A restaurant with no menu sounds liberating. You can order anything you want, prepared any way you like. It also sounds exhausting. Every possibility remains open, and every disappointing choice belongs entirely to you. We usually treat freedom as an uncomplicated good, but a life with no limits can become strangely shapeless. What kinds of constraint might actually set us free?
Listen to the Episode
The Big Questions
- Does having more choices reliably make us happier?
- When does freedom become a burden rather than a gift?
- Can commitment give a life direction without becoming coercive?
- Must service involve sacrifice, or can it grow naturally from love?
- Can a secular life of service provide the same sense of purpose as a religious one?
The Argument
Modern life teaches us to protect our freedom. We want control over our careers, relationships, identities, beliefs, and lunch orders. Much of this freedom is worth protecting. Still, unlimited choice creates its own problems. The more possibilities we have, the more we expect ourselves to choose perfectly. When the job, spouse, body, or life we select fails to satisfy us, we have no one else to blame. Freedom promises control and then quietly hands us responsibility for everything that goes wrong.
Service offers a different way to organize a life. To serve is to accept that my desires are not the only claims upon me. I might bind myself to another person, a community, a cause, or God. That binding limits my autonomy, but it can also relieve me of the demand to invent a purpose from scratch each morning. The important question is not simply whether I am free. It is what my freedom is for.
Religious traditions make this tradeoff unusually clear. Jewish life structured by mitzvot turns service into a collection of ordinary acts: eating, praying, conducting business, observing time, and dealing with other people. The commandments may create gratitude, community, and a sense of nearness to God. They may also feel arbitrary and burdensome. Christian models often place greater emphasis on discovering one’s particular gifts and surrendering them to a divine purpose. Rick Warren’s plumber serves through plumbing. Mother Teresa served by caring for people whom nearly everyone else had abandoned. In both cases, service begins from the claim that a human life does not belong entirely to itself.
Viktor Frankl removes the need for a theological premise but retains the basic structure. Purpose comes through love and through the knowledge that one’s life matters to someone beyond oneself. Even suffering can change when it becomes the cost of sparing, protecting, or remaining faithful to another person. This does not mean that all sacrifice is good, or that every demand deserves obedience. It does suggest that happiness may depend less on keeping every option open than on discovering which commitments are worth closing options for.
Reflect
Whom or what do you already serve, even if you have never described the relationship in those terms?
Where has the desire to preserve your freedom kept you from making a commitment that might give your life more shape?
Which obligations in your life feel meaningful, and which ones merely make you smaller?
Further Exploration
Barry Schwartz, “Self-Determination: The Tyranny of Freedom”
Schwartz supplies the psychological challenge at the center of the episode: expanded choice can raise expectations, deepen self-blame, and weaken the social bonds that help make freedom bearable.
The creation accounts in Genesis
Genesis introduces the unresolved religious question behind a life of service: human beings appear to have been made for a task, although the nature of that task remains open to interpretation. Genesis 1-2 (pay special attention to Genesis 1:27-30 and Genesis 2:5, 15)
The Jewish tradition of mitzvot
The mitzvot offer a concrete model of purpose built through repeated obligations, while also exposing the tension between accepting a divinely given structure and insisting that every commitment justify itself to the individual. You can read this article for more information about the mitzvot.
Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life
Warren sharpens the idea that everyone surrenders to something and asks whether freedom consists not in avoiding surrender, but in choosing what deserves it.
Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity
Mother Teresa’s work shows how imitation of Christ can turn service from an occasional act of generosity into the organizing principle of an entire life. Her official biography is informative (if typographically messy), as is this interview she gave in 1974.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Frankl makes the episode’s secular case for service by locating purpose in love, responsibility, and the discovery that even suffering can acquire meaning when it is borne for someone else.
Continuing the Conversation
I invite you to email reflections and questions directly to me. I will not respond to them all individually, but questions from listeners may become the starting point for future episodes.
I have also created a Chatbot to accompany this podcast. You can interact with it here.
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Full Transcript
When you go out to eat, would you prefer to receive a menu with very few options curated by the chef; a 2-6 page menu; or no menu at all, at a restaurant where you can simply order whatever you wanted? How would each of these scenarios make you feel?
That menu question may seem trivial, but it points to something deeper. We often assume that happiness increases as freedom increases: more options, more autonomy, more control. But what if that is only partly true? What if a good life sometimes requires not more freedom, but the right constraints — commitments that bind us to other people, to a community, to God, or to a cause?
That is where service begins.
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You’re listening to Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life, a podcast about ancient wisdom, modern psychology, and the search for a life that is not only successful, but meaningful. I’m Michael Satlow.
Today: Service, freedom, and the happiness that can come from being needed.
In the last few episodes, we have considered two paradigms of the good life. The first is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of suffering. The second is the cultivation of the virtues. In this episode we will turn to a third paradigm, that of service.
A life of service asks us to give up some freedom, not because freedom is bad, but because unconstrained freedom can become exhausting, lonely, and directionless. Freedom is indispensable; the problem is freedom without form, freedom with no commitments strong enough to give it direction. Service gives freedom a shape: it binds us to God, to other people, to a community, or to a cause.
To understand what a life devoted to service can mean, we need first to understand the link between freedom and happiness. In an influential paper called “Self-Determination: The Tyranny of Freedom,” Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology, argued that there was a causal link between our growing ability to choose and the explosive increase in depression rates. “We experience control to a degree that people living in other times and places would think quite unimaginable,” he writes. So why are we so unhappy?
Schwartz singles out three negative ramifications of all of this freedom. First, it leads us to unrealistic expectations. When we feel that we have infinite choice, we expect that our choices will be perfect. We expect to be able to have well-paying, satisfying jobs, for example, and perfect spouses and children. When the results don’t live up to those expectations not only are we disappointed at the results themselves, but also we feel that we have only ourselves to blame. In one interesting experiment, consumers were much happier with their choice of jam when given a more limited selection of products from which to choose.
The second ramification of our extraordinary freedom of choice is that individualism heightens expectations of perfection. People have every opportunity to perfect themselves, and when they fail, Schwartz says, “the culture of individualism biases them toward making causal attributions that focus on internal rather than external factors.” It leaves people with a crushing and continuing sense of their own failure. Maybe not coincidentally, it thus also fuels industries that seek to address our imperfections, such as the beauty and weight loss businesses.
Third, our emphasis on autonomy and individualism necessarily is in tension with our need for sociality. Being part of a group requires that we give up some of our autonomy. Each group has its own norms and expectations, and they tend to exclude those who willfully violate them. This kind of push and pull between autonomy and adherence to group norms happens all down the line, from formal groups to friend circles. The less autonomy we are willing to sacrifice the less connected we are to others. Less social connection is strongly correlated with higher rates of depression. Studies of Amish and Hasidic communities, that strictly limit the freedom of their members, also suggest this trend toward less depression.
Here’s the point: Every act of serving another is, in effect, a limit put on one’s autonomy. That is, we accept, in most cases voluntarily, that we will put another being or group ahead of our own desires. Whether temporarily or for a longer period of time, we constrain our freedom. And we do that, in most cases, because on some level it makes us feel good.
There are thus three dimensions for us to explore. The first is what a life of service really means or looks like. The second is its attraction. The third is its drawbacks.
What do you think of when I use the phrase “a life of service”? I think that for many today, it summons visions of a lawyer working as a full-time public defender; a doctor who treats the poor or those in war zones; or a child who sacrifices aspects of their career or social life to care for an ailing parent. I think that this is why, when I ask my own students whether they see themselves in a life of service, they answer negatively, even as they express admiration for those who made that choice.
But it is worth deepening our understanding of service and seeing it within a wider context. That context has always been inextricably bound to religion.
The Bible often, if not quite consistently, posits that our purpose, or telos, as human beings is to serve God. At the beginning of Genesis, God first creates the world and everything in it, and caps off creation on the sixth day with the creation of human beings. Their purpose is to fill the earth and master it, ruling over the other creatures. Just a few short verses later, in what biblical critics call the second creation account, humans are created in order to till the soil and develop the earth.
Both accounts are cryptic, and interpreters have puzzled over them for millennia. What does “master” and “rule” mean here, especially since the very next verse suggests that humans are only to eat fruit? Does the second account suggest that our purpose is to only tend the Garden of Eden, from which Adam and Eve were quickly expelled? Or, more generally, does it suggest that God created us in order to till, develop, and order the untamed and wild earth? We are meant to serve God, but it remains somewhat unclear how.
Jews and Christians have drawn different answers to this question. Jews based their understandings of this service on later passages in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament as Christians call it. Most of the classical rabbis, whose literature formed the foundation of modern Judaism, adopted some form of covenantal theology. That is, it proceeds from the idea that God has made a covenant, or deal, with Israel. The deal has two sides. On the one hand, God pledges to protect and love Israel. On the other hand, Israel promises to do God’s will.
God’s will is seen as expressed in scores of commandments, or mitzvot. Sometimes the term mitzvah today is used colloquially to express a “good deed.” Traditionally and theologically, though, it is a commandment, a discrete act that God requires. These commandments encompass both ethical and ritual realms. “Do not murder” or “do not steal” are ethical commands, “guard the sabbath to keep it holy” is a ritual one, as are the laws of kashrut, those outlining forbidden and permitted foods.
Jewish thinkers throughout the ages have reflected on the role of these commandments and have come to several, sometimes very different, conclusions. Some modern liberal Jewish thinkers, for example, see a great divide between ethical and ritual commandments and emphasize the importance of the former over the latter. While there is certainly precedent for this position in the Bible itself, most Orthodox thinkers reject such a sharp dichotomy.
Thus, within this discussion of mitzvot, a basic tension often arises. Are the mitzvot carefully given to enhance human well-being? That is, are they an expression of God’s love? Or are they a set of rules that are sometimes arbitrary, adherence to which is required to show fealty to God? Are the rabbis saying that God requires Jews to observe the mitzvot because they comprise “the law of the land,” as it were, even if they don’t always make sense? Or are they saying that the mitzvot are to be considered as strong suggestions for our own well-being, but as such can change as we and our times change?
I have extended this discussion of the mitzvot, and just touched the surface of its complexity, because of its direct bearing on our thinking about a life of service and the role of freedom. Put simply, the mitzvot offer a model – at least conceptually even if not in all of its details – for constructing a life of service. They also illustrate that such a life always comes with tradeoffs.
To many who observe them, the mitzvot offer a path to serving God through discrete quotidian actions. In any given day, an observant Jew might feel obliged to perform dozens of mitzvot, through prayers, their eating choices, business dealings, and personal relationships.
So does it lead to happiness? Certainly for some, the structured life of following the commandments provides a deep sense of purpose that also brings with it several other psychological benefits, such as reminders to be grateful, a feeling of awe, and a community. Psychologically, the pointed structure that comes with a Jewishly observant life can also add to well-being. I don’t think that we have any actual empirical evidence that those who live by the mitzvot are happier than the members of some control group, but at least anecdotally it seems to work for many.
The benefit of the observance of the mitzvot, it is important to note, is, for many Jews, only marginally tied to hope for an afterlife. That is, while Jewish tradition does have a strain that asserts that living according to God’s will – as enacted in the punctilious adherence to the mitzvot – leads to a good afterlife, the promise of eternal happiness most often serves a secondary role. Jewish traditions and the practice of ordinary Jews emphasizes the benefit of the mitzvot for living in this world. One serves God because it is one’s purpose to do so and will lead to living a life, here and now, alive and breathing, that is closer to God.
Most Jews today, however, find a life structured by mitzvot to be burdensome and arbitrary, disconnected from any sense of purpose and inconvenient to boot. In the context of a pluralistic world with nearly unprecedented choice, among Jews who are largely integrated in majority non-Jewish cultures, they can seem constraining and even embarrassing. Such Jews don’t necessarily reject all the mitzvot – they may well enjoy and get spiritual fulfillment out of attending a Passover seder or synagogue on Yom Kippur. Nor do they necessarily reject a life dedicated to service. They may change their frame of reference to serving other people, whether doing so directly or through political action. Such service to others is often seen as connected to one’s purpose, and sometimes to service to God. But the point I’m trying to make is that the service of God through the mitzvot is largely in tension with our modern valorization of free-choice. Some, though, voluntarily choose these constraints in exchange for the belief that they are living a purposeful life in service to God – which in many cases also brings with it, for them, a sense of enhanced well-being.
Christian models of service overlap with Jewish ones, but they tend to have a different emphasis. Rick Warren, for example, argues in his best-selling book, The Purpose Driven Life, that we each must find and follow our own divine-given purpose. Mother Teresa, on the other hand, exemplifies a life of service that seeks to imitate Christ; a life of imitatio dei.
Rick Warren is one of the most well-known evangelical pastors in the United States, the founder and former leader of Saddleback Church, which claims a weekly attendance of 30,000 members. Warren argues that we are made by and for God; God created us for God’s own enjoyment. Our purpose as human beings, then, is to surrender to God by doing God’s will. As he writes, “Everybody eventually surrenders to something or someone. If not to God, you will surrender to the opinions or expectations of others, to money, to resentment, to fear, or to your own pride, lusts, or ego. You were designed to worship God – and if you fail to worship him, you will create other things (idols) to give your life to. You are free to choose what you surrender to, but you are not free from the consequences of that choice…. Surrender is not the best way to live; it is the only way to live. Nothing else works. All other approaches lead to frustration, disappointment, and self-destruction” (84). The challenge, according to Warren, is to recognize this essential fact about human existence and to surrender to God.
To Warren, we all have five individual purposes. First, that since we are designed for God’s pleasure, we must love God through worship. Second, we are designed, or shaped, for service and so we must minister to others. Third, we are made for a mission and so must evangelize, spreading God’s message. Fourth, we are intended to be part of God’s family, so we must embrace fellowship, especially in and through a church. Fifth, we are created to be like Christ and so must grow in maturity through discipleship.
Warren emphasizes that while we all generally have the same set of purposes, they are going to manifest differently depending on each individual. Every person is unique and endowed with their own special gifts and talents. We are all obligated to serve God, but we do so differently. For example, a master plumber might volunteer to fix a broken sink in the church, unclog the drain of a poor elderly congregant, or oversee the installation of plumbing in a new house built as part of a mission. A person talented at making money might do so in order to donate more to good causes. Both the plumber and the wealthy CEO are valued the same here, and God would not want the person good at making money but lousy at fixing sinks to oversee a plumbing installation.
Why serve God in this way? Ultimately, the goal is to achieve eternal life. “Life is a temporary assignment,” as Warren titles one of his chapters. Life’s journey is about preparing to go home, to heaven, your eternal home. In this way too, our task is imitatio dei, imitation of God. Just as Jesus came down to earth on temporary assignment, so did we.
An extraordinarily strong sense of imitatio dei also lies behind the extraordinary activities of Mother Teresa, who was canonized as a saint in 2016. Mother Teresa, an Albanian, took her first religious vows as a nun in the order of the Sisters of Loreto in 1931, at the age of 20. She served in India, and in 1946 felt called to minister to the very poorest, sickest, and most vulnerable of residents. She founded the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 in Calcutta. The Mission opened hospices, leprosy-outreach, orphanages, and medical clinics, eventually spreading throughout India. Her efforts were recognized by a Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.
Mother Teresa’s work with the very needy was inextricably bound to her faith. As she put it in an interview, “the work is the means of putting our love of Christ into action.” She saw her purpose as imitatio dei, trying to be like Christ in his ministering to the needy. Although she ministered in India to many non-Christians, her work was so heavily embedded in her faith that she was sometimes critiqued, especially by the Hindu right, who accused her of Christian missionary activity.
The Jewish and Christian views that we have explored – which I want to emphasize cannot capture the rich diversity of opinions in either tradition – depart from a similar theological proposition: God made humans for a purpose. That purpose, in turn, reflects back to God, and requires a combination of service and imitation. Both emphasize the need to serve those who are less fortunate because it is God’s wish that we imitate Him.
The differences between these Jewish and Christian views are also worth exploring. The Jewish view emphasizes that a life structured by regular and uniform activities is grounded by the belief that God provided this structure for our well-being in this world. Mother Teresa and Rick Warren emphasize service to others in a more personal and less structured, if no less intense, way. We have to find our unique purpose through our personal relationships with God and then try to figure out how to fulfill it, usually in the context of helping others or the community. The reason that we do this is that this is our mission on earth as we prepare for eternal life.
But does a life of service require belief in God? Viktor Frankl gives one of the most powerful modern answers: no — but it may require love.
Viktor Frankl was born to a Jewish family in Vienna in 1905 and trained as what we would call a psychologist. He had recently married when, at the age of 37, he was sent to the Nazi concentration camps. He survived, and shortly after liberation wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning, which became an international best-seller. In this book, he recounts his experience in the camps and ties it to his theory of logotherapy.
Frankl posits that we have an innate desire to have a purpose. Without a purpose, we drift and lose hope – he observed that those inmates who lost their sense of purpose were the ones most likely to perish. On the one hand, Frankl states that each individual must find their own purpose; it almost seems arbitrary. On the other hand, though, Frankl clearly thinks that purpose must be rooted in love and connection to others. As he writes,
“love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way – an honorable way – in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.” (pp. 38-39)
We all love; it is a resource that we can tap. It is in love for another that we find purpose. He illustrates this approach with a story:
Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now, how could I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, “What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?” “Oh,” he said, “for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!” Whereupon I replied, “You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering – to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.” He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. (p. 135)
Even one’s suffering has meaning, outside of any theological framework. Love leads to service.
We have a psychological desire to feel needed. Studies have shown that feeling like we matter to others correlates with a better sense of well-being. Having a sense of purpose is a manifestation of this need – our purpose is usually connected to the sense that we matter to… someone or something. Service, in turn, is an expression of purpose. We serve because we feel our service matters.
Service can take many forms. It can mean obedience to God’s commandments. It can mean using one’s gifts for a divine mission. It can mean caring for the sick, the poor, the vulnerable, or the people closest to us. It can mean giving ourselves to a cause. In each case, service limits the self. It says: my freedom is real, but it is not ultimate. I am bound to something beyond myself.
Next time, we turn to the fourth and final orientation: detachment, which asks whether happiness comes not from binding ourselves more deeply, but from loosening our grip.
So here are two questions to sit with this week: Whom or what do you serve now? And where in your life might greater commitment — even at the cost of some freedom — make your life feel more meaningful?
You’re listening to Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life, with me, Michael Satlow. Readings, resources, and ways to support the podcast are available in the show notes and at mlsatlow.com. I welcome your questions and feedback.
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Disclaimers
I used an AI chatbot that I trained to generate some of the text this post (I used AI only for light editing on the podcast itself). I take full responsibility for its contents. Also, for some of the Amazon links I may receive affiliate benefits for any purchases made through the provided links.