There is an episode of The Twilight Zone called A Nice Place to Visit. In it, a small-time criminal named Rocky Valentine is shot while fleeing the police after robbing a pawn shop. He wakes up unharmed and is greeted by a cheerful, avuncular man in a white suit named Pip. Pip tells Rocky that in this magical place he has woken up to, he can have anything he wants.

Money? Done. A beautiful apartment? Done. Women? Done. A casino where every bet comes good? Done.

Rocky cannot believe that he has somehow made it to heaven. Someone in the celestial accounting department has made a glorious mistake. This is his idea of paradise. No consequences. No effort. No waiting. No risk. Every desire is met the moment it appears.

For a while, he loves it. Then something strange happens. The winning becomes boring. The women become boring. The money becomes meaningless. Even crime loses its thrill because the outcome is guaranteed in advance. There is no danger, no uncertainty, no chance of failure.

After a month of this, Rocky cannot stand it anymore. He asks Pip to send him to “the other place”. He says he does not belong in heaven. Pip looks at him and says, “Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven, Mr Valentine? This is the other place.” An then laughs maniacially 

Fans of The Good Place, and to some extent Pluribus, might recognise the premise.

A happy life is what most of us want. And with good reason.

A life without pleasure, joy, laughter, beauty and comfort would be grim. But if the whole purpose of life becomes the removal of friction, the increase of comfort, and the pursuit of good feelings, we may end up building a more dangerous kind of existence. The pursuit of happiness alone is a false metric.

For one thing, when we talk about happiness, do we really know what we mean?

The ancient Greeks had a useful distinction.

Hedonic happiness is the pursuit of pleasure, comfort, positive emotion, or the absence of negative feeling. In short, hedonic happiness asks: do I feel good right now?

Eudaimonic happiness is concerned with meaning, purpose, growth, self-acceptance and contribution. Eudaimonic happiness asks: does this matter in the long run?

The first shapes how your day feels. The second shapes how your life feels.

There is no right or wrong here. Hedonic happiness has its place. Pleasure has its place. Comfort has its place. Joy certainly has its place. But as the episode shows, Rocky’s hell is not that he is denied pleasure. His hell is that pleasure is all there is.

No, it is not the latest workout trend.

It is a somewhat modern psychological term with ancient philosophical roots. It describes our tendency to keep running after happiness, while forgetting that the ground keeps moving beneath us. The hedonic treadmill, also called hedonic adaptation, describes how people quickly return to a stable baseline of happiness after positive or negative life changes.

You get the promotion, the house, the new car. You feel great for a while. But soon your expectations reset, and you are back at “normal”. So you keep chasing new goals, believing the next thing will finally make you happy.

Hence the treadmill: constant motion, little lasting progress. We confuse motion for meaning.

This may be the most counterintuitive idea in the essay. It certainly was for me.

A good life requires tension and responsibility. That is what I have come to understand a meaningful life to be. Not constant happiness. Not the absence of discomfort. Not a life where every desire is instantly met.

Meaning needs some gap between where we are and what life is asking of us. A book unwritten. A relationship that requires courage. A child to care for. A business to build. A skill to master. A truth to tell. A responsibility we cannot outsource.

That tension is not a bug in our operating system. It is the feature. Happiness is largely a response to conditions. Meaning is a response to a demand.

Viktor Frankl makes a strange but important point in Man’s Search for Meaning. We assume mental health means inner equilibrium, a state of perfect calm where all tension has been removed. Frankl disagreed.

He argued that human beings need a certain kind of tension: the tension between what we have already done and what we still have to do, between what we are and what we might become.

He gives the image of an architect trying to strengthen a decrepit arch. The architect does not remove the load. He increases it. The added pressure helps the parts hold together more firmly.

That is a very different picture of the good life. A good life may require the right burden.

There are two parts to meaningful work. First, it is work that is intertwined with identity. It expresses something essential in us. Second, it is work that demands something of us.

This is not to say that more stress, more tension or more burden is always better. It isn’t. But the right burden, freely chosen, can hold a person together. It can also expand you into the person life is asking you to become.

At work, we often ask: am I happy?

But perhaps the better questions are: what is being asked of me here? What responsibility am I avoiding? What do I care about enough to endure difficulty for? What kind of tension would make me larger rather than smaller?

The key is that the answers need to come from deep within you, in the absence of external pressure. Because external pressure can create compliance. Meaning requires consent. Meaning requires coherence with who you are

Rocky Valentine’s punishment was not fire and brimstone. It was a life in which nothing mattered because nothing was required of him. Every appetite was fed. Every wish was granted. Every game was won before it began. And because there was no possibility of loss, there was also no possibility of meaning.

That is the danger in making happiness the measure of a life. We may get better at asking for comfort when what we need is a calling. We may keep trying to remove tension when what we need is the right kind of tension. We may mistake ease for peace.

A meaningful life will not always feel happy in the moment. Sometimes it will feel difficult, uncertain, inconvenient and demanding. But it will also feel alive. It will ask something of you. It will give you something to serve, something to build, something to protect, something to become worthy of.

Perhaps the question is not, “Am I happy?” Perhaps the better question is, “What is life asking of me now?”

Because a nice place to visit can become a terrible place to live when there is nothing left to answer.

A quick note before you go

I’m running the next Finding Meaning in Work workshop on Saturday 30 May 2026.

It’s for people who can feel that something in their working life needs closer attention.

Maybe the work is going well enough, but no longer feels fully yours. Maybe you’ve become competent at something without stopping to ask what it is all in service of. Maybe you just need time, structure, and a room that helps you think properly.

This is not a talk. It’s an active workshop with guided prompts, writing exercises, reflection, and discussion. You’ll leave with a workbook, a personal manifesto, and clearer bearings on who you are, what matters to you, and how to move toward work that fits.

When: Saturday 30 May 2026, 11am–3pm
Where: Sanders Place, Richmond
Lunch: Included

If you’re unsure whether it’s a fit, just reply with a line about where you’re at with work right now and I’ll tell you honestly.

If you’d like to join, you can book below. Use DBN2026 at checkout.