The Power of Meaning

by Emily Esfahani Smith

  called positive psychology: Not all of the new research in well-being is occurring within positive psychology. Some of it is in psychology more broadly, economics, and other fields. It’s also important to note that a number of psychologists were studying well-being before positive psychology came around, and some of them were drawing on the humanities for guidance. See, for example, Carol D. Ryff and Corey Lee M. Keyes, “The Structure of Psychological Well-Being Revisited,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 4 (1995): 719–27; and Alan S. Waterman, “Two Conceptions of Happiness: Contrasts of Personal Expressiveness (Eudaimonia) and Hedonic Enjoyment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 4 (1993): 678–91. See also Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being,” American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (2000): 68–78. There were also researchers studying meaning, like Roy Baumeister, Laura King, Brian Little, Dan McAdams, and Paul Wong.

  rich tradition of the humanities: The founding of positive psychology and the development of its vision not only involved social scientists but philosophers, including Robert Nozick and Daniel Robinson. A great example of the melding of the humanities and science in positive psychology is Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also the work of James Pawelski.

  Positive psychology was founded by: For good reviews of what positive psychology is about and its development, see Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (New York: Free Press, 2002) and Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (New York: Free Press, 2011); and Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Positive Psychology: An Introduction,” American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (2000): 5–14.

  Some researchers studied: For good overviews of the research on happiness, I recommend Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want (New York: Penguin Books, 2008) and The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You Happy, but Does (New York: Penguin Books, 2014).

  over 10,000 per year: Ed Diener, a pioneer in happiness research, sent me a graph by email showing the growth of research on happiness (which researchers called subjective well-being) on April 16, 2014.

  Major media outlets: For a book that discusses the happiness zeitgeist more fully, see John F. Schumaker, In Search of Happiness: Understanding an Endangered State of Mind (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2007). For a brief history of the idea of happiness and how, in America, the pursuit of happiness took off as a cultural phenomenon, see Shigehiro Oishi, Jesse Graham, Selin Kesebir, and Iolanda Costa Galinha, “Concepts of Happiness across Time and Cultures,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 39, no. 5 (2013): 559–77.

  According to Psychology Today: Carlin Flora, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” Psychology Today, January 1, 2009.

  since the mid-2000s: From my own analysis as measured by Google Trends in 2013.

  “The shortcut to anything”: Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (New York: Atria Books, 2006), 100.

  we’re more miserable than ever: See chapter 1 for a discussion of the rise of depression and suicide, and chapter 2 for one on the rising rates of social isolation and the consequences of that.

  actually makes people unhappy: See Iris B. Mauss, Maya Tamir, Craig L. Anderson, and Nicole S. Savino, “Can Seeking Happiness Make People Unhappy? Paradoxical Effects of Valuing Happiness,” Emotion 11, no. 4 (2011): 807–15. Mauss also led research showing how the pursuit of happiness begets loneliness: Iris B. Mauss, Nicole S. Savino, Craig L. Anderson, Max Weisbuch, Maya Tamir, and Mark L. Laudenslager, “The Pursuit of Happiness Can Be Lonely,” Emotion 12, no. 5 (2012): 908. For more on how actively trying to pursue happiness makes you unhappy, see section four of Jonathan W. Schooler, Dan Ariely, and George Loewenstein, “The Pursuit and Assessment of Happiness Can Be Self-Defeating,” in Isabelle Brocas and Juan D. Carrillo (editors), The Psychology of Economic Decisions: Volume 1: Rationality and Well-Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 41–70. For a discussion of the benefits of happiness, along with the cons of valuing it above all, see June Gruber, Iris B. Mauss, and Maya Tamir, “A Dark Side of Happiness? How, When, and Why Happiness Is Not Always Good,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 3 (2011): 222–33. In another paper, reporting on the findings from two studies, social scientists pointed out that “the culturally-pervasive value placed on attaining happiness can represent a risk factor for symptoms and a diagnosis of depression”: Brett Q. Ford, Amanda J. Shallcross, Iris B. Mauss, Victoria A. Floerke, and June Gruber, “Desperately Seeking Happiness: Valuing Happiness Is Associated with Symptoms and Diagnosis of Depression,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 33, no. 10 (2014): 890–905.

  “a human being dissatisfied”: John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001), 10.

  Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick: This quote is from Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Touchstone, 1989), 100. The remaining information about the experience machine is drawn from The Examined Life, 99–108, and from Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 43–45.

  as a majority of us do: See Ed Diener and Shigehiro Oishi, “Are Scandinavians Happier than Asians? Issues in Comparing Nations on Subjective Well-Being,” in Frank Columbus (editor), Asian Economic and Political Issues: Volume 10 (Hauppauge, New York: Nova Science, 2004), 1–25; Shigehiro Oishi, Ed Diener, and Richard E. Lucas, “The Optimum Level of Well-Being: Can People Be Too Happy?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 2, no. 4 (2007): 346–60; and Schumaker, In Search of Happiness.

  we recoil: The analysis in this paragraph comes mostly from Nozick, The Examined Life. There, he writes, “We care about what is actually the case….We want to be importantly connected to reality, not to live in a delusion.” In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he gives three related reasons for not plugging in. First, “we want to do certain things”; second, “we want to be a certain way”; and third, “plugging into an experience machine limits us to…a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct,” 43.

  distinction between: See, e.g., Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being,” Annual Review of Psychology 52, no. 1 (2001): 141–66; Veronika Huta and Alan S. Waterman, “Eudaimonia and Its Distinction from Hedonia: Developing a Classification and Terminology for Understanding Conceptual and Operational Definitions,” Journal of Happiness Studies 15, no. 6 (2014): 1425–56; and Corey L. M. Keyes and Julia Annas, “Feeling Good and Functioning Well: Distinctive Concepts in Ancient Philosophy and Contemporary Science,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 4, no. 3 (2009): 197–201.

  Researchers also point out that our motivations differ—some people are motivated by the pursuit of happiness and others by the pursuit of meaning, which has implications for how they behave and feel. For more on our differing orientations to well-being, see Christopher Peterson, Nansook Park, and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Orientations to Happiness and Life Satisfaction: The Full Life Versus the Empty life,” Journal of Happiness Studies 6, no. 1 (2005): 25–41; Veronika Huta, “The Complementary Roles of Eudaimonia and Hedonia and How They Can Be Pursued in Practice,” in Stephen Joseph (editor), Positive Psychology in Practice: Promoting Human Flourishing in Work, Health, Education and Everyday Life, second edition (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 159–68; Veronika Huta, “An Overview of Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being Concepts,” in Leonard Reinecke and Mary Beth Oliver (editors), Handbook of Media Use and Well-Being, chapter 2 (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Veronika Huta, “Eudaimonic and Hedonic Orientations: Theoretical Considerations and Research Findings,” in Joar Vittersø (editor), Handbook of Eudaimoni
c Well-Being (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2016).

  two paths to the good life: Much of the material in this paragraph draws from Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Grove Press, 2006). I also interviewed McMahon and exchanged a number of emails with him throughout 2014–2016.

  footsteps of Sigmund Freud: Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 25. Freud himself didn’t believe that happiness was the purpose of life, but he thought most people did.

  Aristippus wrote: Quoted in Michael F. Steger, Todd B. Kashdan, and Shigehiro Oishi, “Being Good by Doing Good: Daily Eudaimonic Activity and Well-Being,” Journal of Research in Personality 42, no. 1 (2008): 22–42.

  “Nature has placed mankind”: Quoted in McMahon, Happiness, 218.

  One tool commonly used: There are a number of ways social scientists measure happiness. One of the most common tools is called the Subjective Well-Being Scale, which is understood to be a measure of hedonic happiness by researchers, as pointed out in Ryan and Deci, “On Happiness and Human Potentials”; and Todd B. Kashdan, Robert Biswas-Diener, and Laura A. King, “Reconsidering Happiness: The Costs of Distinguishing between Hedonics and Eudaimonia,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 3, no. 4 (2008): 219–33. The Subjective Well-Being Scale consists of two subscales. One is called the PANAS (or the Positive Affect Negative Affect Schedule), which measures your emotional or affective state. The second is the Satisfaction with Life Scale, which asks individuals to rate items like “the conditions of my life are excellent” and “so far I have gotten the important things I want in life.” For other ways to measure happiness, see Sonja Lyubomirsky and Heidi S. Lepper, “A Measure of Subjective Happiness: Preliminary Reliability and Construct Validation,” Social Indicators Research 46, no. 2 (1999): 137–55; Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, David A. Schkade, Norbert Schwarz, and Arthur A. Stone, “A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method,” Science 306, no. 5702 (2004): 1776–80; Daniel Kahneman, “Objective Happiness,” in Daniel Kahneman, Edward Diener, and Norbert Schwarz (editors), Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 3–25; and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeremy Hunter, “Happiness in Everyday Life: The Uses of Experience Sampling,” Journal of Happiness Studies 4, no. 2 (2003): 185–99. These measures of happiness are hedonic, but other researchers define happiness more broadly. For example, in Authentic Happiness, Seligman argues that happiness arises from three pillars: positive emotions, engagement, and meaning. Later, he expanded his definition of a good life to also include the pillar of relationships and achievement, and called this new model “well-being theory” or “flourishing” rather than “authentic happiness” (see Seligman, Flourish). Interestingly, when psychologists expand their definition of well-being beyond positive states and emotions, they tend to call the construct something other than happiness—like flourishing or psychological well-being.

  Meaning is the other path: Some people might say that the distinction between hedonia and eudaimonia is really between two forms of happiness, one grounded in pleasure and one grounded in meaning. However, because our common cultural understanding of happiness is a state of good feeling, positive emotions, and pleasure, while eudaimonia, or living a meaningful life, is something that we do, and can be stressful and full of negative emotions, I’ve chosen to draw a distinction between the two. Also, I use the terms “meaning” and “eudaimonia” interchangeably since my definition of meaning essentially encompasses the various aspects of eudaimonia as defined in the various sources I cite throughout this section.

  Aristotle: For the section on Aristotle, I relied on Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, translated by David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry “Aristotle’s Ethics,” plato.stanford.edu/​entries/​aristotle-ethics/; author interview with philosopher Julia Annas on September 23, 2014, and subsequent email exchanges; and McMahon, Happiness.

  gets translated as “happiness”: As Julia Annas pointed out to me in an interview, philosophers tend to think that the word “happiness” is not adequate for discussing what Aristotle meant by eudaimonia. See also Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), where she writes, “ ‘[F]lourishing’ is a better translation of eudaimonia than ‘happiness,’ ” 10.

  pretty harsh words: Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 6.

  requires cultivating the best: Aristotle also believed that certain external conditions—like having money, friends, luck, and health—had to be minimally satisfied before someone could flourish.

  Aristotle’s distinction: See, for example, Ryan and Deci, “On Happiness and Human Potentials”; Huta and Waterman, “Eudaimonia and Its Distinction from Hedonia”; Carol D. Ryff, “Psychological Well-Being Revisited: Advances in the Science and Practice of Eudaimonia,” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 83, no. 1 (2013): 10–28; and Steger et al., “Being Good by Doing Good.”

  defined as “feeling good”: Specifically, psychologists define it as pleasure, positive feelings, comfort, the absence of distress and negative emotions, and enjoyment.

  as “being and doing good”: See Steger et al., “Being Good by Doing Good.”

  “seeking to use and develop”: Veronika Huta and Richard M. Ryan, “Pursuing Pleasure or Virtue: The Differential and Overlapping Well-Being Benefits of Hedonic and Eudaimonic Motives,” Journal of Happiness Studies 11, no. 6 (2010): 735–62.

  “The more directly one aims to”: Richard M. Ryan, Veronika Huta, and Edward L. Deci, “Living Well: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective on Eudaimonia,” in Antonella Delle Fave (editor), The Exploration of Happiness: Present and Future Perspectives (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer Science+Business Media, 2013), 119.

  according to psychologists, when people say: See Michael F. Steger, “Meaning in Life: A Unified Model,” in Shane J. Lopez and Charles R. Snyder (editors), The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press); and Roy Baumeister, Meanings of Life (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991).

  some social scientists are skeptical: See, for example, Kashdan et al., “Reconsidering Happiness.”

  can’t be conflated so easily: In the following papers, Huta does a wonderful job of drawing out this distinction between meaning and happiness. Both hedonia and eudaimonia, she points out, relate to psychological health in different ways, and both can be taken to extremes, though the research shows that meaning offers a more elevated and prosocial form of well-being than hedonia: Huta, “The Complementary Roles of Eudaimonia and Hedonia and How They Can Be Pursued in Practice”; Huta, “An Overview of Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-Being Concepts”; and Huta, “Eudaimonic and Hedonic Orientations.”

  led by Florida State University’s: Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, Jennifer L. Aaker, and Emily N. Garbinsky, “Some Key Differences between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 8, no. 6 (2013): 505–16.

  overlap in certain ways: The researchers did not measure people who are high on meaning and low on happiness or high on happiness and low on meaning. Instead, they measured how much happiness and meaning each individual reported and then saw what each of those variables correlated with. They write: “Meaningfulness and happiness are positively correlated, so they have much in common. Many factors, such as feeling connected to others, feeling productive, and not being alone or bored contribute similarly to both. Yet the two are distinct, and the focus of this investigation has been to identify the major differences in correlates of happiness (corrected for meaning) and meaningfulness (corrected for happiness).”

  can be at odds: In one analysis of five datasets comprising nearly 3,000 people, Veronika Huta found that 33 percent of respondents were high on happiness and low on meaning, 26 percent were high on meaning and low on happiness, 20 percent were high on both, and 20 percent were low on both—suggesting
a real distinction between meaning and happiness. Email to author on October 28, 2014.

  of a 2010 study: Huta and Ryan, “Pursuing Pleasure or Virtue,” study 4.

  The philosopher John Stuart Mill: John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 117.

  more fulfilling: See, as mentioned, Huta and Ryan, “Pursuing Pleasure or Virtue”; Peterson et al., “Orientations to Happiness and Life Satisfaction”; and Steger et al., “Being Good by Doing Good.” See also Keyes and Annas, “Feeling Good and Functioning Well,” where the findings imply that meaning is a more effective buffer against mental illness than happiness, as Keyes explained to me in an email from March 31, 2016. He also said that eudaimonia has been found to be a stronger protector against mortality than hedonia. Another study found that eudaimonia was associated with a healthier genetic signature than hedonia: Barbara L. Fredrickson, Karen M. Grewen, Kimberly A. Coffey, Sara B. Algoe, Ann M. Firestine, Jesusa M. G. Arevalo, Jeffrey Ma, and Steven W. Cole, “A Functional Genomic Perspective on Human Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 33 (2013): 13684–89. Also, as discussed, the pursuit of happiness can make people unhappy. Meanwhile, there’s research showing that meaningful pursuits like doing acts of kindness, expressing gratitude, setting important goals, and nurturing social relationships boost happiness. For a summary of that research, see Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness.

  1: The Meaning Crisis

  historian and philosopher Will Durant: For the biographical sketch of Durant, I relied on Will Durant, Fallen Leaves: Last Words on Life, Love, War, and God (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); On the Meaning of Life (Dallas, Texas: Promethean Press, 2005); Transition: A Mental Autobiography (New York: Touchstone, 1955); and Will and Ariel Durant, A Dual Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977).