You've Been Measuring the Wrong Things
If you've read what I wrote about joy a few weeks ago, these are the questions that come after it.
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There is a scene in The Bucket List that has stayed with me far longer than I expected it to. Carter and Edward — played by Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson — are standing on top of the Great Pyramid of Giza, two old men with very little time left, looking out at a landscape that has witnessed a thousand generations of human striving. And Carter shares something he read: an ancient Egyptian belief that at the gates of heaven, every soul is met by the gods and asked two questions. The answers determine everything.
Have you found joy in your life?
Has your life brought joy to others?
That is the entire test. Not what you achieved, not what you accumulated, not what you built or proved or earned. Just those two questions.
I want to sit with that for a moment — because I think it cuts closer to something real than most of the frameworks we use to evaluate a life, or a career, or even a single workday.
Two Questions, Two Directions
The first question turns inward. Have you found joy in your life? Not happiness — that particular distinction matters more than it might first appear. Happiness is often a response to external circumstances: the promotion, the vacation, the absence of difficulty. Joy is something different. It is the quality of attention you bring to what you are actually doing. It asks whether you are genuinely present in your own experience, whether you have developed any real relationship with meaning, whether you have allowed yourself to want what you actually want — rather than performing the version of yourself others could most easily approve of.
Most people find this question uncomfortable, not because it is hard to answer, but because answering it honestly requires a kind of courage. It means admitting that some of what you have spent your energy on has been disconnected from anything that actually matters to you. It means acknowledging the gap between the life you are living and the one you intended to live.
The second question turns outward. Has your life brought joy to others? This one is equally unsparing, but in a different direction. It asks not what you have felt, but what you have given. Not whether you were good at your work, but whether your presence in other people's lives left something behind worth having. It is the question of impact — not impact in the LinkedIn sense, but in the most intimate, human sense. Did the people around you flourish, even a little, because you were there?
The Space Between the Two
What strikes me about this framework is not either question alone, but the space between them — the implicit claim that joy flows in two directions, or it does not really flow at all.
A life that has found joy for itself but kept it entirely private tends to collapse inward. The pleasures become smaller over time, the meaning thinner. We are social animals with a very long evolutionary history of existing for each other, and when that thread is cut — when we stop contributing, stop being needed, stop mattering to anyone else's story — something fundamental begins to erode.
But the opposite failure is just as common, and perhaps more widely celebrated: the person who has devoted everything to others, who has poured themselves into their work, their family, their obligations, and somewhere along the way stopped asking whether any of it was actually alive for them. Duty performed without genuine presence is not generosity. It is a kind of slow disappearance.
The Egyptians, apparently, knew this. Or whoever invented the myth did. Joy is not a zero-sum resource. The two questions are not in competition. In fact, the deeper you look at them, the more they seem to be the same question asked from two different angles — pointing toward a single thing: genuine engagement with life, as it actually is, in relationship with the people who are actually in it.
What This Has to Do With How We Work
You might think this is a too large frame to apply to something as mundane as a Wednesday morning. I would argue the opposite.
Most of us spend the majority of our waking hours at work. The decisions we make there — about how we show up, how we treat the people around us, what we are willing to say and what we quietly swallow, whose ideas we genuinely engage with and whose we dismiss — those decisions accumulate. They become habits. The habits become character. And character is what we bring to the gates, metaphorical or otherwise.
The first question — have you found joy in your work? — is not asking whether your job is fun. It is asking something much more specific: are you actually present? Are you doing the kind of work that calls on something real in you, or have you become so expert at performing competence that the actual you has been outsourced entirely? Do you know why you are doing what you are doing, beyond the obvious external reasons?
The second question — has your work brought joy to others? — is not asking whether your colleagues like you. It is asking whether the people you work with are genuinely better for having worked with you. Not better at their jobs, necessarily, though that is not nothing. But more capable of thinking clearly. More willing to take a necessary risk. More inclined to say the thing that actually needs to be said. More human, in the fullest sense of the word.
The Evolutionary Argument for Joy
From an evolutionary standpoint, this is not sentimentality. It is survival logic.
The capacity to experience joy — both our own and the joy of others — is deeply wired into us. Mirror neurons, oxytocin, the social reward systems of the brain: all of it is infrastructure built for connection and contribution. We are not individual units optimizing for personal outcomes. We are deeply interdependent creatures whose nervous systems were shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of living and working in tight-knit groups where everyone's flourishing mattered to everyone else's.
The reason organizations struggle — the real reason, beneath all the strategic frameworks and change management theories — is often that people have stopped being genuinely present with each other. The joy has drained out of the room. Not because anyone decided to be unkind, but because the accumulated weight of unspoken truths, unacknowledged effort, and unasked questions has made genuine presence feel too risky.
When we talk at SavvySimian about self-awareness, empathy, and the courage to be honest in collaboration, we are talking about the conditions under which both of those questions can eventually be answered yes. Not perfectly. Not always. But honestly, and with some real effort toward the thing they are pointing at.
A Simpler Audit
Here is something worth trying. At the end of a week — not the whole life, just the week — sit with both questions and answer them as honestly as you can.
Did anything this week actually bring you joy? Not satisfaction, not the relief of completion, but genuine aliveness in the doing of it? If the answer is yes, notice what it was and protect more space for it. If the answer is no, that is important information — not cause for despair, but a signal worth paying attention to.
And did anything you did this week bring something real to someone else? Not the performance of helpfulness, but an actual contribution to another person's capacity to think, feel, or act more fully? Again — if yes, notice. If no, ask yourself what was in the way.
These are not comfortable questions. They are not supposed to be. Comfort is what we get when we stop asking. The questions are what keep us honest about what we are actually doing with the time we have.
Two Questions Worth Taking Seriously
Carter and Edward sat on top of one of the oldest human monuments on Earth and talked about what mattered. The pyramid behind them was built by people who were, among other things, desperately trying to cheat death — to build something so permanent that it would outlast them, that their existence would leave a mark on the world.
The questions the gods supposedly ask are not about the pyramids. They are not about the monuments or the legacies or the accomplishments. They are about whether you were actually here. Whether the life that passed through you left anything behind in other people that was worth having.
That seems worth taking seriously. Not just at the end — but now, while there is still time to answer both questions differently.
