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MAR 28, 2026
If I asked “What drives you? What do you want — actually?”, would you know what to say?
Would you come up with something deep?
Something brought up by an inner drive? A force urging to be expressed?
Or is the carrot on your stick made of gold? Dangling over an ever deepening pool of comparison and status-games on your favorite social feeds?
Whatever your answer, let’s take that and keep pulling the thread.
What would we get to, if we’d keep asking: “Why?”
You want the fancy job? Ok, great. Why? Because of the money?
Yes.
Why money? For safety? To buy things? Freedom?
— Why?
Keep drilling down and you’ll find that, eventually, every action we take boils down to the same fundamental motivator.
We believe that what we do will improve our situation — the way we feel.
We dress it up with different language (pleasure, respect, security, fulfillment, peace) and chase after it through different vehicles (money, status, relationships, craft, contribution), but deep down we’re all after the same thing.
Happiness.
And even if you land on a purely altruistic “because I want them to be happy,” — it’s still satisfying YOUR desire (for them to be happy).
(Actually, making others happy is one of the surest ways to make yourself happy. Win-win.)
Now, whether what you’re chasing will actually make you happier — or you only thinkit will — is a different story.
But if the eventual goal of every human action is in fact happiness, I’d argue that the primary question of any life worth living should be:
What is it that makes me happy — truly happy — and how do I achieve that?
Happiness as the ultimate goal of life isn’t some revelation. Aristotle figured it out two thousand years ago.
He called it eudaimonia, or the final good (telos). Chosen for its own sake. The end beneath all other ends.
Twenty-four centuries later, this insight still holds. But it raises an obvious next question:
If happiness is the goal — how do you actually get there?
Fundamentally, happiness is a felt state. A mental state. It lives in your mind.
Not in the bank account, not in the job title, not in the relationship. Those things can improve the circumstances for experiencing that mental state, sure. But they are not the state itself.
And at its root, that mental state comes down to this:
The gap between what you want and what you have.
To close that gap, you can do two things.
Most people pick a side and think the other is deluded.
You’re either a hustler or a monk.
So — is one better than the other?
Striving, for example, can go wrong. You could chase something you desperately want and still not get it. That would make you miserable, wouldn’t it?
And even when it seems to be working, there’s still another risk. I’m sure you’ve experienced wanting something badly, and then actually getting it. What happened?
I remember when the iPhone 3G — the first iPhone that was sold here in Holland — came out. Seeing that little brick with its breathtaking screen, able to not just show you greyscale icons, but actual full-color videos, got the inner tech-geek in me borderline obsessively excited. I wanted it so badly.
It wasn’t until a year later, after seeing the presentation of its next iteration — which thrilled me to the point where I just could not help myself any longer — the iPhone 4, that I took the plunge and spent my hard-earned cash.
When I got it, I was ecstatic. I played with it for hours, trying out all kinds of settings, endlessly shooting pics and videos with the unmatched camera, then reviewing and even editing them on its tiny stunning screen.
But then, as I’m sure you’ve experienced, the newness started wearing off. Sure, I still loved it and used it every day, but it normalized. Even with all its fancy, cutting-edge tech sitting right there in my pocket, it became just “my phone.”
And that same thing happened with the car I bought, roughly 15 years later. One that I’d been dreaming about, took detours on my walks just to see it parked in the neighborhood, and had even set as my wallpaper image.
That dulling — the way something you desperately wanted loses its magic once it’s yours — is actually a well-researched feature of how your brain works.
One of the key players in your brain’s reward system is dopamine. And dopamine doesn’t reward you for having something — it rewards you for getting something.
It spikes in response to the surprise of a new reward, then fades once you’ve gotten it. Once your brain has catalogued something as “expected,” the signal that made it feel so good in the first place starts to dull. 1
So your brain adapts. Whatever once felt extraordinary becomes your new normal — and once it does, it stops registering as a source of happiness. Psychologists call this hedonic adaptation: the tendency to return to a baseline level of happiness regardless of what changes in your life. 2
Whether it’s the promotion, the gadget, the shiny new object — the spike fades, the baseline returns. And so the hedonic treadmill keeps you chasing the next one. And the next. And the next.
In a way, we can see this as our biology trying to tell us something.
If the high fades that fast, maybe what you were chasing wasn’t the right thing.
Chasing happiness through getting what you want (when what you want is actually nothing more than a surge of dopamine) is, by design, a game you can’t win by playing harder.
In fact, playing harder is exactly how you’ll lose.
Now — this doesn’t mean all striving is doomed. It means striving aimed at constantly getting the next shiny object is doomed. The spike-chasing kind. The kind that runs on ‘I’ll be happy when...’
There is a different kind. But before we get to that — what about approaching happiness from the opposite direction?
If getting what you want can’t reliably make you happy, what about not wanting it in the first place?
That’s what accepting is. Being totally ok with reality as it currently is.
And on the surface, this sounds almost bulletproof. Things are already the way they are. There’s nothing to do, really. Nothing to change. Nothing to chase.
The only bottleneck here would be your capacity for actually accepting things for what they are (which, as it turns out, is easier said than done).
So, does that imply we should all just plant our ass on mount contemplation and give up wanting anything?
Well, technically you could. But then what about everything you’d miss out on?
You really want whatever it is you want, right?
The house? The spouse? The kids? The car?
Experiences? Adventures? Growth?
Pure acceptance would mean renouncing almost all of the things that make life worth living for most of us. So for the vast majority of people that’s not a viable option.
Also, we’re a moving species, living in a moving world.
We have a natural need to iterate. That’s evolution.
If we didn’t, we’d let entropy — the nature of things automatically moving towards disorder, unless energy is invested to prevent that; like a room getting messy without the effort of keeping it tidy — destroy us.
So there’s truth in both striving and accepting.
But neither, on its own, is likely to make you truly happy.
The answer, then, isn’t in choosing between them, but in the interplay of both. That’s where your best shot at happiness lives.
Think of it as a deep well.
At the bottom is utter despair.
The top — the opening — is light.
Acceptance is the water.
Cultivating your capacity for acceptance is like raising the well’s water level. The higher it gets, the harder it is to sink to the bottom.
Your baseline happiness — where you’d be floating — rises.
Striving is the rope.
Climbing that rope moves you toward the opening.
It’s faster than raising the water. And the climb itself is rewarding — new perspectives, new experiences, the thrill of becoming more capable than you were yesterday. Some of your deepest happiness lives right there, in the upward journey itself.
But the rope does carry risks. Setbacks, slip-ups, and things beyond your control can knock you off. Sometimes you’ll be able to grab onto the rope again and keep the drop to a minimum. Other times the hits you take send you plummeting much deeper.
Climbing a rope out of a dry well is even more risky.
Fall from too high, and you’ll smash into rock bottom.
In contrast, fall into deep water and you’ll just plunge and resurface. Shaken, perhaps, but fine.
Same fall, but here it won’t destroy you.
And the water is more than just a safety net. The higher its level, the less you even have to climb to reach the opening.
So it doesn’t just protect you on the way down — it lifts your starting point on the way up.
So then what about filling the well entirely with water, so we don’t need to climb anymore at all?
It’s possible. But as we’ve already seen, this would mean renouncing almost everything you’ll ever dream of. That alone makes it an unrealistic path for most of us.
But there’s a paradox here, that makes this even less viable — and shows just how dependent these two sides really are.
The well isn’t going to fill itself.
Do nothing and the water actually evaporates — entropy is at work here too.
Because even though accepting might seem passive (and in its application, it is — you’re at rest, at peace, essentially doing nothing), to cultivate that capacity takes work.
That capacity for accepting is what’s called equanimity.
Equanimity is a skill. And skills don’t develop passively — they live on the striving side. Like a muscle, it has to be trained. The stronger it gets, the higher the water rises. Neglect it and it weakens — the water drops.
So:
To accept, you need to strive.
And to be clear — equanimity is not numbness.
It’s not a dulled, dial-tone existence where you just stop caring. It’s quite the opposite. A sharpened awareness. The ability to rest in the gap between stimulus and response. To recognize your instinctive reactions for what they are, and choose your response — rather than being dragged around by impulse.
But the paradox runs in the other direction too.
Without equanimity, striving is more likely to turn reactive. You chase because you’re anxious. You build because you’re afraid of falling behind.
You optimize because your feed told you you’re not enough.
Better striving — the kind that actually moves you up the rope — comes from calm.
From clarity. From having built enough inner ground to know the difference between an impulse and a direction.
Equanimity doesn’t kill your ambition. Far from it. It refines it, turning reactive grasping into deliberate action.
And deliberate action is the only kind that compounds.
So striving and accepting don’t just coexist — they feed each other.
Strive to build your acceptance. Accept to ease your striving.
So for our best shot at a truly happy life, we shouldn’t just strive or just accept. We need both.
Not because it’s a nice compromise. But because they literally can’t function without each other.
The water doesn’t rise without the effort of striving. Striving doesn’t hold without the steadiness of the water.
And the striving isn’t just for you. The things you build, the problems you solve, the work you put into the world — that raises the water level in other people’s wells too.
But what should you actually strive for — and how?
Because you could fight entropy all day long and still end up exhausted, unfulfilled, climbing a rope in the wrong well entirely.
Entropy-reversal tells you whether your striving is productive — whether you’re genuinely building something or just running on the treadmill. But it doesn’t tell you which specific fights are yours.
Not every worthy battle is your battle. You could spend a lifetime building someone else’s vision, solving someone else’s problems, and never once express what’s actually in you.
That deeper question — what’s the work that only you can do — is at the heart of everything I write about here. There’s a structure underneath the striving side. Three domains that reinforce each other when you get them right:
Health. Skill. Wealth.
Not in the way you might think. But that’s for next time.
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1: The canonical evidence that midbrain dopamine neurons encode a reward prediction error signal—bursting to unpredicted rewards, shifting to reward‑predictive cues as learning proceeds, and showing depressed activity when expected rewards are omitted—comes from Wolfram Schultz and colleagues’ primate electrophysiology, especially Schultz, Dayan & Montague, “A Neural Substrate of Prediction and Reward,” Science, 1997.
2: The classic formulation of “hedonic relativism” and what later came to be called hedonic adaptation or the hedonic treadmill—our tendency to return to a baseline level of happiness despite life changes—appears in Brickman & Campbell’s chapter “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society” in M. H. Appley (Ed.), Adaptation‑level theory: A symposium (pp. 287–302). New York: Academic Press, 1971
I’m Coen Modder — a lifelong learner, systems thinker, and guide for those navigating the creative, digital, and internal landscapes of modern life.
From writing Hack the Piano and building a six-figure music education platform, to helping creators align their energy and income, I’ve always worked at the edge where structure meets soul.
Now I focus on helping others find clarity, design alignment, and build what matters, through the interplay of Health, Skill, and Wealth — three levers I explore and optimize to unlock purpose, freedom, and fulfillment.
