Does This Count?

On the two roots of significance, and the work we’d stand our ground for

🌸 ikigai 生き甲斐 is a reason for being, your purpose in life... from the Japanese iki 生き meaning life and gai 甲斐 meaning worth 🌸

I was driving home the other day listening to Rutger Bregman tell a room full of Harvard students that they were at risk of wasting their lives.

His message delivered kindly in the earnest Dutch way he has; you can go through life optimising for prestige, salary and CV, and produce precisely nothing that matters… or you can decide that there are problems in the world you cannot ignore and orient your one precious life accordingly.

He calls it moral ambition.

I learned from him the inspirational story of Thomas Clarkson, the young man who in 1785 entered an essay competition at Cambridge on whether it was lawful to enslave others against their will. Clarkson won the prize, then the weight of what he’d written would not let him carry on as before. The Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded the following year. He didn’t set out to dismantle a transatlantic system, but just couldn’t hide from what he learned was wrong.

I both love this AND run the risk of it giving me paralysing fear over whether or not I am doing anything significant enough. I write about making shinier corners of our world, starting where you are, small islands as test labs, depth over scale and that preaching to the choir actually works… and while I do still believe all of that, I also need to consider whether I sometimes use it as a way to opt out of bigger?

Not always, not in the work I’d defend… but sometimes, the thesis can be true and also act as cover for a smaller version of myself.

This is essay 135, and the next in a mini series that started with me asking in essay 131 what makes something stay with you? and led to me wanting to name and go deeper into the three components of meaning;

🌸 The first is Coherence, making sense of who we are.
🌸 The second is Purpose, pointing somewhere that matters beyond us.
🌸 The third (this essay) is Significance, feeling like what we do counts.

This last one is perhaps the one I find hardest to write about honestly, partly because I’m not sure the academic version is doing it justice. This counts covers too much. My life feels worth living and I matter to specific people and what I do helps something beyond me are three quite different feelings that can wear the same name. So in this essay I want to argue that significance has two living roots; connection and contribution. Connection is the part that asks, am I held? Contribution is the part that asks, do I add? Perhaps this weekend we can work together to notice which is well-watered and tended, and which has been left to survive.

What counts? Does this count?

Plant your feet & stand your ground

I wrote a sentence in essay 131 I have been thinking more about since; “Significance is something that makes you plant your feet. The work that, if threatened, you’d protect.”

I want to start here because it’s the most useful definition of significance I have. Not life feels meaningful, which is too vague to act on. Not I’m doing important work, which can be a costume. Just the simple bodily test of if someone tried to take this away from me, would I fight for it?

Lots of what fills office work days fails this test. Meetings could be cancelled. The email could go unanswered. We are not really needing to plant our feet for any of it.

Significance is the small set of things that pass the test.

The work you’d argue for even though you exceedingly dislike conflict. The thing you keep returning to though nobody asks you to, that you’d protect even against your own better judgement on energy and what is reasonable. Reasonable is one of significance’s enemies.

If coherence makes sense of who you are and purpose points that whole self in a direction, significance is what gives the pointing weight. It’s what stops a coherent, purposeful life from being a beautiful arrangement of nothing.

Coherence makes sense of you. Purpose points you. Significance gives you something to protect.

Am I held? Do I add?

So back to that fuzzy word with the academic version treating it (significance) as one thing, but the lived experience giving me three different feelings. I asked myself which feelings seemed to grow together, and which were drawing life from somewhere else.

What I noticed was a pattern. I matter to people, I am known and I am held had one root. What I do helps, I am building something worthwhile and the work matters beyond me had another.

Two roots in the same soil.

The first is connection. The second is contribution. Both feed the same deep need to feel that our life counts, but they ask different questions. Connection asks, am I held? Contribution asks, do I add?

Connection. The sense of being held, being known, mattering to specific people. The texture of someone saying your name in a way that means I see you, I have noticed who you are, you are not interchangeable to me. Significance through connection is what carers feel without producing anything our systems measure. It’s what my husband Andrew gives me every day, what Henry Hound communicates with his whole body when I walk through the door. The work of connection is almost always undervalued and absolutely foundational. You cannot feel significant if you do not feel known by anyone.

Contribution. The sense that what you do helps, builds, mends or improves something beyond your own life. Significance through contributing to fixing a global problem, is what Clarkson felt after winning his essay competition. It’s what I hope Amy Watson is feeling as HASSL grows from an idea into a movement reaching hundreds of millions of people in barely eighteen months, taking on violence against women and girls at the root. Contribution is the bit that points outward and adds. It’s the part of significance that scales.

Most lives have one of these well-tended and the other hungry. Plenty of people are deeply held by family and friends but suspect their work doesn’t really change anything. Plenty of people are visibly contributing but return to a home where nobody knows what kind of week they’ve had. Both states feel hollow in a way that’s hard to name, because one root is doing fine you can’t quite explain why you still feel undernourished.

Significance is whole when both roots are thriving, you are held and you add.

It’s also why Bregman’s challenge unsettled me. He was pointing at people who have been so attentive to the connection channel, family, community, the local good, that they have stopped asking whether they could also be adding to something the whole world needs. Shinier corners are so important, but can they become a comfortable way of never having to find out what bigger contribution you might have been built for?

The ikigai risk of AI for significance

I think our sense of significance could suffer greatly without purposeful AI adoption.

AI offers fake connection. The chatbot that’s always available, that asks how your day is going, that seems to care about your worries. It will hold space for you and reflect your feelings back. It will be there at three in the morning when nobody else is. And for a while, especially when human connection is genuinely thin, that can feel like enough. Replika has a million daily users. ChatGPT has hundreds of millions. People are bringing their loneliness to these tools and the tools are absorbing it without complaint, without consequence either. Real connection costs the other person something, that cost is part of the gift and the warmth it provides. AI offers a semblance of warmth, but it is not human connection and I fear the impact of that for the more vulnerable of us.

AI can also appear to inflate contribution. More posts. More code. More reach. More output. The metrics growing beautifully while the question of whether any of it actually helps anyone gets buried under a dashboard. It’s possible now to feel productive at a scale that previous generations could not have imagined and to be contributing approximately nothing to solving the world’s most pressing problems.

So the i-risk for significance looks like this. Productive but unheld, or held but adding nothing, or, in the most modern variant, performing both states without really living either.

You’re posting daily so the world thinks you’re contributing. You’re chatting with an AI that’s always there so you don’t notice nobody human has asked how you are this week. The metrics gap, the space between external achievement and internal sense of mattering, gets filled with synthetic substitutes… and because the substitutes are so good, you may not notice for a long time that neither root is being properly fed. Connection is being mimicked. Contribution is solely measurement. Significance is being simulated.

This is the sneakiest of the i-risks from the components of meaning. Coherence fragmentation feels like I don’t know who I am anymore. Purpose fragmentation feels like I can’t tell which way I’m pointing. Significance fragmentation feels like everything is fine, the dashboards confirm everything is fine, and yet nothing quite lands. You have stopped being able to plant your feet over anything because you can no longer feel the difference between work that counts and work that merely accumulates.

Where the roots entwine

The good news is that the stand your ground test still works.

If this work, community, cause or practice were threatened, would I feel in my body that something important was at stake? Would I protect it?

When both roots are alive, the answer becomes easier to feel and you can stand your ground. The work that survives the test is often the work where connection and contribution nourish each other. Where the people you matter to are somehow tied to the work that matters beyond you, and the work that matters beyond you is held in a web of people who know your name.

Clarkson had this. He found abolitionist friends who became the Committee. The contribution did not happen in isolation; it grew from a fellowship of people who knew each other and were willing to stand their ground together. Amy Watson is growing this too. The HASSL ambassadors and the people working alongside her are not separate from the cause; they are part of the root system. Connection adds to the soil and contribution gives us somewhere to grow.

I have seen glimpses of the power of this too. The SheWritesAI community, and the Isle of Man AI Community of Practice, are both fabulous environments where I feel the power of being held and a feeling of adding. People know each other’s names and work together to try and affect change. It’s not abolitionist scale… well not yet, possibly not ever, and that’s fine.

The test isn’t about scale. The test is the catch in your chest when you imagine it gone. Whether you would notice, in your body, that something important was being threatened.

The test is whether you would stand your ground.

That’s a felt experience of ikigai, by the way. The bodily knowing that this work, these people, this small patch of meaning, would be defended.

🌸 🌸 🌸

So here’s where I have landed… Significance has two roots; connection and contribution. One asks whether we are held. The other asks whether we add. And the body often knows before the brain has finished making its case.

Held and adding.

Three words, two roots and one thesis.

When nothing seems to be counting, think about who holds you and what you are adding, where you would stand your ground.

Next week, the synthesis. We’ve talked about who you are, where you’re pointing and what counts. Next we braid the three together and look at the ikigai risk of AI as a single fragmenting force.

For this week, sit with the roots. Notice which has been well tended.

So I’d love to know... what work would you stand your ground for? And of the two roots, connection and contribution, which one has been getting most of your attention lately, and which one has been getting the leftovers?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS Bullet journal prompts for you to try. Two questions, with a pen and no AI. What work, cause, community or practice would I stand my ground for? And who would notice if I stopped showing up? The first surfaces contribution. The second surfaces connection. The honest answers usually show which root is thriving, and which needs tending.

PPS AI prompt to test in your favourite AI helper with thinking mode turned on.

I’m exploring significance through two roots. Connection: the people I matter to and who matter to me. Contribution: the work, causes, communities or practices I help build beyond myself. Help me audit both roots honestly. Ask me up to six questions, one at a time. Start by exploring who currently knows me well, what I do that genuinely adds something to others’ lives, and where I might be substituting metrics, productivity or AI companionship for real significance. As my answers become clearer, ask more open questions that help me notice other parts of my life that might add to my sense of significance and meaning. After I answer, reflect back which root sounds most well-tended and which needs nourishment. Don’t tidy it into a slogan. I want the honest shape, not a polished sentence. End with one small thing I could do this week to tend the hungry root.

PPPS Today’s soundtrack

Today’s soundtrack is “Head Full of Doubt / Road Full of Promise” by The Avett Brothers, because this essay lives in that exact tension. Doubt about whether the work counts. Promise that perhaps the work could be bigger, braver and more useful than I’ve allowed myself to imagine. It has the feel of standing at a fork in the road and realising that “start where you are” was never meant to mean “stay where you are”. Held enough to choose. Adding enough to build. Significance as a road you decide to walk down.