Does all of this have meaning?
Sometimes, our lives can feel overwhelming, filled with challenges and uncertainties. Even when we change the circumstances that seem to cause our suffering, we may still feel a sense of emptiness or question whether life has meaning. Perhaps it would be easier if finding meaning in life came with a map, or if it were a giant, mysterious force that we could eventually discover. Yet, as of the writing of this article, we are not aware of a universally agreed-upon meaning of life. Interestingly, this lack of inherent meaning does not prevent us from searching for it. On the contrary, we continuously strive to create meaning in our lives, and when we cannot, we feel deeply discouraged and disheartened. In that sense, meaning in life does not necessarily refer to “the meaning of life” as a universal truth, but can also capture the subjective quality of our experience, how we perceive, interpret, and feel about our own lives from within, rather than an absolute reality agreed upon by others. In this therapy sketch, we will take a closer look at “meaning in life” and how it’s connected to our well-being.
What do we mean when we say “meaning in life”?
When we talk about meaning in life, researchers often break it down into three key parts: comprehension, purpose, and existential mattering (King & Hicks, 2021).
Comprehension: To call something meaningful, we often need to understand it. We need things to seem clear to us and make sense. This is also true for live events. We often call events meaningful if we “get” them in some way. If we look through an evolutionary lens, this could be related to how we humans evolved to seek patterns, regularities, and associations in our environments, which helped us survive. So, in a sense, at least in part, what we might find meaningful in life could also be what is useful, predictable, and adaptive for us (Baumeister & Von Hippel, 2020). This also becomes clear at times when our lives don’t make sense. When painful, shocking things happen to us, we experience incredible pain and distress, such as when we experience traumatic events, like an accident. Its effect stays with us long after the event has passed. Interestingly, we find some relief when we can integrate such negative experiences and have a coherent narrative of our lives, such as when we engage in therapy. Similarly, we can see how we find regularities and patterns meaningful in our routines as humans. Research shows that people often enjoy and find satisfaction in pursuing daily routines; whether it is a breakfast you consistently have or a podcast you keep listening to on weekends, these activities seem to create meaning in life (King & Hicks, 2021).
Purpose: Purpose is perhaps the first thing many of us think of when we call something meaningful in life, so much so that we tend to use them interchangeably. We call something purposeful when it’s aligned with our personal values and goals. Experiencing a sense of purpose contributes greatly to our physical health and mental well-being and is associated with finding a greater sense of meaning in life. Purpose seems to serve and important organizational function for our inner life, and that may be one of the reasons why it’s strongly associated with a sense of meaning and experienced as beneficial. Having a purpose, however small, seems to help us organize our inner and external lives. It guides our behavior toward valued goals and provides an overarching template for organizing our self-knowledge and decisions. Similarly, not being able to identify with any purpose can leave our life story more fragmented and directionless, contributing to feelings of emptiness, low motivation and energy, and hopelessness.
Existential mattering: According to King & Hicks (2021), we seek a sense of existential mattering to experience life as meaningful. This sense emerges when we feel like our lives matter, despite the vastness of the universe. We may seek this sense through various means, such as when we try to make a name for ourselves and be influential in others’ minds, or when we want to have children so that our lives can continue in a sense. The ways we find to matter in life seem to promote a strong sense of meaning for us. Conversely, when we feel we don’t matter, especially in others’ minds, it leads to a sense that life is meaningless, which is associated with negative health outcomes. Social inclusion and feeling like we matter in others’ minds are so influential for us that even when we experience momentary, impersonal social exclusion, it seems to affect how much meaning we assign to life (Heintzelman & King, 2014).
What makes life meaningful?
Positive Affect: Interestingly, we don’t have to experience happiness or other positive affect (pleasure, enjoyment, cheerfulness, fun) to call a moment meaningful (Baumeister et al., 2012). There are moments in life when we experience deep sadness, grief, and heartbreak, and yet they stay with us for the rest of our lives as meaningful memories. Still, we tend to associate moments of positive mood with a sense of meaning. When we find enjoyment and pleasure in what we do, we tend to seek more of it, and achieving those moments feels worthwhile. Conversely, this could mean that when we are unable to experience a positive mood, either temporarily or chronically, life can feel meaningless. We see the relationship between meaning and positive mood clearly when we are depressed. For example, when we struggle with depression, we tend to feel deep sadness, emptiness, and hopelessness, and it becomes so hard for us to find pleasure in anything. When this happens, we also tend to see life as meaningless in those moments. Even though we can’t really say that one causes the other, and that both mood and a sense of meaning probably affect each other continuously, their connection is undeniable.
Mental Time Travel: Our brain’s capacity to remember the past and imagine the future is often described as a form of “mental time travel” in the literature. For some researchers, our ability to travel to the past and future in our minds is what makes it possible, or sometimes necessary, to find life meaningful in the first place. Because we can see things from the past to the future, it gives the sense that our “self” is a continuous thing with a story. In relation to this capacity, for example, we sometimes experience nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past. Or we create mental imagery of the future that we sometimes even find more meaningful than the present moment. According to research, both having nostalgic memories and being able to imagine a future can generate a sense of meaning for us. This could conversely mean that when we become stuck in our ways of thinking about the past and future, such as when we experience trauma and its memory becomes so invasive with flashbacks and nightmares, or when we experience obsessive-compulsive thought patterns and our mental imagery makes up future scenarios that we don’t wish to live, it can also affect our capacity to experience life as meaningful.
Mortality Awareness: The awareness of our mortality can fuel many things. In fact, in existential psychology (Yalom, 1980) and in theories such as Terror Management Theory (TMT; Routledge & Vess, 2018), mortality awareness is considered one of the main sources of anxiety and dread we experience. On the other hand, if we face the finiteness of our lives in a healthy and supportive way, it can make us pursue goals and activities that are more aligned with our values, helping us find life meaningful.
The Self: We don’t often think about it in our daily lives, but as humans, we experience ourselves in ways that are significantly different from those of other animals we share this earth with. The degree to which we organize our knowledge, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors around a “self” is perhaps unmatched compared to other living beings. Even though many of our animal friends also seem to experience a level of self-recognition and “mine-ness,” being contained in a sense of “me” is probably stronger for us. This sense of a continuous “self,” even if it seems trivial, seems like an important aspect of finding life meaningful. When we find something meaningful, we find it meaningful for ourselves, not others. However, certain things in life can disrupt our sense of self, preventing us from experiencing life as meaningful. For example, certain stressors in life can cause us to experience dissociation, in which we feel detached from ourselves, thoughts, and emotions, as if we are watching ourselves from outside (depersonalization) or from our surroundings, where everything seems dreamlike, foggy, or even visually distorted (derealization). Many of us can experience these feelings momentarily, but due to significant distress, trauma, or other mental health conditions, these feelings can become persistent. When we feel this way consistently, it can prevent us from experiencing our “self” fully and, therefore, from feeling a sense of meaning in life.
In general, the experience of meaning in life is closely linked to how an individual organizes and interprets their experiences, and how they relate to both their internal and external worlds. Difficulties in the fundamental components of meaningfulness, such as understanding, purpose, and a sense of existential value, often arise alongside a loss of meaning and psychological distress. The therapeutic process can support the restoration of wholeness in these areas; it can create space for the individual to make sense of their experiences, develop a more coherent framework within their life story, and reconnect with their values. Over time, this process can contribute to the individual experiencing their life in a more integrated, purposeful, and subjectively meaningful way.
Takeaways
- Meaning in life isn’t just “the meaning of life” as a universal truth but also reflects our subjective experience, how we perceive and feel about our lives from within.
- Sense of meaning in life has at least three distinct aspects: comprehension, purpose, and existential mattering.
- We find meaning in life when we understand or “get” things, but when they become unexplainable and unpredictable, we tend to feel distress and a reduced sense of life meaning.
- When life events align with our personal values and goals and feel purposeful, we tend to experience a greater sense of meaning in life. Conversely, a lack of purpose can contribute to feelings of emptiness, hopelessness, and a reduced sense of meaning in life.
- When we feel like our lives matter, especially when we feel socially connected and valued by others, it promotes a greater sense of meaning in life. Conversely, when we feel our lives don’t matter, especially to others, we experience a reduced sense of meaningfulness even if the exclusion we feel is temporary and impersonal.
- Positive mood, mental time travel, mortality awareness, social connections, and a coherent sense of self all enhance our experience of meaning, while their absence or disruption can lead to a sense of meaninglessness.
References
Baumeister, R., & Von Hippel, W. (2020). Meaning and evolution: Why nature selected human minds to use meaning. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
Baumeister, R., Vohs, K., Aaker, J. L., & Garbinsky, E. N. (2012). Some Key Differences between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 8(6), 505–516. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.830764
Heintzelman, S. J., & King, L. A. (2014). Life is pretty meaningful. American Psychologist, 69(6), 561–574. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035049
King, L. A., & Hicks, J. A. (2021). The science of meaning in life. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 561-568.
Yalom, I. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy, Chapter 10: Meaninglessness, pp. 419-460.
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