Linda Blair How to have a meaningful life
At first glance, you might think happiness and a sense of meaningfulness in life go hand in hand. However, numerous studies challenge this assumption – and some even suggest it’s rare for the two to coexist.
Happiness is about getting what you want, about satisfying needs or desires, and it’s associated with taking more than with giving. Happiness is fleeting: it comes and goes, and we have less control over it than we would like. In fact, Jonathan Schooler and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara showed that trying to be happy may even be counter-productive.
Schooler asked participants to listen to a piece of classical music, instructing some simply to listen to the piece while asking others to try to feel as happy as possible while listening. Afterwards, they found participants who tried to feel happy were actually unhappier than those who had simply listened.
Meaningfulness, on the other hand, is a quality that must be created or chosen. Login George and Crystal Park at the University of Connecticut reviewed literature about what constitutes a meaningful life, and came up with three features. A meaningful life has: a) purpose, the degree to which you feel directed by valued goals; b) comprehensiveness, the ability to make sense of your life and see it as coherent; and c) mattering, the belief that your life has significance and is valued.
The relationship between happiness and meaningfulness attracted the attention of Roy Baumeister at Florida State University. He and his colleagues asked 394 Americans aged between 18 and 78 whether they felt their life was meaningful and/or happy, and why. Although a few scored highly on both dimensions or low on both, a significant number scored high on one dimension and low on the other. The differences between the latter two groups were notable. Those who described their lives as more happy than meaningful tended to avoid challenging situations and relationships. They described themselves as relatively self-orientated, and more often as takers than givers. Those who didn’t rate themselves as particularly happy but who saw their lives as highly meaningful spent significant time working on their relationships and helping others.
It seems, therefore, that if you choose to imbue your life with meaning, in particular to invest effort in your relationships and work to improve the lives of other people, you may feel stressed and less happy than those who don’t choose to live this way. There is, however, a huge pay-off. The Harvard Grant Study has followed the lives of 268 Harvard undergraduates and 456 Boston inner-city residents since 1938. It has found little association between health and longevity, and happiness goals such as money or fame. Instead, the factor most powerfully associated with health, contentment – and even longevity – is the ability to maintain satisfying and meaningful long-term relationships.