Modeling a Sustainable & Productive Life

One's actions can be seen as supplying at once (1) the internal market of one's own needs and (2) the external market of others' needs. Meeting others' needs well makes you a desirable person to others, but you can end up "accomplishing a lot" in others' eyes but not feel satisified or happy. On the other hand, supplying only the internal market ignores the reality, which is that as a social animal relying on a division of labor, most humans need goods & services provided by others, which others would only exchange for goods & services of your own.

It is easy to view prioritizing the external market as the "mature" path to take; in fact this is often encouraged by family, school or work. However, that merely perpetuates unsustainable inefficiency, since a behavior that serves the society may be very costly for a person to perform, because the behavior does not serve one's internal market. The truly "mature" path to take is to stop supplying behavior that is cost-inefficient to oneself, and rather tease out a set of behaviors that both serve others & nourish oneself. Since such behavior is not as costly for the person to perform than for others to perform, this is also the more socially efficient outcome.