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THINKING ABOUT WHAT COUNTS
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There are many ways to shape your life, leaving aside the factors outside of your control like nature (what you are born with) and nurture (how the events and people around you affect things). For example, you can identify some things about influential people in your life or ones you hear about in books, news media and entertainment, or figures from the Bible. Either consciously or in ways you are less aware of, these personalities offer a model or sometimes a pathway to lead you toward the person you become and continue to come to be.
The thirst for meaningfulness (in God's eyes, in peer's eyes, in your own eyes) can be expressed by achievements that are visible or may be intangible and not readily visible to others; kindnesses done for other living things along the road of life, for instance. Dreams or aspirations of one's own or inspired by others may include meaningfulness as the fruit of the efforts as well as costs for that undertaking.
Another major form that people may use to measure success, or its lack, is worldly acumen and rewards produced: the more stuff (or less tangibly, the more experiences) gathered equates the the more achievement. Worldly measures might include consumer victories: satisfaction from bargaining for a good price, avoiding costly monetary liability, freedom from debts, and so on. Or the trophies might fit the bumper sticker, "The person who dies with the most stuff wins."
Doubtless there are many other ways to estimate one's own value among the living, but from the Rabbi Jesus example, perhaps relationships and lives touched by one's efforts - either adding net positive things to those lives, or by lessening the negative parts of those others' lives - are the best yardstick for knowing your measure.
Analytically, the motivators of meaningfulness, material shrewdness, or building relationships of depth and breadth can be discussed independent of each other, but going about one's day or lifetime these all work together, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. And yet, even if it is artificial to separate these from each other, doing so helps to make clear which mindset leads the others at any moment: is your decision based on maximizing utility (homo economicus) and pressing the levers of political economy, or is the main organizing principle for why you are driving your life in a particular direction mainly about meaningfulness, something that resonates as the main point which positions all else in secondary or dependent roles. Or maybe the lens through which you see the world and view your own self, as well, is concerned with quality of relationships, the ways that one person helps another to bridge difficulties, grow into a bigger person, do the right thing, and pay forward or pay back blessings they have known. Of course this same discussion of individual lives can also be broadly projected on the various zeitgeist of a certain generation or century; or indeed upon a whole culture, language, or society - what is primary and what is regarded as secondary in lifetime worth?
No matter which current flows strongest in your life at a given stage, the others will be also be present because even the holiest aspirations and intentionality takes place in a world of gravity, calories, hungers and thirsts. So material circumstances cannot simply be dispensed with. Nor can the deep-rooted desire to express and recognize meaningful words and deeds. As for living and loving relationships, there must necessarily be good days and bad days; not forever frozen and unchanging in tone and texture.
Having a yardstick, or at least being aware of the one you most often turn to, is an important step in assessing, estimating, comparing and discussing earlier situations and also for planning the future use of time and energies that give shape to the life that you now live and the one that you want to live in days to come.
