What Makes Life Meaningful?

A near-death experience, serious illness, separation, or loss of a loved one can all shake our sense of who we are and force us to reevaluate our core values, life purpose, and sense of meaning. The Terror Management Theory (TMT) suggests that features that remind us of our mortality are likely to heighten fear around death (Routledge & Juhl, 2010). However, TMT also suggests that a life “imbued with meaning and purpose” can help stave off such angst. You could also do community service or join a program to clean up the environment. When you are giving, you can start to feel that you are providing something that helps others and that you are living a life of meaning. Meaning also often comes from experiencing challenges, while happiness does not.

Mind & Mood

Locke’s seminal research has given us a good deal to go on when it comes to effective goal-setting. But understanding goal-setting theory is only one step toward crafting personal life goals. In this article, we’ll take a closer peek at some ideas and resources that will help you set out on the right path, and stick at it for success.

How to Create Meaning and Purpose in Our Daily Lives

Her book is a call to recognize our place in the world—perhaps most importantly by nurturing our relationships and serving others—so that we bring more meaning to our lives. This article is part of a GGSC initiative on “Finding Purpose Across the Lifespan,” supported by the John Templeton Foundation. In a series of articles, podcast episodes, and other resources, we’ll be exploring why and how to deepen your sense of purpose at different stages of life. Sometimes the people we admire most in life give us a clue to how we might want to contribute to a better world ourselves.

• If we need help, a survey like the VIA Character Strengths Survey can be useful in identifying our personal strengths and embracing them more fully.
• The Greater Good Science Center studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society.
• Another activity is to use meaning to move you toward your character strengths.
• Work with your client to identify what is most valuable to them before they commit to action; for example, being creative, learning, or showing compassion to others.

Live in the present moment

On the one hand, it’s nice to know that life’s meaning is within reach. If you can identify your values, you’re capable of finding purpose and fulfillment in your life. Others can help you along the way, but you’re the only one who can decide what would make your life meaningful. Now a new book takes a stab at figuring how to create meaning in life out just what pursuing a meaningful life entails. The book, though only loosely tied to research, is mostly an engaging read about how people find meaning in life through “four pillars” of meaning. People who report fewer social connections, loneliness, and ostracism also report lower meaningfulness (Williams, 2007).

When it comes to finding meaning, it helps to try to pull particularly relevant experiences in our lives into a coherent narrative that defines our identity. People who describe their lives as meaningful tend to have redemptive stories where they overcame something negative, and to emphasize growth, communion with others, and personal agency. Laura Kray and colleagues found that asking people to consider paths not taken in life and the consequences of those choices imbued experiences with more meaning. When we have long-term goals in life that reflect our values and serve the greater good, we tend to imbue our activities with more meaning. Having purpose has also been tied to many positive outcomes, including increased learning for students in school and better health. While hardship can lead to purpose, most people probably find purpose in a more meandering way, says Bronk—through a combination of education, experience, and self-reflection, often helped along by encouragement from others.

• Proper self-care can help you avoid conditions like caregiver burnout, which stems from sacrificing your own life in service of others.
• We’ll look at this shortly, but for now, suffice to say that they give us something to commit to.
• The capacity of meaning to allow us to wake up every morning and do what needs to be done requires that meaning be present even in suffering.
• Start with just a few minutes at a time that you can designate as your mindful moments.
• But Bronk’s research suggests that having a supportive social network—caring family members, like-minded friends, or mentors, for example—helps youth to reframe hardship as a challenge they can play a role in changing for the better.
• A new sense of purpose came with the new community and identity she helped to build, of gay and lesbian Christians.

Goal Setting Workbook

Making connections with other individuals and maintaining these relationships are reliable ways to develop a sense of meaningfulness (Heintzelman & King, 2014). Together, these three components – coherence, purpose, and significance – result in feelings of meaningfulness. Knowing that meaningfulness is derived from three distinct fields, let’s look at ways in which we can find our meaning. Living a meaningful life and deciding what is meaningful are age-old questions (e.g., Marcus Aurelius wrestled with this question when he was Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 AD). Alternate points of view that broaden the mind may help an individual experience an increased sense of meaning in life (Hicks & King, 2007).

Seven Ways to Find Your Purpose in Life

Luckily, there’s no shortage of resources to help you on your journey. You’re free to consult countless religions, philosophies, and doctrines to piece together your ideal life path. Adults can do this if they need feedback, too—either formally or informally in conversation with trusted others. People who know you well may be able to see things in you that you don’t recognize in yourself, which can point you in unexpected directions. On the other hand, there is no need to overly rely on that feedback if it doesn’t resonate.

• However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways for older adults to meet new people and form new relationships.
• Inherently, life goals need to be meaningful, and meaning is subjective.
• Observant readers might comment that these are questions typically asked about our vocations or professional activities.
• In Japanese culture, to find meaning and purpose in life is to find one’s ikigai.

How to Track and Evaluate the Status of Your Life Goals: The Role of Accountability

Help your client move away from a fixed mindset and open up to finding new purpose through exploration and challenge (Lee, Hwang, & Jang, 2018; Smith, 2018). To the existentialist, our sense of meaning and purpose comes from what we https://ecosoberhouse.com/ do. Rather than dictating how the reader should live, Nietzsche tells us we should create our values and our sense of purpose. It’s increasingly common for someone to be diagnosed with a condition such as ADHD or autism as an adult.

In fact, a likely reason we don’t think about meaning in life too much is that our lives simply feel right (that is, things simply make sense). Our lives are embedded in a natural world characterized by regularities—sunrises and sunsets. We overlay these regularities with our own routines—morning coffee or an evening walk. The regularities of life provide the rhythms that undergird the feeling that life is meaningful.

Join 550,000+ helping professionals who get free, science-based tools sent directly to their inbox. If we accept the existentialists’ view, then we are free to lead a life according to our values, assign a meaning to what we see as vital, and pursue a unique purpose. Recent research suggests that people with increased meaning are better off – they appear happier, exhibit increased life satisfaction, and report lowered depression (Huo et al., 2019; Ivtzan, Lomas, Hefferon, & Worth, 2016; Steger, 2009). For Camus, as with his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism concerns itself with the uniqueness of the human condition (Sartre, 1964). According to the existentialist formula, life has no inherent meaning.