Extrinsic Rewards In Seven Pounds And Fight Club

Extrinsic rewards are often perceived to lead to true fulfillment in life, though this is far from the truth. Extrinsic rewards never lead to true fulfillment and this is especially true in the movies Seven Pounds and Fight Club. These movies, despite being fundamentally different, share one important lesson; people that have only achieved their extrinsic goals will never feel truly fulfilled, thereby facing the realization that true fulfilment only comes intrinsically. Both Ben Thomas (the main character for Seven Pounds) and the unnamed narrator (the main character from Fight Club) face the initial emptiness that comes from only attaining extrinsic goals and then face the realization that true fulfillment will only come intrinsically.
People that only achieve their extrinsic goals will never feel fulfilled. The narrator in the movie Fight Club is no

The narrator is addicted to buying IKEA sets, his extrinsic reward for working so hard at his job. The narrator says, “Like so many others, I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct” (Flincher, 1999). In the movie Seven Pounds, Ben Thomas’s extrinsic rewards are his beach house and his box jellyfish. In the movie, Ben Thomas speaks highly of his box jellyfish, showing that he truly believes this to be a reward for his hard work. Ben says, “The first time I ever saw a box jellyfish, I was twelve…To me it was just the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen” (Muccino, 2008). In the movie Seven Pounds, Ben Thomas has his extrinsic rewards but these artificial things do not fulfill him in life, especially after the death of his fiancé. Ben says that his box jellyfish is the most beautiful thing in his life, but this does nothing to make him fulfilled, it just gives him another meaningless extrinsic reward. Similarly in the movie Fight Club, the narrator feels unfulfilled even though he is surrounded with his IKEA sets, his extrinsic