In the fall of 1905, 30-year-old Albert Schweitzer dropped several important letters into a mailbox. One of them was his resignation – he was a school principal. The rest were to family and friends: he was leaving his old life, he told them, and enrolling in medical school. He was going to become a doctor in the jungles of Africa. 

It’s not as though Schweitzer hadn’t already achieved a lot for a 30-year-old. He had doctorate degrees in Philosophy and Theology, he was a world-renowned organist, and he’d written a famous and influential book. ¹ He had every reason to feel glad about his achievements, and he did. But something deep inside Schweitzer tugged at him. He’d been troubled his entire life by human suffering, and he was intrigued by the paradoxical words of Jesus: “Whosoever would save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake shall save it.” ² Schweitzer volunteered and served others in different ways, but it never felt complete; he longed for a cause he could dedicate his whole life to. When he learned one day of people in equatorial Africa in desperate need of medical care, he knew he’d found the answer to Jesus’s riddle. 

Less than two years before this, George Bernard Shaw, on the verge of becoming one of the world’s most famous playwrights, wrote in an epistle to a friend:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. ³

Becoming “worn out”, even in the service of a great cause, doesn’t sound like something most of us aspire to. A comfortable home, happy children, and a less-stressful job are closer to most of our hearts’ desires. Perhaps Schweitzer and Shaw are noble but eccentric characters blessed with more energy than the rest of us, but I suspect it would be a mistake to dismiss them. Their examples, while dramatic, reveal a much-neglected open secret: one of the surest, fastest ways to become happy is to be useful to a cause greater than yourself. 

An Unexpected Formula for Happiness

“Losing yourself to save yourself” is a bizarre notion. Happiness, we imagine, is something to be figured out in solitude and then carried around inside us like some warm and glowing ember. The novelist Zadie Smith underscores this fruitless pursuit in her essay “Find Your Beach”:

The dream is not only of happiness, but of happiness conceived in perfect isolation. Find your beach in the middle of the city. Find your beach no matter what else is happening. Do not be distracted from finding your beach. Find your beach even if—as in the case of this wall painting—it is not actually there. Create this beach inside yourself. Carry it with you wherever you go. The pursuit of happiness has always seemed to me a somewhat heavy American burden, but in Manhattan it is conceived as a peculiar form of duty. ⁴

It’s no surprise that a lot of us – Americans and non-Americans alike – balk at the idea of happiness being something that’s not about you, and not found or practiced in isolation. Schweitzer didn’t often use the word “happiness” in his writings but his profound sense of meaning and purpose came from helping others. We can extend “others” to include animals, plants, and the entire earth. There is a deep and abiding satisfaction to be found in not thinking about how happy you are or aren’t because you’re so focused on the happiness of someone or something else.

Modern science confirms some of this, including the so-called “Helper’s High,” described as a warm and stimulating feeling one gets after volunteering or serving others.  ⁵ Most of us have known this feeling, whether it was raking a neighbor’s leaves or giving up our seat for an elderly person on public transit. I find it ironic that a number of people object to the idea of feeling good after serving others, as though it somehow cheapens or compromises the act, and yet focus most of their time on how to make themselves happy.

But is being there for your neighbor really comparable to building hospitals and saving lives in equatorial Africa? Are these even the same thing, especially close up? Schweitzer would argue that it is. In his autobiography, he explains that, while he felt a burning desire to help others his whole life, this needn’t be on the same scale for everyone or look the same:

Of all the will toward the ideal in mankind only a small part can manifest itself in public action. All the rest of this force must be content with small and obscure deeds. The sum of these, however, is a thousand times stronger than the acts of those who receive wide public recognition. The latter, compared to the former, are like the foam on the waves of a deep ocean. ⁶

Being a “force of Nature”, to use Shaw’s words, doesn’t require a high Q-rating or an impressive list of things you’ve done, places you’ve been, and people you’ve schmoozed with. If anything, wanting to impress yourself or others misses the whole point: to forget yourself in the process of being useful. Schweitzer, for all his fame, remained humble throughout his life. He is one of the outliers; he is the foam on the sea waves. You and I may become foam or, more likely and just as importantly, the water beneath. 

But that still leaves a yawning question: If there is so much well-being to be found in a purpose greater than ourselves, why don’t more of us do it? 

Self-Transcendence > Self-Actualization

One reflexive answer might be, “Well, what about my needs? I need to make sure those are taken care of, too. A warm bed, enough money, a good sex life…” This is what makes Jesus’s ancient imperative a Catch-22: either the things we need take care of themselves, or we realize we didn’t need them as much as we thought we did. To find ourselves, we have to lose ourselves first. And Catch-22s are difficult for most of us.

Our concern with our well-being is rooted in survival instincts to meet our needs and ensure nothing thwarts them. This is perhaps reinforced by Abraham Maslow and his ubiquitous contribution to modern self-help: the famous pyramid, or hierarchy of needs. At the bottom, Maslow explains, are the most basic things like food and shelter. The goal is to reach the highest tier, “self-actualization.”

And what is self-actualization? I don’t think Maslow envisioned it in the form of anxious individuals running from one opportunity to the next, one relationship to the next, hoping that somehow happiness will be just around the corner. And yet this is how so many seem to interpret the term today. More interestingly, near the end of his life, Maslow re-examined his ideas about what it means to be “self-actualized.” He theorized that it required something more profound than self-development – that it required transcendence:

“Transcendence refers to the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness… relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.” ⁷

Viktor Frankl, the founder of Logotherapy, has a different view, however. For him, self-transcendence – losing ourselves in a greater cause – is not something we have to postpone until we meet all our other needs. It’s just the opposite:

The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence. ⁸

Here again is the paradox Jesus describes, only in modern and straightforward language. To find yourself, you mustn’t focus on yourself: focus instead on something more important. Frankl survived several brutal years in concentration camps during the Holocaust. If anyone tested and lived this truth, it was he. 

And as for Albert Schweitzer: he accomplished his ambitious plan to complete medical school and work as a doctor in Africa – today he’s remembered every bit as much for his humanitarian contributions as he is for his scholarly ones. Above all, he’s remembered for his guiding ethical principle, “Reverence for Life.” He died at the ripe old age of 90 in the same hospital he’d labored for years in, in Gabon.

In 1935, thirty years after he made his dramatic decision to attend medical school, Schweitzer addressed the graduating class at a boys’ school in England. In it, he shared with them his discovery of what makes a life most meaningful:

You will need to say: “I don’t only want to live an exterior kind of life.” You don’t wish to be a person who says: “I want success, I want to have a good position, I want to be comfortable in life”; but you wish to be somebody who says: “I want to keep my own soul.”

…

In fighting against evil we are looking for volunteers. I would have you say: “I want to be one of those volunteers. I don’t wish to pass the time only for myself, — in resting, in enjoying myself, in reading the papers…but I wish to give some of my time for the work which needs to be done in our human society. I must find something where my heart will be happy.

That is what you ought to look for in life: never rest until you have found it. ⁹

You may have already found your life’s purpose: perhaps it is your grandchildren. Perhaps it’s volunteering at the botanical garden, or working in nature conservation, or being a kind and effective physical therapist or dental hygienist. Perhaps you have several purposes that all find their common thread in helping others. But if you don’t have one – if you don’t know what yours is – I echo Schweitzer’s advice: Look for it, and don’t rest until you find it. And if necessary, take the leap and forget yourself first.

1. The Quest of the Historical Jesus. He also wrote a seminal book on the music of Bach
2. The New Testament: Mark 8:35.
3. From the dedication to his play, Man and Superman.
4. From her essay, “Find Your Beach.”
5. Luks, Allan. “Helper’s High.” Psychology Today, October 1988.
6. From Out of My Life and Thoughts.
7. From The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.
8. From Mankind’s Search of Meaning.
9. From a speech recorded in The Silcoatian.