Your Life Is Already Meaningful
“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
—WILLIAM JAMES, Is Life Worth Living, 1897
Most people in most circumstances experience their lives as being pretty meaningful no matter the lingering existential doubts. When I told professor Laura King, one of the leading experts of psychological research on life’s meaningfulness, that I was in the process of writing a book on the subject, she gently pulled me aside in the corridor of Portland’s Convention Center and issued a sage warning: don’t tell people that their lives are meaningless—that would be irresponsible because decades’ worth of research demonstrates the opposite. In an influential 2014 article published in American Psychologist, King and Rutgers’s professor Samantha Heintzelman reviewed various nationally representative surveys and other evidence to see how much meaningfulness people experience on average.54 Turns out it’s a lot. When a broad survey of Americans over the age of fifty were asked whether they felt their life had meaning, 95 percent said yes.55 Another survey asked a large national sample of people to rate their agreement with specific statements like “My life has a clear sense of purpose” on a scale from 1 (not true at all) to 5 (completely true). The average was quite high, 3.8.56 And this trend extends outside the US, too. As noted before, of the 140,000 people from 132 nations surveyed by the Gallup World Poll about whether their “life has an important purpose or meaning,” 91 percent answered yes, with the percentage even higher in some of the world’s poorest countries.57 Other studies show that people facing various health problems, like fighting cancer, typically still find their life meaningful.58 King and Heintzelman write, “Evidence from large representative samples and the body of research using an older and a newer measure of meaning in life strongly point to the same conclusion: Life is pretty meaningful.”59
Despite the absurdity of existence and the fact that life is, in general, cosmically insignificant, impermanent, and arbitrary, most people most of the time seem to experience their lives as being meaningful. Should we say that most people most of the time are mistaken? Perhaps it’s our duty to reveal the gloomy existential facts to them? This inherent paradox is often the fork in the road for philosophers and psychologists. Certain philosophers want to argue that people are mistaken in holding their lives in high regard and the absurdity of existence should be rubbed in their faces. Psychologists, instead, tend to take people’s evaluations at face value: if a person feels that one’s life is meaningful, then that life is meaningful indeed. While I side with Professor Laura King and the psychologists, and believe that, for the most part, we should believe people who say their lives are meaningful, it’s also important to get to the root of this very human paradox.60
The paradox between life being absurd and the fact that people still experience high levels of meaning in their lives is, to a significant degree, the result of us not really understanding the question of meaning correctly. More accurately, we confuse two separate questions. One of them we no longer seem to find an answer to, and the confrontation with this question typically leads to an existential crisis. The other question, however, still has a solid and life-affirming answer to it through which to experience meaning in life. What we need to realize, however, is that the former question—“What is the meaning of life?”—is, in fact, a historical by-product of Western thinking that’s only emerged in the past couple of centuries. Times have changed, but we still seek a kind of meaning that only makes sense in the old, abandoned worldview. Our current crisis of meaning is thus an understandable mistake given the intellectual history of Western society. But it’s still a mistake in need of correction.
We’ll start making that correction in the next chapter. To do so, however, we first need to understand why humans search for meaning in the first place.
REFLECTIVITY CURSED HUMANS WITH THE NEED FOR MEANING
“Humans may resemble many other creatures in their striving for happiness, but the quest for meaning is a key part of what makes us human, and uniquely so.”
—ROY BAUMEISTER, “Some Key Differences Between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life,” 2013
Among the key physical peculiarities that make humans stand out even among our closest primate cousins is the size of our brain compared to our body. Our ancestors some two million years ago had brains of about 24 to 37 cubic inches. Modern humans typically have brain sizes of approximately 73 to 79 cubic inches.61 This dramatic growth spurt, called the cognitive revolution by scientists or the “Tree of Knowledge mutation” by author Yuval Noah Harari,62 ultimately separated the upright walking naked ape from his animal cousins. There are many theories about what led to this rapid arms race in brain size in the human species and what unique abilities this new processing power enabled—language, cooperation, culture, religion, and so forth—but let’s concentrate on this key feature: humans became reflective.
Reflection is the ability to take a third-person’s look at one’s own life. Instead of immediately responding or reacting to whatever happens in the present moment, we’re able to step outside of the situation to stop and think. We can contemplate our past actions and make predictions about the future while simultaneously consolidating both sets of information to make conscious decisions about how to behave in the present.
Our capacity for reflection is a uniquely human tool and sets us apart from other animals trapped in the present moment, unable to plan for the next month let alone the next decade of their lives.63 Humans have basic animal instincts, but we also have the brain power to override such impulses to focus instead, for example, on long-term goals, the rewards of which will only be reaped days, months, or years from now. Reflection allows for planning, collective action, and long-term goal setting, which in turn has enabled us to create artwork, architecture, and tools, to name a few things, unimaginable for any other animal. It took approximately two hundred years to build Notre-Dame in Paris. Such a monument is testimony to the creative potential totally unseen on this planet before human existence. Reflection isn’t just about planning for the future, and carrying out epic-sized projects, however. Reflection also lets us connect with the past, which can further enhance the meaningfulness of our lives. Philosopher Antti Kauppinen has argued that “building on the past gives life a kind of progressive narrative shape,”64 which sounds more meaningful than a life composed of isolated episodes. Neuropsychology agrees.
A neuroimaging study carried out at Northwestern University with eighty-four participants demonstrated that increased connectivity in the medial temporal lobe network, which is known to be implicated in mental time travel to experience the past or the future, is correlated with people’s reports about how much meaningfulness they experience in life.65 A trip down memory lane can thus provide a nostalgic sense of meaningfulness. As humans, we’re also peculiarly calibrated to be able to find meaning in the future. Reflection makes hope possible: we can envision a better world and make plans to actualize it. Valuable goals in the future are often what make present-day efforts, and even struggling, meaningful. We can endure present-day suffering and pain much better if we’re able to retain the hope and the belief that something valuable awaits us in the future.
But there’s a price to pay for all this capability for reflection. Because of it, we don’t settle for the instinctual goals that drive most other animals. It’s both a blessing and a curse that we’re inescapably trapped in a world that extends both backward to the past and forward to the future. We plan and worry about things that might happen or might not happen in the distant future. We mull things over from our past, rehashing old wounds or cherishing memories. Our problem—as compared to most animals—is that we can stop in the middle of an activity and, with a kind of reflexive self-reflection, ask ourselves: What’s the point? Why am I doing this?
Reflection, thus, creates the need for justification.66 When the question of why arises, we need a satisfactory answer. We need to be able to endorse our actions even after we’ve reflected on them. Herein lies the origin for our need for meaning. As reflective animals, we need to feel that our activities have a point, a reason or a purpose behind them, and that they—somehow—matter, and contribute to something worth contributing to.67 In order to answer ourselves, we need a framework, some kind of worldview, that tells us specifically which activities and goals are worth doing and which ones are pointless; in short, when we come to that inevitable fork in the road, we want a meaningful worldview to guide us toward the path worth taking. Lacking such a framework of meaning can have grave consequences.
Already during the Second World War, Erich Fromm, the social psychologist and psychoanalyst, observed that modern man is “freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society” that had previously limited him.68 While many celebrated this liberation as the final step toward man’s evolution as a self-standing individual capable of self-actualization, things didn’t go as planned. Despite being restricting at times, the traditional cultural framework gave humans a sense of security, comprehensibility, direction, and significance. In other words, it had provided humans with a robust sense of meaning in life. Absent that framework, however, people still needed to know what to do with their lives and how to make them worth living. Unfortunately, the newly liberated culture didn’t have suitable or comforting answers, which unsettled many people, making them feel isolated, anxious, and at a loss of direction. The liberation that was supposed to happen was instead subverted to an escape from freedom, with people submitting to whatever authority was willing to give them firm answers to life’s big questions and thus the stability they so desperately needed.
According to Fromm’s analysis, modern man is “anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.”69 For Fromm, this was one of the root causes of the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s, the atrocities of which are all too well known. There are alarming similarities across the political landscape of the Western world today, which makes it imperative that we create a reflective framework and value system that not only feels universally justified but is also able to withstand the cynicism and divisiveness of our modern times. The other option is uncertainty and regressive, authoritarian value frameworks, which undermine the principles of care, equality, and freedom at the heart of the lifestyle we have built for ourselves since the dawn of the first true democracies in the eighteenth century.
If we can’t do that, we’ve wasted a perfectly good cognitive revolution.
THE ART OF SIMULTANEOUSLY SEARCHING FOR AND HAVING MEANING IN LIFE
Why search for meaning if our lives are already meaningful? This simple question reveals the Western bias in our thinking about meaningfulness. Professor Michael Steger, another key expert on the psychology of the meaning in life, examined people’s search for meaning in life and the presence of meaning in life and found that the results were opposed in the US: the more there was presence of meaning in a person’s life, the less prone that person was to pursue more.70 We operate from a deficit mode as regards meaning in life: we get interested in the topic mainly when it’s lacking. However, when Steger investigated the same matter in Japan, he discovered that there the relation between the two was not contradictory but harmonious: a person already living a meaningful life was more prone to reflect on how to live even more meaningfully. It might be that this openness to reflect on the meaning of one’s life is what led the individuals to make life choices that increased their sense of meaningfulness in the first place.
Eastern cultures might be wiser than the West in this regard. Although you may already have some presence of meaning in your life, it’s possible and often life-enhancing to search for even better sources of meaningfulness. This is not a desperate attempt to fill a void, but an invitation to reflect on your life to find more ways of living that work in harmony with the activities, choices, and relationships that could make your days more meaningful. We are works in progress and the joy of being human is that we know this—we fundamentally know there’s room, in each of us, for more understanding, improvement, and personal fulfillment. Rather than bemoaning what you may lack, take stock of what you already have and find ways to build on it. Free yourself to understand reflectively what you already may grasp intuitively, that your life is already meaningful.