How Meaning Can Compensate for Enjoyment—and the Other Way Around
How enjoyable are the following activities for you? Put them on a scale from 0 (totally unenjoyable, you aren’t interested) to 10 (extremely enjoyable, you can’t imagine anything better). Eating your favorite chocolate, fighting for your country in a war, spending time on your hobby, raising children, funding hospitals in Africa, preventing global warming, sex, watching the World Cup, helping an old lady across the street, taking a spa holiday to the Caribbean. Give yourself a few seconds.
Most people rate sex, chocolate, TV and spa holidays at 9 or 10, while raising children is a 2 or a 3.
Another question: how meaningful are the aforementioned activities? Put them on a scale from 0 (completely meaningless) to 10 (deeply meaningful). Give yourself another moment to think.
Most people come up with a totally different order. Raising children is rated significantly higher than a spa holiday. Helping an old lady across the street is more meaningful than stuffing your face with chocolate.
Hmm. What really matters? What should we be focusing on? Which activities contribute to a good life—the “enjoyable” ones or the “meaningful” ones?
As early as the fifth century B.C., Greek thinkers were pondering these issues. A minority of philosophers, known as hedonists, believed that a good life consisted of consuming the maximum possible number of immediate pleasures. The word hedonistic originates from the Ancient Greek “hedoné,” which means delight, pleasure, enjoyment, gratification and sensual desire. Basically, why help an old lady cross the street when you could be watching a funny YouTube video on your mobile phone?
Most philosophers, however, believed that instant gratification was base, decadent, even animalistic. A good life was made up of the “higher pleasures.” Striving for these was called eudemonia. As soon as the term had been coined, however, people started wrangling about what it meant. Many philosophers concluded that “higher pleasures” meant virtues: only an honest life could be a good life. Hospitals in Africa, basically, instead of the World Cup. Some virtues were considered especially conducive to happiness: Plato and Aristotle both believed that people should be as temperate, courageous, just and prudent as possible. These four new catchwords were gratefully adopted several centuries later by the Catholic Church and repurposed (now in Version 2.0) into what became known as the cardinal virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice. Following this logic consequentially, you reach absurd conclusions—things like “a Nazi war criminal who is basking on an Argentinean beach is not really happy, whereas the pious missionary who is being eaten alive by cannibals is,” as the Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert has laconically remarked.
So it’s all a bit of a muddle. The psychologist Paul Dolan at the London School of Economics has tried to disentangle it. Just as every musical note has two qualities—pitch and volume—every experienced moment has two components: a pleasurable (or hedonistic) component and a meaningful component. The hedonistic component is the instant gratification. The meaningful component, on the other hand, refers to our perception of how purposeful a moment is. Eating chocolate, for instance, has a greater hedonistic but a smaller meaningful component, at least for most people. The ratio between the two components is reversed, however, if you’re helping an old lady cross the street.
Paul Dolan’s refusal to define more precisely “meaningfulness,” or “purposefulness,” as he puts it, means he can abandon the whole 2,500-year-old “virtues” house of cards to collapse behind his back. True to the motto “I know it when I see it,” everybody knows instantly how meaningful or meaningless an experienced moment is. Right now you’re reading this paragraph. The pleasurable component is probably smaller than a sip of Château Pétrus, but hopefully the meaningful component is bigger. Your author’s experience is yet more extreme. Writing this chapter is, admittedly, unenjoyable; I’m struggling, but the attempt to get my thoughts down on paper in an intelligible form feels highly meaningful. Purpose and pleasure as the two cornerstones of happiness—it’s “a bold and original move,” as Daniel Kahneman has observed.
Every year, Hollywood produces four hundred to five hundred films—a billion-dollar industry. No wonder researchers are trying to figure out why people go to the cinema, hoping to create a recipe for a surefire blockbuster. For a long time the hedonistic film theory reigned supreme: give audiences just enough excitement—not too boring, not too stressful—to transport them away from their banal realities. Offer them beautiful actors and entertaining stories with a happy ending. Yet blockbusters keep being produced whose success doesn’t rely on this recipe, and thus cannot be explained hedonistically—Life Is Beautiful, for instance, or A Beautiful Mind. Only recently have film scholars confirmed what good directors and writers have known from the beginning: there’s got to be a meaningful component, something besides sheer gratification. Even a sad movie filmed on a shoestring budget can be good—if there’s enough meaning in it.
Meaningfulness also plays a role on the job market. Young employees, in particular, are willing to accept a salary below market standards to participate in “meaningful” projects. This is good for idealistic start-ups and bad for major corporations—the latter have to compensate for their deficit in meaning by upping the hedonistic component (read: money). Artists, of course, have always had to consider this trade-off: is it better to die in a blaze of artistic glory or sell out to a mass audience for hard cash?
I recommend you strike a balance between enjoyment and meaning. Avoid the extremes. Why? Because your marginal utility decreases the further you wander toward the fringe. Chocolate, TV and sex become ineffectual after—at the most—the second kilogram of chocolate, the twenty-fourth hour of binge-watching or the fifth orgasm. Equally, it won’t make you happy to spend all day and night saving the world while denying yourself any pleasure. It’s best to switch between meaningfulness and enjoyment. So if you’ve saved a small piece of the world, then I think you deserve a glass of fine red wine.