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 sigal.samuel@vox.com. 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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