Soulspan: Beyond Lifespan and Healthspan to Feeling Alive
Longevity is a means rather than an end to discovering the magic around us.
Posted June 4, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
As sociologist William Bruce Cameron observed, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
This is certainly true in medicine.
As a physician specializing in precision health, resilience , and longevity, a field increasingly built around lab values, dashboards, and advanced biomarkers , I value and am perhaps a bit obsessed with the unprecedented data and interventions available today to extend healthy years of life.
But at its core, my work is truly about establishing trust, preserving dignity, sparking inspiration, and guiding a path to possibility. The sacred patient-physician bond is a space for unfiltered conversations about fears, struggles, hopes, and desires. These conversations get to the heart of our humanity. They make it clear that what we seek, beyond health and longevity, is more elusive.
Research backs up what many of us already intuitively sense: Some of the most important factors for well-being and longevity are subjective and hard to measure. Connection , contribution , purpose , and meaning aren’t just embedded in our DNA as essential to living longer and healthier. They may be the ultimate goal.
In other words, lifespan and healthspan are tools that preserve our mental and physical capacity to engage with what matters more: nourishing our soul. I call this intuitively recognizable but difficult-to-measure metric our soulspan. In essence, soulspan can be defined as the extent to which we feel fully alive from experiencing joy, satisfaction, and meaning throughout our lives. We build our soulspan through the energy and fulfillment we gain from connecting, creating, and contributing.
The Three Dimensions of Soulspan
- Joy: How you emotionally experience life.
Joy is different from happiness . Happiness is something we pursue deliberately, tied to how well we feel life is going. We feel happy when we experience pleasure, achieve a goal, receive praise, or pursue success. It rises when circumstances are good and falls when they aren't. It is, at its core, about me and how my life is measuring up.
Joy is a deeper emotion , less dependent on circumstance. We experience it through presence, awe , love, beauty, gratitude , and liberation. We nurture it by connecting with ourselves, another person, nature, or the transcendent. This is why joy can exist even amidst grief , uncertainty, tiredness, or pain. For example, a parent holding their newborn in the middle of the night might not feel happy but can still feel profound joy.
Unlike happiness and pleasure, joy can’t be pursued directly. It bubbles up from our core. It has a quality of wholeness rather than stimulation. And critically, it is not about us but about losing ourselves for a moment.
- Satisfaction: How you evaluate and live your life.
In medical literature, life satisfaction involves making a thoughtful, global judgment about how your life, as a whole, is going. It is a self-evaluation of how well you think your life matches your goals and standards, separate from momentary emotions or situations.
However, life satisfaction goes beyond this clinical definition.
Satisfaction is not just about getting what you want or liking your circumstances but also about discovering your true essence and courageously living it. More than just things going well, satisfaction means feeling that the life you have built matches who you really are and that you are living in alignment throughout your life.
I think of it the way Michelangelo thought about sculpture. He famously described the figure as already existing within the marble. The artist's task was not to create it from nothing. Instead, it was to remove what obscured it. The same is true for us. Your truest self, a constellation of your values, gifts, desires, and the way you love, create, and contribute, is already there. Over a lifetime, your task is to chisel away fear , conditioning, inherited expectations, and the performative identities that obscure it.
To be truly satisfied, you have to first recognize your true nature. Second, and more difficult, you need the courage to express it.
Aliveness, in my view, lives here. Not in achievement but in the congruence between who you are and how you live. It’s taking chances and pursuing what truly matters to you without letting fear, comfort, or the desire to belong override your self-integrity.
Many people reach extraordinary levels of external success but still feel strangely empty because their lives were shaped by seeking approval and meeting expectations rather than self-expression. Constantly betraying yourself is exhausting and leaves you feeling divided. In the end, the regrets I hear most are not that people failed. It is that they didn't love fully, didn’t take a chance on what mattered, or didn’t let themselves be who they were.
- Meaning: How your life connects to something larger.
Meaning involves transcendence. It’s how our life, and the way we live it, connects to the universe. We experience meaning when we feel that our experiences, relationships, struggles, and contributions piece together in some way and are part of something bigger than ourselves.
Research suggests that meaning consists of three interconnected elements : coherence, purpose, and significance.
Coherence is the feeling that your life makes sense. It is the story you tell yourself about who you are, how the chapters of your life connect, what your experiences taught you, and how even difficult moments fit into a larger narrative.
Purpose is the feeling that your life is directed toward something. Purpose gives us direction and helps us see our efforts and challenges as part of something we care about.
Significance is the feeling that your life matters. It is the sense that your existence has value and that your life is worth living.
Ultimately, meaning is about how your life became part of a larger human story.
When people say something “feeds their soul” or “sucks the life out of them,” I think they are talking about a natural desire to extend their soulspan.
In the end, what matters is not just how long or how healthy we lived, but how much magic we experienced along the way through moments of joy, the satisfaction of becoming ourselves, and the meaning we found by connecting to something bigger.
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Sharon Horesh Bergquist, M.D., is a practicing internal medicine physician, scientist, and an associate professor at Emory University School of Medicine.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.