Frankl's Inverse Law - The pursuit
"When a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure" ~ Viktor Frankl
Frankl is arguing that a lack of meaning causes people to seek temporary relief in superficial pursuits, rather than addressing the underlying existential void. Perhaps for many, maybe even most people, this is a big issue. But there is another group who suffer with the opposite problem: Frankl's Inverse Law.
"When a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning"
If ease, grace, joy and playfulness don't come easily to you, one solution is to ignore moment-to-moment happiness entirely and just always pursue hard things. You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test. You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble, because you struggle to feel gratified.
TLDR: you prioritise meaning over happiness because happiness doesn't come easily to you.
The problem is that as Bill Perkins says, delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification. From the outside, this looks like you've transcended the shallow need for pleasure, but in reality it's just cope to avoid facing the fact that you struggle to feel joy, so instead, you perpetually promise yourself that happiness might finally come tomorrow. But like running toward the horizon, tomorrow never arrives.
Congratulations, you've managed to subjugate your joy as a tribute to your work. Thoreau says "The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it". By this logic, many of us are paying into a bank account that we never withdraw from. Permanently winning the marshmallow test results in you never actually arriving at a moment where you cash in your efforts for rewards.
In anticipation, this sounds like building up to some amazingly impressive moment which will make all the pain worth it. But in retrospect, I get the sense that this will just feel like a series of miserable successes where you never stopped to actually enjoy your time on this planet.
"You need to do at least a bit of what you care about now, as opposed to banking on finding time for it in the future, once the decks are clear and life's duties are out of the way. Life's duties will never be out of the way. And so if you really mean it when you say you'd like to write a novel or spend more of your time with your ageing parents or fighting climate change (or having fun), at some point you're just going to have to start doing it!" ~ Oliver Burkeman