Life is complex and multidimensional. While there are countless aspects to life, most philosophers and thinkers have identified 7 key categories that encompass the broad components that make up a life. These 7 fundamental “things” represent the major realms of human existence and provide a framework for understanding the journey of life.
Happiness
The pursuit of happiness is one of the most central human endeavors. Happiness comes in many forms and is subjective to each individual. However, research has uncovered some common attributes shared by happy people, as well as behaviors and mindsets that tend to lead to greater life satisfaction and well-being.
Studies show that strong social connections, meaningful goals, engagement in hobbies, generosity, gratitude, optimism, and living in the moment are all contributing factors to happiness. Additionally, finding purpose in life’s challenges and taking care of mental and physical health have proven to boost happiness levels.
While circumstances certainly play a role, happiness is very much dependent on mindset, perspective, and making intentional choices that nourish mental, emotional and spiritual fulfillment. Discovering activities that create “flow,” minimizing negative influences, practicing mindfulness, setting positive goals, and finding ways to help others are all actions people can take to potentially increase happiness.
Relationships
Humans are social creatures, hardwired for connection. Relationships are central to human existence and essential components of a life fully lived. Research continually emphasizes the importance of relationships for health, longevity, happiness, resilience, identity formation, and more.
Key relationships often include intimate partnerships, family relationships, friendships, professional networks, and a sense of belonging to a community. While relationships require work and inevitably involve challenges, putting effort into cultivating strong bonds tends to yield dividends of love, support, companionship, growth, and joy. Communication, vulnerability, compromise, and acts of service and care help nurture healthy relationships.
Even during times of interpersonal conflict, relationships play instrumental roles in shaping who we are and how we navigate life’s journeys. As the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke stated, “One has only to look at a human being to gain a premonition of all the possible relationships.”
Romantic Partnerships
For many people, choosing a life partner is one of the most significant decisions they will make in life. Romantic relationships can be sources of deep fulfillment. Elements like passion, intimacy, emotional and physical connection, mutual support, joint experiences, and shared growth enrich life’s journey. A strong partnership takes work, requiring openness, compromise, and continual nurturing of intimacy and respect.
Families
Family relationships are foundational and shape development in profound ways. While all families experience challenges, healthy families provide stability, modeling, care, values, belonging, and opportunities to practice building strong bonds. Families come in many forms and configurations. However they manifest, maintaining open communication and honoring each member helps foster strong familial bonds.
Friendships
Friends provide a vital source of fun, comfort, acceptance, and camaraderie throughout life. Meaningful friendships tend to share attributes like trust, honesty, loyalty, laughter, reciprocity, and mutual growth. Friendships require active maintenance through shared experiences, listening, vulnerability, and being present for one another during ups and downs.
Community
Feeling part of a community provides a sense of belonging and connection beyond family and friends. Community bonds give opportunities for support, service, collaboration, and making a difference. Communities form around shared interests, geography, spiritual affiliations, cultures, passions, values, and demographics. Investing in community life tends to yield benefits both for the individual and the greater good.
Experiences
Our lives are composed of a tapestry of experiences that shape us over time. The events we engage in, the places we go, the skills we gain, the challenges we face, and the adventures we have all converge to influence who we become. While material possessions fade, experiences endure as part of our identity and our store of memories that can be drawn upon.
Humans crave novelty, growth, stimulation, and meaning from their experiences. An examined life involves a balance of mundane daily routines and exciting new experiences that take us out of our comfort zones and expose us to diverse people, places, and ideas. Deliberate planning to incorporate new pursuits allows for regular influxes of fresh experiences.
Even painful experiences often provide growth, wisdom, resilience, perspective, compassion, and a deeper appreciation for life’s positive moments. Varied experiences, mixed with reflection and integration over time, help craft a rich, textured life journey. As the philosopher Umberto Eco wrote, “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”
Travel
Travel allows us to step out of ordinary routines and venture into new territories and experiences. It provides opportunities for adventure, widens perspectives, fosters learning and self-discovery, immerses us in diverse cultures, and reminds us how vast the world is. Memorable travel experiences, whether near or far, become woven into the fabric of a life journey.
Hobbies
Engaging in hobbies provides outlets for fun, relaxation, creativity, challenge, and connecting with others. Hobbies serve as enriching additions to life that round us out and give meaning and healthy escapes from daily stresses. Hobbies also keep us active, expose us to new skills and communities, and give a sense of ongoing growth and purpose.
Milestones
Milestones signify key turning points and achievements throughout life’s journey and provide opportunities for reflection. Milestones like graduations, weddings, births, professional accomplishments, personal milestones like learning new skills, and other major life events add texture and layers to our life stories.
Challenges
An inescapable reality of life is challenges. Hardships force us to cultivate resilience and coping strategies. Painful times test our resources and alter our perspectives. Setbacks require us to flex our problem-solving capacities. Unexpected detours oblige us to adapt and demonstrate flexibility even when disappointed. Difficult seasons ultimately shape us in ways joyful times cannot.
An examined life recognizes that during the good times as well as rough patches, there are almost always opportunities for growth if we are willing to look. The key is shifting mindsets to understand challenges as chances to learn, evolve, gain wisdom, and develop greater self-awareness, humility, compassion, and emotional intelligence.
As Viktor Frankl noted, “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.” Finding meaning in suffering allows us to shape our responses to life’s unavoidable trials and realize that we often have more capability to choose our attitudes than we initially think.
Failure
Failing at endeavors such as jobs, relationships, or personal goals can fell devastating. However, redefining failure as an essential prerequisite for growth and success helps us normalize and learn from it rather than let it defeat us. Thomas Edison famously said of inventing the light bulb, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Embracing failure as feedback readies us to try new approaches and is often the only path to innovation.
Loss
Letting go of loved ones, opportunities, possessions, or aspects of identity we have outgrown but must mourn is difficult emotional work. Loss often thrusts people into periods of painful transition and rebuilding. Yet allowing ourselves to fully grieve creates space for the next season of life. Poet Rumi wrote “The cure for pain is in the pain.” Sifting through the complex emotions of loss ultimately unlocks potential for renewed appreciation and growth.
Uncertainty
Few guarantees exist about what life will bring. The inability to control outcomes and ever-changing variables leads to universal human struggles with uncertainty. Times of career changes, moves, transitions, waiting periods, unpredictable world events, and life detours can leave us unmoored. Building resilience, cultivating trust, focusing on what we can control, making contingency plans, and learning to adapt continually helps equip us to better navigate uncertainty when life veers off script.
Purpose
Human beings intrinsically crave meaning and purpose as fuel for their existence. People oriented toward purpose tend to be healthier, happier, and more resilient. Purpose provides a compass for directing energy and passions. Core ingredients of leading a purposeful life involve discovering one’s unique gifts and values, then aligning actions and goals toward making a positive difference.
Sources of purpose may shift over a lifetime as roles and priorities evolve. Having a diversity of purposeful pursuits such as family, career, creativity, community, care-giving, spiritual growth, education, charity, advocacy, athletics, and self-actualization allows for abundant opportunities for fulfillment. Living purposefully involves continually refining vision, finding motivation in setbacks, and recognizing progress made on the never-ending purpose journey.
Helping Others
Contributing to needs greater than our own provides a profound vehicle for purpose. Compassionate service to help lighten others’ loads through formal volunteer work, informal daily kindnesses, community initiatives, and active mentorship provides meaning by allowing us to apply personal talents to make a positive difference. Research shows that giving to others boosts morale and health while decreasing stress.
Creativity
Pursuing creative passions provides an avenue for imagining, innovating, manipulating materials, and expressing ourselves. Creativity digs channels to flow into our unique potential and leave a mark on the world through literary, visual, or performing arts, crafts, cuisine, design work, photography, or other artistic channels. Following creative callings gives outlet for human innovation and play.
Exploration & Learning
Feeding our intrinsic drive to learn, grow, and explore the unfamiliar gives meaning and enrichment to life. Deliberately stepping into growth experiences outside comfort zones, welcoming new perspectives through travel, building knowledge, training minds and bodies, and continuously acquiring new abilities allows us to evolve, expand limits, and contribute in wider capacities.
Spirituality
Spirituality represents humanity’s search for meaning through connection with elements larger than the self. For many people, cultivating spiritual health provides a sense of purpose, inner peace, values framework, and connection to community. Spiritual paradigms help make sense of the world and our place within it.
While spirituality often intertwines with organized religion, people may also describe themselves as spiritual without religion. Ways of nourishing spiritual well-being without formal religion may include spending time in nature, making art, volunteering, meditating, keeping a gratitude journal, or pursuing other reflective practices. However it manifests uniquely in each life, nurturing spiritual dimension helps round out holistic well-being.
Religious Faith
Participating in organized religion provides a meaningful rite of passage for billions globally. Religions organize around shared cosmologies, sacred texts, rituals, and moral frameworks for living. At their best, religions foster hope, community, service, spiritual growth, and consolation. Faith commitments provide guiding lights that help make sense of the world for many people.
Values & Ethics
Clarifying personal values and living ethically helps anchor spirituality. Values crystallize what matters most across life realms. Ethics guide us in translating values into virtuous thoughts and behaviors. Living by principles of integrity, honesty, humility, compassion, wisdom, temperance, courage, justice, and care for humanity contributes to spiritual fulfillment.
Mindfulness & Meditation
Spiritual teachings across traditions emphasize quieting the mind through disciplined meditation and living mindfully. Calming distraction opens space for present moment awareness, gratitude, self-reflection, and connection to things greater than self. Regular mindfulness meditation physically alters the brain in ways that boost mood, focus, empathy, and sense of peace.
Legacy
The drive to leave a meaningful legacy steadies life’s journey for many. Legacy represents the imprint we leave for future generations based on contributions made, values honored, investments in people, creations crafted, memories built, and wisdom passed on. Legacy seeds live on through offspring, communities strengthened, discoveries made, art left behind, and lessons conveyed to others we mentor.
Cultivating legacy requires narrowing priorities to what matters most for positive impact. Legacy also develops through small daily acts of service and human connection. While legacies remind us of mortality, they eclipse finite lifetimes by cascading from one generation to the next. Considering legacy provides a compass for aligning daily choices toward what outlasts us.
Investing in People
Nothing makes a greater impact than positively influencing other people. We do this through teaching, mentoring, volunteering, raising children, improving communities, or simply being present. Relationships provide the conduit for passing on accumulated knowledge, bonding through shared experiences, and sowing future potential in others.
Creations & Contributions
The fruits of our labors live beyond us through tangible creations and discoveries, whether art, writing, scientific innovation, policy change, infrastructure built, or organizations established. Giving the best of ourselves through our vocations leaves something meaningful for society. Even modest contributions to causes greater than ourselves endure as parts of a larger mosaic of human progress.
Values Preserved
Principles forged through character and modeled through ethical living pass on intangible legacies. Values like justice, courage, honesty, empathy, and wisdom shape those we interact with through demonstration, stories, and daily morality. Values preserved become lessons woven into the fabric of family and community history.
Well-Being
Thriving physically, emotionally, and mentally creates fertile ground for fully experiencing life’s journey. Prioritizing self-care across these realms builds capacity for managing life’s demands and cultivates holistic health. When the facets of our being work in harmony, we gain ability both to navigate challenges and savor joys along the way.
Physical Health
Caring for the body through nutrition, movement, sleep, hydration, hygiene, medical care, recreation, moderating vices, and stress relief maximizes physical health. Setting healthy boundaries and seeking balance boost energy levels to participate more fully at work and play. Strong physical health provides a foundation from which to build other dimensions of wellness.
Mental Health
Safeguarding mental health requires proactive attention to emotions, thought patterns, learning, focus, memory, perspective, self-awareness, counseling when needed, minimizing anxiety and toxic input, and coping strategies for hardship. Pursuing mental clarity and growth enables us to navigate life’s journey with greater maturity, wisdom, and recovery from setbacks.
Emotional Health
Processing emotions in healthy ways, being in tune with needs, expressing vulnerability and compassion, fostering positive relationships, finding outlets like music or art, giving and receiving love, and nurturing self-esteem and resilience contribute to emotional well-being. Developing emotional intelligence builds capacity to engage fully and meaningfully with all life offers.
Conclusion
Life’s journey comprises interconnected dimensions including happiness, relationships, experiences, challenges, purpose, spirituality, legacy, and well-being. While not exhaustive, reflecting on these core components provides a map for living fully, intentionally, and meaningfully. As we navigate each day, week, and phase of life’s adventure, considering how to nurture each realm leads to more complete engagement and fulfillment throughout the voyage.