4 Ways to Find Meaning in Life
The headline this week is pretty ambitious, but I think I can live up to it.
“What’s the meaning of life?” is a cliche philosophical question, but it touches on something fundamental about how humans relate to the world around them. People want to know that there’s significance to their lives, but not necessarily in any grandiose sense. Most of us just want to feel that there’s value in getting up and being active each day. We search for signs that our existence is a net good in the world, even if only on a minuscule scale in the grander scheme of the universe.
In the past, researchers have identified three important constructs underlying “meaning in life”. The first is coherence, which refers to an ability to make sense of what’s happening in our lives as we build a personal story. The second is purpose, which is the feeling that we’re working toward important life goals. The third is mattering, which is the belief that our lives matter in the wider context of the world around us.
However, new evidence is revealing an overlooked construct, and it may be the most crucial one of all. Researchers are calling it “experiential appreciation”, and it refers to enjoying and appreciating sensations as you experience them—a concept that you may already recognize if you’re familiar with mindfulness.
In a recently published paper (February 2022), researchers probed what it means to experience meaning in life. In their first study, they analyzed past survey data from over 11,000 people across 30 countries. These surveys were originally designed to assess coping strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the researchers plucked out individual questions linked to meaning-in-life constructs. Here’s an example for each construct; participants had to rate their agreement with each statement or question below:
Coherence: “I’ve been looking for something good in what is happening”
Purpose: “I do something productive every day”
Mattering: “I’m doing what is good for our society”
Experiential appreciation: “I appreciate my life as it is right now regardless of the circumstances”
Meaning in life: “In general, to what extent do you feel that what you do in your life is valuable and worthwhile?”
The researchers analyzed the survey data, testing how each construct predicted people’s scores in the overall meaning-in-life measure. Consistent with previous research, the three traditional constructs (coherence, purpose, and mattering) all individually predicted meaning in life to some extent. The interesting part was that after accounting for those three constructs, the new fourth construct of experiential appreciation explained another significant portion of people’s meaning in life. In other words, a major ingredient in the meaning-in-life formula had been missed by previous researchers.
In a second study, the researchers developed their own way to measure experiential appreciation. For the three older constructs, they pulled specialized survey questions from previously published studies. But since experiential appreciation was a newcomer, they had to formalize its meaning and how to measure it. After some careful analysis, they ended up with five survey items. Anyone who scores highly on these items is high in experiential appreciation:
“I have great appreciation for the beauty of life.”
“I take great interest in my daily activities.”
“I appreciate a wide variety of experiences.”
“I appreciate the little things in life.”
“I tend to find myself deeply engaged in conversations with other people.”
Using these new measures together with the standard measures for the other three constructs, the researchers sent surveys to over 1500 people in the US and China. Instead of relying on indirect questions as they did in the previous COVID survey analysis, they collected dedicated data using well-tested measures for each construct.
Once again, higher purpose, higher mattering, and higher experiential appreciation all consistently predicted higher meaning in life. The effects of coherence were a little weaker, showing significant predictive power in the Chinese sample but not the American sample. While coherence was a little shaky, experiential appreciation certainly wasn’t.
So at least when analyzing the connections between all of these concepts, experiential appreciation wins a deserving place in the fight for meaning in life. But could you actually boost meaning in life by boosting experiential appreciation?
To answer this, the researchers came up with a way to stimulate people’s experiential appreciation: they showed everyone an awe-inspiring 2-min video from the nature documentary, “Planet Earth”. Few things in life give us a deeper connection to the present moment than sights of hypnotic oceans, lush forests, and David Attenborough documentaries.
The nature manipulation worked. Following the video, people reported higher levels of experiential appreciation. More importantly, by boosting their experiential appreciation, the video also indirectly raised how much people reported feeling a sense of meaning in their life. The researchers now had evidence of a causal connection between appreciating the moment and feeling that life is valuable.
The four elements of meaning in life: Here’s a simple wheel I’ve made to visualize the four elements associated with meaning in life according to the latest evidence. Think about how each of them applies to your own life. Feelings like “meaning in life” are incredibly subjective, but model-based thinking makes them less abstract and more practical. At difficult moments, work out where your problems might lie on this wheel. Where are your strengths and where are your weaknesses?
“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”
~ Anaïs Nin
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👋 Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD
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