Yasemin Aydın
I have a habit of returning to films I love, rereading books years later, sometimes even watching the same series for a second or third time.
It is not simply nostalgia.
As we change, the story changes with us. The film remains the same film, the book the same book; but the person encountering it is no longer the same person. The intervening years, the things we have lost and gained, disappointments we did not anticipate, children who have grown a little older, and questions we have learned to ask differently all become part of the work.
Perhaps this is one of the strange privileges of returning to art: sometimes we discover that what has changed most profoundly is not our interpretation of the story, but the interpreter.
Recently, during a conversation with a child about what actually matters in life, I found myself thinking again about Pixar’s Soul.
Children have an inconvenient gift for reducing questions we have spent years surrounding with sophisticated language to something embarrassingly simple.
Why does success matter?
What do you want to become when you grow up?
What happens if you never become it?
And what does it actually mean to be a good person?
None of these questions has an easy answer.
That is why I watched Soul again.
This time, what remained with me was not primarily its jazz, its vision of the afterlife or even Pixar’s extraordinary visual imagination.
It was a simpler question:
What must we be pursuing for a life to count as genuinely lived?
Soul gives that question an almost brutally clear metaphor.
Joe Gardner is a gifted jazz pianist who has spent years waiting for the moment when his “real” life will finally begin. Then the opportunity arrives. He gets the chance to perform with the musicians he admires. The door he has been waiting for seems finally to open.
And just as he believes he has reached the threshold of the life he was meant to have, an absurdly ordinary accident kills him.
The metaphor could hardly be more explicit: Joe has spent his life climbing towards a summit, only to fall into an abyss immediately after reaching what he thought was the top.
But the film’s more interesting moment comes later.
Joe returns to life. He plays the concert he has imagined for years.
And nothing happens.
Or rather, the concert happens — but the transformation he expected does not.
He has achieved the thing around which he organised his sense of self, and yet he remains himself.
This is the more unsettling death in the film: not the death of Joe’s body, but the collapse of the story he has told himself about what achievement will finally do for him.
The question is no longer simply what happens if we fail to reach our defining goal.
It is what happens if we reach it.
What remains when the future around which we have organised our identity finally becomes the present?
Success and meaning are not the same thing
I have never believed that human beings should live without aims.
Quite the opposite. I think a life needs direction: things worth pursuing, standards by which we examine ourselves and some conception of a person we would consider it worthwhile to become.
But direction is not the same thing as success.
Modern societies have become exceptionally good at measuring the latter.
Titles. Income. Visibility. Degrees. Followers. Awards. Positions. Publications. Promotions. Projects completed. Recognition received.
Meaning is more troublesome.
It resists dashboards.
And human beings have a persistent tendency to confuse what can be measured with what matters.
So life quietly adopts the grammar of project management.
When I achieve this, I will relax.
When I reach that position, I will consider myself successful.
When I cross this threshold, I will finally allow myself to feel that my life is going well.
Psychology has been warning us for some time that flourishing cannot be reduced to either pleasure or achievement.
Carol Ryff’s influential work on eudaimonic wellbeing, for example, describes a good life in terms that include purpose, personal growth, autonomy, meaningful relationships and the capacity to live in greater coherence with one’s values.
Frank Martela and Michael Steger similarly distinguish between different dimensions of meaning: coherence, the sense that one’s life is intelligible; purpose, the sense that it has direction; and significance, the sense that one’s existence matters.
These distinctions are important because an outwardly successful life can be experienced as profoundly meaningless.
And a life that would appear unremarkable according to most public metrics can possess extraordinary coherence, purpose and depth.
Joe Gardner’s mistake, then, is not that he loves jazz.
Why should loving something deeply be a problem? There is nothing wrong with developing a gift, pursuing excellence or dedicating years to a craft.
His mistake is to require achievement to provide existential confirmation.
The concert is no longer simply something he wants to do.
It becomes evidence that he has finally become the person he was supposed to be.
We make a dangerous bargain when we ask success to answer questions of worth that success is incapable of answering.
Because the person the world calls successful and the person we might consider good, mature or fully alive are not necessarily the same person.
What do we mean by “the best version of yourself”?
I believe deeply in the possibility of becoming better.
Yet I feel uneasy whenever I hear the injunction to become “the best version of yourself”.
Contemporary culture has an extraordinary capacity to translate moral or existential aspirations into optimisation.
Become more productive.
More disciplined.
Fitter.
More focused.
More visible.
More efficient.
More successful.
The self becomes an enterprise undergoing permanent restructuring.
But perhaps our “best self” should mean something else.
To become more patient.
To be capable of recognising another person’s legitimate claim even when we desperately want to win the argument.
To remain just towards someone who has treated us unjustly.
To become quicker at recognising our own failures than cataloguing everyone else’s.
To stop measuring other human beings primarily by their usefulness to us.
To learn that someone else’s success does not diminish our worth.
To know when perseverance is courage and when it has become vanity.
To know when letting go is wisdom and when it is merely fear.
These qualities do not scale particularly well. They rarely produce spectacular narratives. Many cannot even be observed from the outside.
And yet they may tell us more about the person we are becoming than almost anything that appears on a résumé.
Different philosophical and religious traditions have developed their own vocabularies for this process of moral formation.
Aristotle spoke of virtue as something cultivated through practice and habituation. Confucian traditions placed enormous weight on moral cultivation through relationships, ritual and repeated conduct. Stoic philosophy distinguished between what lies within our control and what does not.
Sufi thought developed another vocabulary: the idea of the insan-ı kâmil, often translated as the “complete” or “mature” human being.
Read carefully, the interesting part of the concept is not a fantasy of moral perfection.
It is almost the opposite.
Human maturity is understood less as arriving at a flawless condition than as undergoing a continuing process of formation.
Fethullah Gülen, writing within this tradition, makes a distinction I find particularly useful: the capacities a person happens to possess are not themselves evidence of maturity; what matters is what that person does with them. He describes this as giving one’s will its due — taking responsibility for developing what has been entrusted to us rather than treating talent, circumstance or potential as achievements in themselves.
I find the idea valuable beyond its explicitly religious setting. It shifts attention away from what we have been given — intelligence, talent, opportunity, status — towards what we make of it. Moral worth, on this account, resides less in possession than in response.
The person who announces that they have arrived has misunderstood the journey.
What matters is not the possession of moral perfection but the repeated education of attention, intention and conduct.
There is something psychologically plausible in this older language.
Character is not established through isolated heroic decisions.
It accumulates.
You do not become patient by behaving patiently once.
Generosity is not a single donation.
Honesty matters most when telling the truth has a cost.
The self is built to a remarkable extent through repetitions that are too small to become stories.
When I tried to explain goodness to the child who had inadvertently started this train of thought, this was what I found myself returning to.
Being good when everybody is watching matters.
But becoming the kind of person who behaves decently when nobody is watching is something else.
Social psychology approaches the issue in different terms, but the underlying intuition is familiar: identity is not merely a proposition we hold about ourselves.
It is reinforced through behaviour, relationships, habits and the categories of action we gradually learn to experience as “like me” or “not like me”.
This is why becoming a good person makes more sense to me as a direction than as a destination.
It is more like travelling north than reaching North.
You never arrive at “northness”.
But you can know whether you are still moving in that direction.
The part of life we do not choose
There is, however, another problem with our contemporary obsession with becoming.
We do not make ourselves entirely by ourselves.
And we certainly do not author the whole of our lives.
We do not choose the families into which we are born, the historical moment we inherit, much of our biology, or the political and economic circumstances through which we will have to make a life.
We cannot know whom we will meet, whom we will lose, which opportunity will disappear, or which seemingly accidental encounter will alter the trajectory of everything that comes afterwards.
Anthropology has long been suspicious of the fantasy of the completely self-created individual.
Clifford Geertz famously described human beings as suspended in “webs of significance” they themselves have spun.
We enter stories that began before us.
Language is waiting.
Family is waiting.
Memory, social class, culture, institutions and inherited ways of understanding the world are already there.
The autonomous individual beloved by certain versions of modern self-help is therefore something of a fiction. We exercise agency, certainly, but never from nowhere.
This does not make human agency irrelevant.
On the contrary.
Perhaps one of the deepest tensions of human life lies precisely here: we must act seriously while knowing that we do not control the whole field on which we act.
Older religious traditions often expressed this tension through concepts such as providence, fate, surrender or trust.
Secular philosophy has its own vocabularies: contingency, finitude, uncertainty, acceptance.
The vocabulary matters.
But the underlying human problem is broader than any single tradition.
What belongs to me?
What does not?
Where does responsibility end and control become illusion?
We cannot determine everything that happens to us, but what happens to us does not wholly determine what we become.
There remains a field, sometimes painfully narrow, within which response is possible.
How will I behave in this situation?
What will I do with whatever capacities I possess?
What will suffering make of me?
What am I prepared to protect when protecting it becomes costly?
Can I lose something without allowing the loss to determine the moral quality of everything that follows?
Agency is not omnipotence. It is the capacity to answer for the part that is actually ours.
This produces a very different understanding of effort.
Do what is yours to do.
Do it seriously.
But do not imagine that the universe has entered into a contractual obligation to reward you for it.
Effort belongs partly to us. Outcome never belongs entirely to us.
Success therefore cannot prove the moral value of our actions.
Nor can failure automatically disprove it.
This is one reason modern achievement culture deserves more scrutiny than it receives.
It repeatedly implies that if we set the right goals, organise ourselves intelligently, cultivate the appropriate habits and work hard enough, we can design the life we want.
Sometimes we can.
Often we cannot.
Bodies become ill.
People die.
Economies collapse.
Governments change.
Families fracture.
Wars begin.
Other people make decisions.
History enters the room.
The fantasy of total self-authorship becomes especially cruel when circumstances cease to cooperate.
A mature philosophy of life therefore needs something between control and passivity.
Not “everything is up to me”.
Not “nothing is up to me”.
But something harder:
There are things I must attempt to change, things I must learn to endure, and wisdom consists partly in discovering which is which.
The Stoics would recognise this.
Religious traditions would recognise it too.
Different languages; an enduring human dilemma.
Do we find meaning or make it?
Soul repeatedly plays with the idea of the “spark”.
At first, the concept resembles one of contemporary culture’s favourite commandments: find your passion.
Somewhere inside each of us, the story goes, is one vocation, one calling, one singular thing we were meant to do.
Find it, and life will finally make sense.
This is an appealing idea.
It is also a heavy burden.
What happens if there is no singular calling?
What happens if your calling changes?
What happens if circumstances make the life you imagined impossible?
And what happens to all the years lived before you discovered this supposedly authentic purpose?
Research on meaning offers a more modest and, to me, more humane picture.
Meaning is not located exclusively in extraordinary missions or exceptional achievements.
Relationships matter.
Belonging matters.
Care matters.
Continuity matters.
Creation matters.
The ability to understand one’s life as possessing some narrative coherence matters.
Meaning may therefore be less like treasure buried somewhere inside us and more like a relationship we construct between ourselves, other people and the world.
This is also where anthropology complicates the radically individualised idea of purpose.
What we experience as meaningful is never simply an idea inside a solitary mind.
We learn value through relationships, cultures, histories and communities.
Even the question “What gives my life meaning?” is asked in a language we did not invent.
Our answer is personal.
But the materials from which we construct it are social.
This is why I find the command to “find your purpose” less helpful than another:
Do not lose your direction.
A goal can be completed.
A direction continues.
At twenty, the work that gives a life shape may look very different from what matters at fifty.
Relationships change.
Responsibilities change.
Abilities change.
The people who depend on us change.
There need not be one immutable mission beneath all of these phases.
What may persist is an orientation:
to use whatever capacities we have well;
to recognise the claims other people make upon us;
to remain capable of revising ourselves;
to value truth above convenience;
and to care at least as much about the kind of person our choices are forming as about the visible trace those choices leave behind.
No one becomes a person alone
One of the loveliest things Soul understands is that 22 does not discover the value of life through a philosophical lecture.
It happens through contact.
Food.
Walking.
Conversation.
Music.
Wind.
A falling leaf.
The film ultimately refuses the idea that existence needs to justify itself through exceptional achievement.
Life begins to matter through participation in life.
This also suggests why moral development cannot be treated as a solitary self-improvement programme.
We do not develop patience in a room where nobody tests it.
Compassion requires vulnerability — ours or someone else’s.
Justice becomes real when competing claims confront us.
Generosity presupposes another person who can receive.
Forgiveness exists only where injury has occurred.
Ethics requires other people.
Self-Determination Theory, developed by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, makes a related argument from psychology. Human wellbeing is closely connected to autonomy and competence, certainly, but also to relatedness — the experience of connection and belonging.
We flourish not merely because we accomplish things.
We flourish because we are connected.
And this may be why some of the most meaningful acts in a human life are also among the least impressive from the outside.
Making a child feel safe.
Remaining with a friend during a period nobody else wants to witness.
Correcting an injustice no one would ever have discovered.
Taking responsibility for an ageing parent.
Keeping a promise.
Doing ordinary work carefully because other people depend on it.
Remaining faithful for years to a principle for which nobody applauds you.
Much of what makes a life morally serious is radically resistant to spectacle.
None of these things needs to become a “success story”.
Yet character is formed precisely here.
What achievement does to us
This is why I do not interpret Soul as saying that we should abandon large ambitions and simply “live in the moment”.
That would be too easy.
I believe human beings need aspiration.
We need moral direction.
We need projects that demand something of us.
Sometimes we even need commitments that exceed our own immediate comfort and interest.
But our goals must not replace the life in whose service they supposedly exist.
And the question we ask of success should perhaps change.
Not merely:
Did I achieve what I wanted?
But:
What did pursuing it make of me?
A person can succeed while becoming crueler.
More narcissistic.
Less capable of friendship.
Less able to tolerate contradiction.
More willing to instrumentalise others.
One can even turn the desire to be “a good person” into an instrument of superiority.
Moral aspiration has its own vanity.
Perhaps genuine development can therefore be measured partly by an inverse criterion.
As I advance, does my world contain more of me — or more room for other people?
Am I becoming more capable of recognising inconvenient truths?
Does success intoxicate me less?
Does failure humiliate me less?
Can I distinguish more clearly between responsibility and control?
Can I pursue something passionately without making its achievement the proof that my life was worthwhile?
Perhaps maturity means becoming less dependent on events to certify who we are.
To become a better version of oneself, then, is not to reach some summit.
It is to keep correcting direction.
Again and again.
To care somewhat more about character than display.
Effort than applause. Integrity than narrative.
And perhaps most difficult of all: to accept that the work will never be completed.
A life cannot be rehearsed
I still cannot give the child who started all of this a one-word answer to the question of what matters most in life.
Happiness is insufficient. Success is clearly insufficient. Love comes closer, but love without responsibility or justice can become sentimental.
Meaning, belonging, courage, care, truth, loyalty, curiosity, mercy, responsibility: all seem to hold part of the answer.
Perhaps the difficulty is not that we have failed to discover the single correct value.
Perhaps no single value was ever capable of carrying an entire life.
So the questions themselves may need to change.
Instead of: What can I get from life? Perhaps: What will I do with the life I have been given?
Instead of: How successful will I become? Perhaps: What will success and failure make of me?
Instead of: How do I control my future? Perhaps: How do I exercise agency responsibly inside a future I can never fully control?
And instead of asking whether we might one day become completed, perfected human beings:
Can I become a little more capable today of living according to what I claim to value?
What moves me most in Soul is that it places tiny fragments of ordinary existence among its enormous metaphysical questions.
A leaf. A walk. A voice. A conversation. A phrase of music.
Perhaps this is not a retreat from meaning but where meaning becomes concrete.
We do not know the whole shape of our lives while we are living them.
We have limited vision. Limited agency. A limited field of action that opens again each day.
Some traditions call the attitude required beyond that field trust. Others call it acceptance. The Stoics spoke in one register; religious traditions in another; contemporary psychology increasingly examines our capacity to tolerate uncertainty without surrendering agency.
The names differ. The human predicament does not.
A good life is not a life in which everything we wanted eventually happened.
Nor is it necessarily the life that would make the most satisfying biography.
Perhaps a good life is one in which, amid what happens to us and what does not happen for us, we continue attempting to become people capable of meeting reality without surrendering either responsibility or humanity.
I have disagreements with some of Soul’s metaphysical assumptions. I am not convinced that any film (or philosophy) resolve the question of what human existence is ultimately for.
But that may be the wrong criterion by which to judge it.
The value of a serious work of art does not lie in supplying answers we can adopt wholesale. Sometimes it lies in disturbing answers we had stopped questioning.
And Soul does that exceptionally well.
Especially in a culture that has become so adept at confusing achievement with meaning, it asks something worth carrying long after the credits:
If the great moment finally arrives ; the promotion, the recognition, the audience, the success, the thing we thought would make everything cohere; and we discover that life is still simply life, will we know how to inhabit it?
References
Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books.
Gülen, F. (1995). “İnsan-ı Kâmil Olmak.”
King, L. A. & Hicks, J. A. (2021). “The Science of Meaning in Life.” Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 561–584.
Martela, F. & Steger, M. F. (2016). “The Three Meanings of Meaning in Life: Distinguishing Coherence, Purpose, and Significance.” The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 531–545.
Ryan, R. M. & Deci, E. L. (2000). “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior.” Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.
Ryff, C. D. (1989). “Happiness Is Everything, or Is It? Explorations on the Meaning of Psychological Well-Being.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069–1081.
Ryff, C. D. & Singer, B. H. (2008). “Know Thyself and Become What You Are: A Eudaimonic Approach to Psychological Well-Being.” Journal of Happiness Studies, 9, 13–39.