Palliative vs meaningful action
Palliative action is action taken to relieve a symptom without actually addressing the cause.
It’s taking out your to phone to check notifications when you feel stuck on a a problem, which may alleviate the discomfort of wrestling with a hard problem but doesn’t actually help you make any progress on solving it.
Meaningful action is action that is goal-aligned — it’s choosing to continue to work through an important problem despite how challenging it feels in the moment.
Palliative action is almost always easier to take, but at most it’s a sparkly, ephemeral distraction.
Meaningful action, while the harder choice in many situations, provides precisely what’s on the label: meaning, a durable sense of fulfillment, the hard-earned conclusion that “that was time well spent” versus “where did all the time go?”.