect to something larger than yourself. Serving others, seeking truth, and worshipping God all transcend mere self-interest.

6. It should be intrinsically worthwhile. If nobody applauded, would it still be worth pursuing?

7. It should generate further horizons rather than terminate growth. A worthy summit is never the last.

Endless scrolling, passive entertainment, and chasing likes fail nearly every test. Human flourishing requires continual self-transcendence because growth appears to be part of what it means to be human. Not everyone must become a CEO, astronaut, or Olympic champion. But everyone needs a mountain. For one person that mission may be parenthood; for another, building a business or mastering a craft.

The specific aim matters less than the existence of one. More ominously, there may be an imperative to striving, captured well in a saying attributed to Jesus in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Perhaps the punishment for abandoning the upward call of excelsior is not external at all, but woven into the fabric of human nature itself.

Human beings seem drawn beyond themselves. Perhaps this is why the greatest losses in life are often not our failures, but our unrealized possibilities. So the next time you find yourself wondering what comes next, it is worth remembering that perhaps our deepest fulfillment lies not in arriving, but in answering that call.

Mark D’Souza is a Toronto-based physician and author of Lost and Found: How Meaningless Living is Destroying Us and Three Keys to Fix it.