The Meaning of Your Life

Chapter 1

The Meaning of Meaning

At the age of fifty-one, the novelist Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy wanted to kill himself.

You might think that, because nineteenth-century Russia was a very poor country, and writers are notoriously poorer than average, this self-destructive impulse was caused by hopeless poverty. Or because he felt his genius was unappreciated. Or because he had mental illness, which has afflicted so many great artists and writers.

But none of these was the case. On the contrary, Tolstoy was arguably the most successful and celebrated author of his time. His novel War and Peace was a huge bestseller; he lived in aristocratic luxury; he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times. Nor was his despair the result of a crisis in his personal life: His marriage, though complicated, was stable and enduring and produced thirteen children. He had no addictions or ruinous personal habits.

But all this outward success left him feeling empty.

Tolstoy hoped that his work would fulfill his need for . . . well, he wasn't quite sure what. He focused on his writing obsessively, to the exclusion of everything else, but it never gave him what he craved. So he looked to science, which seemed to many in the late nineteenth century to promise the answer to every question, just as technology does today. As he studied, he expected to find the meaning of life buried in the complicated formulas of chemistry, physics, and biology. For a long time, Tolstoy assumed that not finding it was a function of his ignorance. But as the years passed, he was confronted with the reality that, as he put it, life's why was not to be found in "the laws of light, of chemical compounds, the laws of the development of organisms."

As he exhausted his intellectual options one by one, he sank deeper into despair. By the time he reached his fifties, he feared that "life [was] meaningless. . . . Now this was horrible. And in order to escape this horror I wanted to kill myself."

In so many ways, Tolstoy was way ahead of his time-including in his suffering, which is a lot like that of the people we met in the introduction. His situation sounds grim, and maybe yours feels that way, too, at least on your worst days. But in fact, life was going to get a lot better for Tolstoy, for one simple reason: he was looking hard for his life's meaning. True, he hadn't found it yet. But as desperate as he felt, he did not stop hunting, and the best predictor of finding something-including meaning-is looking for it. In the end, Tolstoy found what he was looking for.

Psychologists would say that Tolstoy was low in the presence of meaning but high in search. In this chapter, we will see where you are on these two dimensions. This is important as you set out on your meaning journey, because it creates a map of your meaning quest so you can find yourself on it. In this chapter, you will take a test of where you are in presence and search, which are your starting coordinates. But before we do that, we need to figure out the destination of the meaning journey as well. That requires defining what meaning, well, means.

The Meaning of the Meaning of Life

If you need to find something important, there are two questions you need to answer. The first is general; the second, specific. For example, if you are keen to find a spouse, the general question to answer is "What are the characteristics of an appropriate mate?" By that I mean figuring out the general features of a person with whom you would, ideally, spend the rest of your life. That means someone with the right basic demographics (who is the gender you seek, for example, and not fifty years older or younger than you), who seems sane, who more or less shares your values-that sort of thing. That's super important so you can start trying to answer the specific question "Who is my mate?" You must have an idea of what you are looking for in general to have any kind of fruitful search for the specific person. Of course, the person you wind up with will differ in many ways from what you had in your mind, but having something in mind makes it possible to start the journey toward your goal.

Similarly, while the main goal of this book is finding the meaning of your life, you first need to know what you are looking for generally-the meaning of life's meaning. If that could be anything, from a feeling to a Ferrari, you will spend your life on a wild-goose chase, going after anything and everything, and probably ending up with something silly or completely trivial.

You might even conclude that it is all some sort of cosmic joke, like in the 1983 Monty Python movie titled, appropriately, The Meaning of Life. The film opens with six fish swimming in a restaurant's tank, greeting one another. When one of them (named Howard) is taken out, cooked, and eaten in front of the others, the shocked fish begin to question the meaning of life. The movie moves through various comedic sketches that show life's absurdity and finishes a couple of hours later with a woman opening an envelope containing the answer to the question. "It's nothing very special, really," she reads blandly. "Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations."

Deep down, though, none of us believes that the definition of the meaning of life is just a silly joke. We crave it, which indicates to us intuitively both that it exists and that there is a way to define it. Until recently, the definition probably wasn't so important, because of the way people lived, just naturally going about life in ways that delivered meaning every day-more on that later. People today need to be more explicit about what we are looking for before we start out on the journey to find it.

The Three Elements of Meaning

About twenty years ago, I set out to write my first book. It felt like I was standing at the base of Mount Everest, looking straight up. I asked a friend who had written a lot of books how to get such a huge, complicated project done. "Simple," he told me. "Write one paragraph at a time." In other words, don't think about it like one big, unmanageable project-think of it as a bunch of smaller, manageable projects. That really helped me a lot, and I wrote the book over the next year-one paragraph at a time. That's a technique called decomposition, which is a fancy term for taking an enormously complicated endeavor and breaking it into smaller, more manageable pieces. This technique is used a lot in computer science, but the concept is as simple as the Chinese proverb "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

Decomposition isn't only about work, though. It can also apply to personal questions such as "How do I improve my marriage?"-a daunting challenge that can seem too complex to even begin. Experienced counselors say that the best approach is to see marriage not as one huge puzzle but as an interlocking set of challenges: how to communicate more clearly; how to be more considerate and thoughtful; how to manage conflict better; and so on. By looking at one challenge at a time, they can imagine making progress, bit by bit.

This is how psychologists tackle the challenge of defining meaning: as a set of interlocking elements. For example, Professor John Vervaeke of the University of Toronto believes that there are an infinite number of potential parts of our lives, and through the process of "relevance realization" we decide which of these parts truly matter. This process of figuring out which ones is what constructs the meaning of our lives.2 Or consider the approach taken by psychologists Frank Martela and Michael F. Steger, who sort all these potential parts of life's meaning into three big elements:3

Meaning = Coherence + Purpose + Significance

The first element of meaning is coherence, or how the events of your life fit together. This is an understanding that things happen in your life for a reason. That doesn't necessarily mean you can fit everything into your narrative the moment it happens. Sometimes things still seem to come out of left field-nasty surprises still occur, and it doesn't seem to make sense when someone you love gets sick or you have an ugly breakup you didn't expect. But you usually are able to make sense of things afterward, so you have faith that you eventually will, even when life feels chaotic.

In contrast, life feels meaningless when you see it as totally random and incoherent. You feel powerless and utterly irrelevant in an oppressive universe, thrown about by dumb and blind forces. To believe your life has meaning makes about as much sense as believing a single particle of space dust a hundred light-years away has some special meaning.

We naturally resist this randomness, however, which is why people adopt all kinds of theories of life's coherence. Some people turn to science and put their faith in the idea that there are well-ordered natural forces in the universe that explain why everything happens, even if we don't quite understand them. Others turn to religious metaphysics, believing that supernatural forces, perhaps a cosmic consciousness or divine being like God, have a plan for the universe and their lives. Still others keep their focus firmly in the world and believe shadowy people and powerful conspiracies are the organizing factor behind much of what they experience.

Some of these approaches are more associated with happiness than others, but all of them are an attempt at finding coherence. I am not saying that they are all simply human inventions, however. As a Christian, I believe God exists and has a plan for my life and the universe, a lot of which we can learn about by studying science but much of which will also always be a mystery to me. Faith knits together for me the parts of my life that make sense with those that do not, and it has helped me to make some radical changes over the years. For example, I left a twelve-year career in classical music to become a social scientist. For a year or so, I searched for what I thought was the divine will about how I could lift others up best. This made these two disparate career paths cohere.

The second element of life's meaning is purpose, which is the existence of goals and direction in your life. This is the belief that you are alive in order to do something. Think of purpose as the map of your life, telling you where you are in your journey and where you want to go. Your map can change as your destination changes throughout life, but you always need one. Without it, your journey becomes a big problem, just as any trip would become a problem if you didn't know where you were and didn't know where you wanted to go.

I remember once as a little kid, probably four years old, I had a scary experience of getting lost in a big hospital. My dad had to visit a sick friend and took me with him. Unfortunately, children weren't allowed up to the floors where the patients were. So he sat me in a lobby and told me to wait there. After what seemed like nine hours (but was probably twenty-five minutes), I decided to look around a little. I went through one door, then another, and down a hall. I decided to turn back but couldn't find the lobby and found myself wandering farther and farther down corridors that all looked the same. I couldn't read, so the signs were no help at all. When a sympathetic nurse asked what I was looking for, I couldn't say anything beyond "My daddy." I remember it was a terrible feeling of hopelessness. Together, we found my dad after another four hours (or maybe it was ten minutes), which made me happy.

To lack purpose in your life is like never finding your dad and just wandering the halls of the hospital forever. It means you have no direction and are just meandering. Progress is impossible because there's no clear goal. Maybe you'll find something fun or interesting from time to time through sheer luck, but you won't have anything to look forward to and won't feel like you are making improvements in your life. This is the case when you don't have educational or professional aspirations; when you don't have any sense or desire about building a family; when you have no aims to deepen your spiritual or philosophical life; when you don't have any ambition about your health and well-being.

The third element of meaning is significance. This refers to the inherent value of your life to yourself and, even more important, to others. To be significant doesn't mean that when you die, you will have a long obituary in The New York Times or a street named after you in your hometown. It simply means that the world would be worse for someone you love if you didn't exist.

One of the most popular movies of all time is It's a Wonderful Life, director Frank Capra's 1946 Christmas classic starring James Stewart as George Bailey. This film is all about finding life's meaning by discovering one's significance. The movie starts on Christmas Eve, at what appears to be the end of George's life, as he contemplates jumping off a bridge to end it all. He is facing bankruptcy and arrest for a series of business events at the bank he manages that were not of his doing. He sees his life as having been one of failures and missed opportunities, and he honestly feels that it would have been better for everyone if he had never existed. At this point, he would be of greater value to his family dead than alive, he believes; then at least his widow would have his life insurance money.

At this moment, an angel from heaven, assigned to save George, appears and shows him what the world around him would have looked like had he indeed never existed. A brother he saved from drowning in childhood perishes instead; his uncle is committed to an asylum when the bank George ran becomes insolvent without him; instead of being a wholesome place, his town is a disreputable place full of dishonest people and immoral entertainment; his wife is an unhappy woman who never found love. He realizes through this counterfactual miracle that he truly is significant to the people he loves the most, and thus that his life has deep meaning.