When You Live at Your Fullest, the Universe Lives Through You
A reflection on purpose, pain, and the divine force that moves through those who refuse comfort.
If I told you that no matter what path you choose in life, you’ll receive an equal share of suffering; would that convince you to choose a path with a higher purpose ?
Below is my understanding of why we must go beyond comfort and chase a higher purpose if we want our lives to mean something.
The Early Scripts of Comfort
Since my major was Counseling during my Master’s in Psychology, I’ve spent years counseling people in different phases of life.
Across those conversations, I started noticing two recurring mental scripts that quietly trap people in cycles of comfort and stagnation.
Script One: The Stagnant Idealist
These are people who either inherited enough or over time earned enough to lose motivation. They tell themselves they’re “flowing with life,” when in reality, they’re stagnant like a puddle of still water breeding mosquitoes.
The irony is that, in their stagnancy, there’s still some movement; like mosquitoes buzzing above the water or pigs rolling in the mud. On the surface, there’s life and noise. They wear crisp shirts, drive shiny cars, go to offices, and return home every evening. From the outside, it all looks functional or even successful. But inside, nothing moves. They’ve mistaken motion for progress.
They play the role of their ideal self before others, but deep down they know they’ve stopped growing. They’ve become experts at rationalising & convincing themselves that peace is freedom, while it’s actually decay.
Script Two: The Escaping Achiever
The other script is more subtle. These are people who are skilled, passionate, and motivated, but the moment hardships appear, they imagine an easier future. They picture a safe space beyond struggle.
But that future never satisfies. It’s the classic illusion of the grass being greener on the other side. Once you reach that imagined comfort, the absence of hardship becomes the absence of meaning.
It’s a worse state than stagnation because at least stagnant water affects something; mosquitoes breed there, pigs roll in it. But this comfort turns a person into a rock —unmoving, unfeeling, lifeless over a long period of time.
Hardships are part of life, hence we shouldn’t resort to our happy safe space on the visibility of hardship. As Ratan Tata once said,
“Ups and downs in life are very important to keep us going, because a straight line even in an ECG means we are not alive.”
I was also living this script with my safe spaced version of “buffalo farm” & retirement in late 20s.
The Comfortable Dream I’m Glad I Lost
When I was 20, I had loans of around ₹5 lakhs; part education, part survival. I’d already done several internships, yet my dream then was simple: clear the loans, buy 20–30 buffaloes in my hometown in Himachal, hire a few people for upkeep, and live peacefully while chilling & smoking weed every now and then.
The land was already there, so were the fields for grazing, the shelter, even the marijuana plants. I’d mapped it all out - a small, self-sustained, comfortable life. Looking back now, I’m grateful that dream never came true.
The Relativity of Purpose
If I’d stayed in the village forever, running that buffalo farm might’ve been meaningful but to do it after evolving intellectually and emotionally would’ve been regression.
That was a childhood dream with a limited context about life.
Context defines meaning.
And it’s relative to where you are in life and what’s your TRUTH in that moment.
If Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam had settled for teaching in Rameshwaram after his early rejections, India might never have known the Missile Man who shaped our nuclear program. We might have missed a Bharat Ratna laureate, the only one to receive it even before becoming President.
Kalam faced repeated failures, returned home heartbroken, and could have easily chosen a simple, respectable life of teaching. But he didn’t. He kept searching for a doorway until he met Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, who saw his spark and gave him that opportunity. That single decision to persist through suffering instead of settling for safety altered not only his destiny but the destiny of India itself.
After Zip2, Elon Musk could have retired early. Instead, he built PayPal, then Tesla, pushing the world toward sustainable mobility and later SpaceX, taking on space exploration, a domain still barely open to private entities. His rockets exploded, his companies nearly collapsed, yet he never chose comfort. For him, hardship was the compass of purpose.
And sometimes purpose doesn’t just build rockets, it carries a hammer and chisel.
Dashrath Manjhi, the Mountain Man of Bihar, spent 22 years carving a 110 m road through a mountain after losing his wife. He did it alone, with bare hands and bleeding palms, so that no one else in his village would die waiting for help.
He didn’t do it for fame or money. He did it so that no one else would suffer as he did. Every strike of that chisel was an act of purpose born out of pain.
That is what choosing meaning over misery looks like; transforming pain into progress.
That is what living at one’s full potential means — refusing comfort, choosing evolution.
The Journey from Dukh to Kaivalya
When I first read सांख्य दर्शन / Sankhya Darshan (one of the nine philosophies of Vedic or sanatan dharma), one line stayed with me. It said that the path of life is to move from Samsara (Dukh) toward Kaivalya.
In simple terms, it means that life is a journey from suffering toward awareness beyond attachment — a higher state of being where we act without being enslaved by outcomes.
To me, this line has always been deeply spiritual, perhaps one of the most powerful truths I’ve come across. I’m loosely interpreting it here so that it fits the context of this piece.
The essence, however, remains the same.
The purpose of life is not to escape pain but to evolve through it; to use it as the bridge from Dukh to Kaivalya. Because pain will exist no matter which path you choose — Samsara itself, by its very definition, is suffering.
So if suffering is inevitable, why not walk a higher path that transforms it into meaning?
The Larger Path
Whether it’s Jamshedji Tata building industries, Martin Luther King Jr. fighting for equality, Ambedkar breaking caste barriers, Bhagat Singh offering his life at 21, or a nameless artist chiseling temple walls; each chose a path full of hardship and meaning.
Even our spiritual icons Jesus, Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Mahavir, and the Sikh Gurus always walked through fire, not around it.
So why do we crave a life of comfort when every story of greatness is carved through pain?
My Learnings
I’m writing this on an ordinary working day, one where I could have easily chosen to focus on tasks, calls, and meetings.
But instead, I chose to write this because I felt an urge to explain why it’s so important to choose purpose and fulfillment over ease and comfort.
I don’t even know if the person who triggered this reflection will ever truly understand it; maybe not today, maybe not for years. Understanding comes only when one is ready.
But still, I wrote. Because choosing the harder, meaningful thing always creates a ripple somewhere. Maybe this will reach someone who needs to read it, someone on the verge of giving up, and it might push them to take their first plunge toward their true potential.
It took me around six hours to write this, and yet, it feels like the right choice.
Because choosing the hard and right thing, no matter how small, always aligns you with something larger than yourself.
So here are my learnings:
Hardships and suffering give life meaning & anyways we can’t avoid them.
Choose hardships that serve a higher purpose, beyond material gain.
When you already have wealth or comfort, let purpose keep you awake.
Avoid stagnancy as it breeds ego, indulgence, or decay.
Life constantly changes, now whether it’s positive or a negative change; it depends on your actions and how you perceive a situation.
and always ask: am I living at my full potential or hiding behind comfort?
In the end, we are all walking toward the same destination — death — through one form of hardship or another.
Since suffering is inevitable, choose the one that expands you.
Because when you strive toward something greater than yourself, the universe or God, or whatever sails your boat; that force begins to move through you.
Whenever a human being breaks away from the automated path and dares to live at their fullest potential, that divine energy chooses to experience the material world through them.
It’s no longer you who works; it’s the life itself working through you.
That is how the divine expresses itself — through human will, through purpose, through relentless evolution.
So live life as a force to reckon with.
Because you are not merely living in the universe; the universe is trying to live through you.