Why Finding Meaning — Not Happiness — Is What Really Matters
Author
Emily Esfahani Smith explains how one can live a more meaningful life.
The pursuit of happiness is so important to
American ideals that it has been enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
But a new book, The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters, argues
that finding meaning in life is ultimately more satisfying than searching for
happiness.
Author Emily Esfahani Smith says one can find
meaning even in tough circumstances to give you a reason to live, whereas a
pursuit of happiness focused on satisfying your every whim can still lead to
emptiness.
Smith, a columnist for The New
Criterion and editor at Stanford University’s
Hoover Institution, joined the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM’s channel 111 to
talk about her book.
An edited transcript of the conversation
follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: What
got you thinking down this path? Most people want to do everything they can to
be happy.
Emily Esfahani Smith: I
certainly thought that myself as I was growing up. But I was a grad student
here at the University of Pennsylvania for positive psychology several years
ago, and one day we heard a lecture about the difference between a happy life
and a meaningful life. It was eye-opening and provocative because it showed me
that the happy life was associated with things like feeling good, being in good
physical health, and being a taker versus a giver, to use the language of Adam
Grant, a professor here. Whereas the meaningful life was associated with doing
things for other people, connecting to something that’s bigger than you and
being a giver versus a taker.
I started thinking about that and realized that makes a lot of
sense because so many of the people that I know and admire aren’t focused on
pursuing their own personal happiness. They’re focused on leading meaningful
lives and what they can do for others. That was the germ of idea that led to
the book.
Knowledge@Wharton: In
many cases, success comes out of leading that meaningful life.
Smith: Exactly. The
research shows that if you set happiness as your goal and pursue it, value it
the way our culture encourages us to do, you can actually end up feeling
unhappy and lonely. But if you set meaning as your goal and devote yourself to
living a meaningful life, you experience this deeper and more endearing form of
well-being down the road.
Knowledge@Wharton: Many
would say the millennial generation is leading the path towards having meaning
be an important component of our society.
Smith: That’s right. I
remember seeing a study that showed that of all the things that millennials
want in a job — financial reward, prestige, status — the No. 1 priority for
them is a sense of meaning at work, which I think is wonderful. I would also
say that sometimes millennials and non-millennials, all of us, can suffer from
some myths about meaning. We think that if we want our work to be meaningful,
it has to give us the one meaning and purpose of our lives — and that we can’t
find or craft meaning no matter what kind of circumstances we are in. So, as
much as I think it’s important to value meaning, I think that we also need to
bring it down to earth a bit.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
say meaning can take a variety of different forms. It’s different things for
different people.
Smith: Exactly. I
interviewed all kinds of people about what makes their lives meaningful, and I
looked at what the social science research said. No two people told me the same
things. Everyone found meaning on their own. But I did find that there were
certain themes that came up again and again.
When people talk about what makes their lives meaningful, they
talk about having relationships that are defined by a sense of belonging,
having a purpose or something worthwhile to do with their time, crafting
narratives that help them understand themselves in the world, and having
experiences of transcendence or self-loss. We all have to find it on our own,
but I think that there are those universal building blocks that we can all
build up in our lives.
Knowledge@Wharton: One
of the things you looked at in this book was the element of suicide, which I
found very interesting. Suicide is incredibly impactful, but how does it play
into this concept of a meaningful life?
Smith: A lot of people
think of suicide as a problem of unhappiness. Someone is depressed or
despairing, and the reason is they’re not happy, so let’s make them happy. But
the research shows that when you look at what’s driving suicide rates, what
predicts it most strongly is not a lack of happiness among the population but a
lack of meaning. Suicide is really a problem of meaning. People think that
their lives don’t have worth, so they give up on life. They despair. The best
way to get people out of despair and depression is for them to know that their
life has a why or a reason.
Knowledge@Wharton: Is
there a link between not having meaning and suicide?
Smith: Human beings are meaning-seeking
creatures. We weren’t put on this earth to feel happy all the time. We were put
on this earth to find meaning and to live meaningful lives and to know that our
lives matter. When we feel like we don’t have meaning or our lives don’t
matter, then we become vulnerable to depression, suicide, despair.
Knowledge@Wharton: If
you go back 20, 30 years to that Wall Street culture we all remember, it would
seem that was the height of seeking happiness through financial and
professional gains and maybe not worrying as much about the meaning part of it.
Smith: There was a very
hedonic sense of pleasure and happiness that was driving the culture then.
Speaking about millennials, there was a study related to this showing that the
interest in finding meaning among millennials correlated with the recession.
There’s something about being in an economic downturn that forces people to
maybe take stock of their lives because the financial opportunities aren’t as
readily available.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
talk about something called the Pillars of Meaning. What are they?
Smith: I wrote this book
because I wanted to understand what exactly the building blocks of a meaningful
life are so that we could know what we have to do. … My approach was to go out
across the country and interview dozens of people about their own stories of what
makes their lives meaningful. I also turned to social science research. There’s
a new and growing body of research around what makes life meaningful, so I
pored through all those studies. I also looked at what the humanities had to
say because for thousands of years philosophers, religious sages, poets,
artists have been dealing with this eternal question of meaning.
As I parsed through all that research, I found that these four
themes came up again and again. These are what I call the Four Pillars of Meaning.
These are what the building blocks of a meaningful life are — having a sense of
belonging, purpose, storytelling and transcendence.
Human beings have a need to belong. This means that we need to
be in relationships or part of communities where we feel valued for who we are
intrinsically, not just because we adopt a certain label. Where it gets
negative is you become part of a group and you’re not true to yourself, or
people only care about you because you assume some label, like a political
label or a sports team label.
Knowledge@Wharton: Talk
about resilience. I think more and more, people feel like resilience is a key
component because you don’t know what’s going to come around the corner for
you.
Smith: Resilience is the
ability to bounce back from adversity. Psychologists talk about it as being
bent but not broken by tragic experiences or adversities. I found that the
people who were the most resilient had those four pillars of meaning that were
strong in their lives so that when adversity hits, they were able to withstand
it. Like if it was an earthquake, their infrastructure was strong enough to
withstand it.
The other thing that happens is that people grow after
adversity, and that’s another form of resilience. The way that they do it is by
building up these different pillars of meaning in their lives. They strengthen
their relationships. They find a new purpose. Their spiritual life deepens, for
example.
Knowledge@Wharton: Purpose
and meaning seem very similar in many cases.
Smith: I think a lot of us
use the terms purpose and meaning interchangeably. But purpose is really one of
the building blocks of a meaningful life. Meaning is an assessment that we make
about our lives. Do our lives have value and significance? Purpose is a
far-reaching goal that involves contributing to the world. It’s having
something worthwhile to do with your time. It’s the way you leave your mark on
the world.
Knowledge@Wharton: The
spirituality part of it I find interesting because it feels like that has
regressed a bit.
Smith: When you look at
the indexes of religious involvement — such as people going to church, people
praying, religious identification — those are all down. At the same time,
what’s been increasing is the number of people who identify as spiritual but not
religious. We have this part of us that needs spirituality defined in the sense
of things that are bigger than us. We want to know what life is about, what our
lives are about. That’s been with us for thousands of years. It’s not going to
go away. If we don’t satisfy it within a framework of organized religion, we’re
going to try to satisfy it in other ways.
Knowledge@Wharton: We
still have a lot of people in this country who are looking to survive by
working two jobs. How does that play into finding a meaningful life?
Smith: I think one of the
big distinctions between a meaningful life and a happy life is that a
meaningful life can be a hard life. When you’re giving back, you’re making
sacrifices. It’s a busy life. It’s an active life. The key in meaning is about
connecting and contributing to something beyond yourself. If you’re busy
because you have two different jobs, you’re raising children, I would say that
the way to find meaning is to ask yourself how are the things that you’re doing
supporting the people and the communities that you love? Even if you don’t find
the nature of your work meaningful, you can find meaning by adopting this kind
of service mindset.
Knowledge@Wharton: What
has meaning meant to you?
Smith: In my book, I write
about my childhood growing up in a Sufi meetinghouse in Montreal. Sufism is a
school of mysticism that’s associated with Islam. Rumi the poet was a Sufi. The
whirling dervishes were Sufis. It’s kind of like a group of monastic orders
that grew up in the Middle East during the middle ages. Living in this Sufi
meetinghouse meant that twice a week Sufis came over to our home and they
meditated sitting on the floor for several hours. They practiced love and
kindness. They practice service to all through charity and volunteering.
I was surrounded by people who were leading really meaningful
lives, even though their lives were also difficult lives. Some of them were
refugees. Some of them had just been beaten up by life in other ways. I was
surrounded by people who had really clear answers to what it meant to lead a
meaningful life. I think that seeded the idea of meaning as a really important
part of life from an early age for me.
Knowledge@Wharton: The
U.S. is a cultural melting pot. Does that impact how meaning can be brought
forward, especially reaching out to other people and other cultures?
Smith: This is really
about belonging, and cultivating belonging with other people. As Americans we
want people who come here to feel at home, like they’re welcome here.
One of the things that I like to say about belonging is that
it’s a choice and we can cultivate it in the moment with another person. We can
choose to reach out to someone and build up this pillar of meaning, or we can
choose to reject them by unfriending them on Facebook, by being racist or
inappropriate or things like that. Or we can choose to value them and lift them
up. I think that as we live in a culture that’s increasingly diverse and
immigrants come to this country, we need to do everything we can to build that pillar
of belonging.
Knowledge@Wharton: How
does this relate back to the traditional business structure in the U.S.?
Smith: In recent years,
there’s been this move in the business community towards meaning and purpose. A
lot of companies are rebranding themselves around meaning and purpose. Some of
them, maybe it’s not so sincere, but others it really is. I talk about this
apparel company ‘Life Is Good’ in my book and how they are a meaning-driven
company. They really want to spread the power of optimism. That’s their mission
and purpose. They do that by having these positive shirts and hats.
People who are going through adversities, like a woman who lost
her husband to 9/11, children who are suffering with cancer, have written into
the company saying how meaningful the company’s message was for them as they
got through their adversity. The company takes those letters and reads them to
their employees, so the employees know that no matter what they’re doing their
tasks are part of this bigger purpose to make the world a better place.
Knowledge@Wharton: I
want to touch on storytelling because I find it interesting. We are a culture
of stories. How does that play in to what you’re talking about with finding
meaning?
Smith: Storytelling is about
your own life story and how you tell that story to yourself. It’s the act of
taking your experiences and weaving them into a narrative that explains who you
are and where you came from. It’s how you make sense of your experiences, and
it gives meaning because it provides a framework. It allows you to understand
your life in terms of patterns, and it makes you feel like your life is
coherent and integrated. Storytelling is especially important when you’re
dealing with adversity because those are blips in your narrative that you need
to reintegrate into your story.
Knowledge@Wharton: So
that you don’t forget the path you’ve been or the travails that you’ve had to
deal with?
Smith: Exactly. And to
understand that those travails weren’t meaningless, that they helped you grow
or they led to this or that good outcome. We don’t want to feel despair
whenever we experience something negative.
Knowledge@Wharton: But
do enough people think of it that way?
Smith: That’s the real
problem of the happiness zeitgeist — we don’t want to deal with negative and
painful memories, even though it’s really important to do so because we need to
be able to close the chapter … on the more difficult experiences of our lives
to find a sense of peace and resolution.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/finding-meaning-not-happiness-ultimately-satisfies/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-05-25
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