The spiritual life calls out to me. But is it self-indulgent?

Vox

07-07-2025

is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic.
Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form or email [e-mail]. Here's this week's question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
I graduate college soon, and like everyone around me, I'm working hard to find a job. But unlike those around me, I have a sense for how inactivity enlivens me — I get lots of joy from silence, reflection, and complete agency over my mind. I've quit most social media, and I got into meditation a while ago and never looked back. This awareness makes me tilt towards a life that optimizes for this. But I also have very altruistic leanings, which could become serious scruples if I don't do good in the world.
Should I be trying to balance the pursuit of two seemingly opposed life goals — pursuing true happiness through inactivity and contemplation (as hypothesized by thinkers like Aristotle and Byung-Chul Han) and striving to do good in the world through robust goal-oriented action? The first is indifferent to which ends (if any) one's life contributes to, as long as it is blanketed in leisurely contemplation and true inactivity. The second invites and rewards behaviors that are constantly opposed to prolonged inactivity (working efficiently, constantly learning, etc). So I really don't know how to handle this.
Dear Contemplative and Caring,
Matthieu Ricard is known as the 'world's happiest man.' When he lay down in an MRI scanner so scientists could look at his brain, they saw that the regions associated with happiness were exploding with activity, while those associated with negative emotions were nearly silent. The scientists were stunned. How did his brain get that way?
The answer: 60,000 hours of meditation. See, Ricard grew up in France, earned a PhD in genetics, and then, at age 26, abandoned a bright scientific career in favor of going to Tibet. He became a Buddhist monk and spent nearly three decades training his mind in love and compassion. The result was that one stupendously joyous brain.
But what if he'd instead spent 60,000 hours bringing joy to other people?
Philosopher Peter Singer once put this question to Ricard, basically asking if it was self-indulgent to spend so much time in a hermitage when there are problems in the world that urgently need fixing. Ricard gave a complex answer, and I think looking at all three components of it will be helpful to you.
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For one thing, Ricard pointed out that there are many different values in life. Helping other people is absolutely a wonderful value. But there are others, too: art, for instance. He noted that we don't go around scolding Yo-Yo Ma for the thousands of hours he spent perfecting the cello; instead, we appreciate the beauty of his music. Spiritual growth through contemplation or meditation is like that, Ricard suggested. It's another value intrinsically worth pursuing.
Ricard also emphasized, though, that helping others is something he values very deeply. Just like you, he prizes both contemplation and altruism. But he doesn't necessarily see a conflict between them. Instead, he's convinced that contemplative training actually helps you act altruistically in the world. If you don't have a calm and steady mind, it's hard to be present at someone's bedside and comfort them while they're dying. If you haven't learned to relinquish your grip on the self, it's hard to lead a nonprofit without falling prey to a clash of egos.
Still, Ricard admitted that he is not without regret about his lifestyle. His regret, he said, was 'not to have put compassion into action' for so many years. In his 50s, he decided to address this by setting up a foundation doing humanitarian work in Tibet, Nepal, and India. But the fact that he'd neglected to concretely help humanity for half a century seemed to weigh on him.
What can we learn from Ricard's example?
For someone like you, who values both contemplation and altruism, it's important to realize that each one can actually bolster the other. We've already seen Ricard make the point that contemplation can improve altruistic action. But another famous Buddhist talked about how action in the wider world can improve contemplation, too.
That Buddhist was Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen teacher and peace activist who in the 1950s developed Engaged Buddhism, which urges followers to actively work on the social, political, and environmental issues of the day. Asked about the idea that people need to choose between engaging in social change or working on spiritual growth, the teacher said:
I think that view is rather dualistic. The [meditation] practice should address suffering: the suffering within yourself and the suffering around you. They are linked to each other. When you go to the mountain and practice alone, you don't have the chance to recognize the anger, jealousy, and despair that's in you. That's why it's good that you encounter people — so you know these emotions. So that you can recognize them and try to look into their nature. If you don't know the roots of these afflictions, you cannot see the path leading to their cessation. That's why suffering is very important for our practice.
I would add that contact with the world improves contemplation not only because it teaches us about suffering, but also because it gives us access to joyful insights. For example, Thich Nhat Hanh taught that one of the most important spiritual insights is 'interbeing' — the notion that all things are mutually dependent on all other things. A great way to access that would be through a moment of wonder in a complex natural ecosystem, or through the experience of pregnancy, when cells from one individual integrate into the body of another seemingly separate self!
At this point, you might have a question for these Buddhists: Okay, it's all well and good for you guys to talk about spiritual growth and social engagement going hand-in-hand, but you had the luxury of doing years of spiritual growth uninterrupted first! How am I supposed to train my mind while staying constantly engaged with a modern world that's designed to fragment my attention?
Part of the answer, Buddhist teachers say, is to practice both 'on and off the cushion.' When we think about meditation, we often picture ourselves sitting on a cushion with our eyes closed. But it doesn't have to look that way. It can also be a state of mind with which we do whatever else it is we're doing: volunteering, commuting to work, drinking a cup of tea, washing the dishes. Thich Nhat Hanh was fond of saying, 'Washing the dishes is like bathing a baby Buddha. The profane is the sacred. Everyday mind is Buddha's mind.'
But I think it's really hard to do that in any kind of consistent way unless you've already had concerted periods of practice. And that's the reason why retreats exist.
Buddhist monks commonly do this — sometimes for three years, or for three months, depending on their tradition — but you don't have to be a monk or even a Buddhist to do it. Anyone can go on a retreat. I've found that even short, weekend-long retreats, where you're supported by the silent company of other practitioners and the guidance of teachers, can provide a helpful container for intensive meditation and catalyze your growth. It's a lot like language immersion: Sure, you can learn Italian by studying a few words on Duolingo alone each night, but you'll probably learn a whole lot faster if you spend a chunk of time living in a Tuscan villa.
So here's what I'd suggest to you: Pursue a career that includes actively doing good in the world — but be intentional about building in substantial blocks of time for contemplation, too. That could mean a year (or two or three) of meditative training before you go on the job market, to give you a stable base to launch off from. But it could also mean scheduling regular retreats for yourself — anywhere from three days to three months — in between your work commitments.
More broadly, though, I want you to remember that the ideas about the good life that you're thinking through didn't emerge in a vacuum. They're conditioned by history.
As the 20th-century thinker Hannah Arendt points out, vita contemplativa (the contemplative life) has been deemed superior to vita activa (the life of activity) by most pre-modern Western thinkers, from the Ancient Greeks to the medieval Christians. But why? Aristotle, whom you mentioned, put contemplation on a pedestal because he believed it was what free men did, whereas men who labored were coerced by the necessity to stay alive, and were thus living as if they were enslaved whether they were literally enslaved or not.
In our modern world, Arendt notes, the hierarchy has been flipped upside down. Capitalist society valorizes the vita activa and downgrades the vita contemplativa. But this reversal still keeps the relationship between the two modes stable: It keeps them positioned in a hierarchical order. Arendt thinks that's silly. Rather than placing one above the other, she encourages us to consider the distinct values of both.
I think she's right. Not only does contemplation need action to survive (even philosophers have to eat), but contemplation without action is impoverished. If Aristotle had had an open-minded encounter with enslaved people, maybe he would have been a better philosopher, one who challenged hierarchies rather than reinforcing them.
It can be perfectly okay, and potentially very beneficial, to spend some stretch of time in pure contemplation like Aristotle — or like the Buddhist monk Ricard. But if you do it forever, chances are you'll end up with the same regret as the monk: the regret of not putting compassion into action.
Bonus: What I'm reading
Not only does modern life make it hard to think deeply and contemplatively — with the advent of AI, it also risks homogenizing our thoughts. The New Yorker's Kyle Chayka examines the growing body of evidence suggesting that chatbots are degrading our capacity for creative thought.
This week, I learned that rich Europeans in the 18th century actually paid men to live in their gardens as…' ornamental hermits '? Apparently it was trendy to have an isolated man in a goat's hair robe wandering around in contemplative silence! Some scholars think the trend took off because philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had just argued that people living in a 'state of nature' are morally superior to those corrupted by modern society.
Twentieth-century Trappist monk Thomas Merton was a great lover of stillness. His poem ' In Silence' is mainly an ode to the contemplative life. But he ends the poem with these cryptic lines: 'How can a man be still or listen to all things burning? How can he dare to sit with them when all their silence is on fire?'