Asking ourselves questions like ‘what is the meaning of life?’ or ‘what is my purpose?’, is an important part of being human. The worthwhileness of being alive is important for each of us in the context of the greater picture of the cosmos. The universe is such a big place composed of mostly empty space. We are a group of beings that have pushed our survival to the point where we can enjoy the achievements of our civilization but we still need to come to an understanding of our place within this cosmos such that we don’t feel insignificant within it.
First, it would make sense to define what meaning is before we follow through to the meaning of life. The word meaning is from Old High German, meinen, and refers ‘to have in mind.’ To have meaning one needs reflective linguistic thinking that utilizes our capacity to understand the connections between the mental representations of the world. (George and Park) Having meaning necessarily means that we are interpreting the world in some way through these representations.
In 2015 Martela and Steger wrote an article, ‘The Three Meanings of Meaning in Life: Distinguishing Coherence, Purpose and Significance’ that connects the essential properties of what one needs to have a sense of meaning in life. The three concepts that Martela and Steger discuss as essential to having a meaningful life are coherence, purpose and significance. Coherence is an individual’s ability to make comprehensible sense of their world and lives. Purpose is relative to one’s direction and sense of core goals in their life. Lastly, significance is when someone views their life as worth living and has a sense of inherent value for life.
Meaning is about rising above the merely passive experiencing, to a reflective level that allows one to examine one’s life as a whole, making sense of it, infusing direction into it, and finding value in it. (Martela and Steger 2016 538 TMoMiL)
In 2016, George and Park discuss the concepts of meaning in life but use slightly different terms for two of the three properties that Martela and Steger use: mattering = significance and comprehension = coherence. Purpose is the same for both researchers. George and Park offer well-being outcomes for each of the three properties that I will include at the end of each section.
Coherence
There is a cognitive component to making sense of one’s experiences in their life that I discuss in the Unity of Self and the Journey Tools. Our experiences have to make sense within the context of our own narrative for us to have coherence. Part of the coherence property of meaning in life is our ability to find patterns in our experience that gives us a sense of predictability and hence promotes our survival. If an organism is able to predict patterns in their environment, they are better able to survive in those environments. Martela and Steger discuss how we have developed a certain sense or feeling for that which is meaningful. This feeling for the meaningful has an evolutionary foundation from our ability to survive due to our ability to make successful predictions.
A certain type of feeling, the ‘feeling of meaning,’ that provides us with information about the presence of reliable patterns in the environment...patterns and predictability can be constructed, eventually building to overarching meaning models that help people make sense of one’s self, the world, and one’s fit within the world (Martela and Steger 2016 533-534 TMoMiL)
Coherence and comprehensibility is a value neutral, property of understanding. Coherence is an attempt to create accurate mental models or representations of the world and one’s life. To have meaning to our experiences, we need to be able to find some order and connection with our identity and what goes on around us.
George and Park Well-Being Outcome
(Comprehension)
1) Minimizes Uncertainty:
- consistent meaning frameworks gives a sense of understanding on a day-to-day basis.
- uncertainty can be aversive to experience and detrimental to one’s well-being.
2) Increased Sense of Clarity:
- helps navigate through one’s life, can discern best actions and choices.
3) Making Sense of Difficult Life Circumstances:
- make sense and manage challenging life issues and stress.
Purpose
Purpose is fundamentally about having direction and goals oriented towards the future that manages our present behaviours and actions. A sense of our core goals and enthusiasm about our direction towards the future gives us purpose. The pursuit for purpose is an attempt to find justification and motivation for one’s actions and build a sense of self-worth. Purpose is about having intentional behaviour for future goals that are directed by value driven motivations. An individual’s purpose shows what a person values that is a reflection of their sense of identity.
In 1998, Carver and Scheier published a book titled ‘On the Self-Regulation of Behaviour,’ where they discuss a hierarchy of goals with the most abstract goals at the top and concrete goals at the bottom. At the top of the hierarchy are the ‘be’ goals, which represent a person’s most desired states or aspirations towards an ideal like being a good friend or being trustworthy. The higher the goals are on the hierarchy, the more valuable and closer the goals are to a person’s identity or central to their sense of self.
A successful self-regulation is a process of finding and pursuing goals that a person values. Depending on how valuable a goal is will determine how much a person is driven and motivated towards that goal. The hierarchy of goals is a good way to understand our purpose in the quest for meaning in our lives. Our commitment to higher order goals that is consistent with our values and identity gives us purpose.
It is important to use the Revaluation of Values Tool to compose our own value structure such that we can create a sense of purpose in our lives by directing our actions and behaviours towards them. One purpose of life that most people will aspire to is being happy.
Happiness
In the book ‘The Art of Happiness’, the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler present principles from Buddhist teachings in a way that is easy to read. Together, they present principles that are understandable in our pursuit to follow the purpose of happiness. The Dalai Lama discusses the main purpose of life as achieving happiness that is independent of religious orientation.
I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. That is clear. Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life. So, I think, the very motion of our life is towards happiness…” (Dalai Lama 2009. AoH 13)
The way that we use our minds largely determines our sense of meaning and purpose in life. With proper training and building constructive mental habits, we can achieve a state of durable, personal happiness. If we have a habit of filling our minds with distorted thoughts that lead to negative emotions, we will be living a life that is lacking in optimal well being and unnecessary suffering. Through training, we can increase our mental stability and have a resilient sense of happiness.
Happiness is determined more by one’s state of mind than by external event. Success may result in a temporary feeling of elation, or tragedy may send us into a period of depression, but sooner or later our overall level of happiness tends to migrate back to a certain baseline. (Cutler 2009. AoH 21)
How we are thinking most of the time is the most substantial factor on our level of happiness. The general perspective we take on life and our experience, has more of an affect on our sense of meaning than specific periods of ups and downs. The attitude we take on the situations we find ourselves in is the largest contributing factor to our moods. Burns’ cognitive distortion checklist helps us identify when we are not thinking of the world in a realistic way. The Dalai Lama gives us examples of how to compose constructive attitudes about ourselves using our mind. The mind is the common denominator in all of our experience and if we can find mastery within that domain, it will transcend to the feelings we have within our experiences. See Feeling Good Tool.
No matter what level of happiness we are endowed with by nature, there are steps we can take to work with the “mind factor,” to enhance our feelings of happiness...because our moment-to-moment happiness is largely determined by our outlook...whether we are feeling happy or unhappy at any given moment often has very little to do with our absolute conditions but, rather it is a function of how we perceive our situation, how satisfied we are with what we have. (Cutler 2009. AoH 22)
Practicing a specific kind of attitude with the use of Burns’ identification of cognitive distortions, we can create a stable sense of emotional well being. If we accept that our purpose is happiness, it is within our control to maintain a calm sense of serenity despite the surrounding events.
The Dalai Lama states that if we can develop a strong sense of being content the changes of the external world will pass over you without disrupting the mental foundation that you have cultivated and trained. One of the greatest wisdoms from the book is to appreciate what we have rather than what we do not. If we are able to focus and be content with the things in our lives that we are grateful for, instead of thinking of what’s missing, we will feel a sense of durable happiness. We can always find something that we do not have yet no matter how much money we have accumulated, so an appreciation for what is in our lives is a much better mode to use our minds.
George and Park Well-Being Outcome
(Purpose)
1) Increased Day-to-Day Pursuit of Valued Goals:
- Assists in pursuit of lower valued day-to-day goals increasing well-being
2) Increased Positive Emotions:
- Progress and achieving one’s goals creates positive emotions
- Characteristic of pursuing higher order goals creates positive emotions
3) Harmony with Pursued Goals and Essential Values:
- People with higher purposes most likely pursue goals congruent with essential values and identity
- Harmony between goals and values predicts if pursuing goals will lead to well-being
4) Goal Adjustment:
- Having purpose makes adjusting lower goals easier when faced with problems or obstructions
- Effective goal adjustment leads to greater well-being
Significance
Significance is essentially about the value, worth and importance we feel about ourselves and our lives. Terror Management Theory discusses how we manage our anxieties about death and that our awareness of death causes us the feeling of terror. To reduce this conflict of our awareness of death, we engage in cultural practices, like religion, or devote ourselves to something that is greater than ourselves.
Our self-esteem, in the context of our terror produced by the awareness of our own death, has to be balanced in a cosmological or existential ‘mattering’ of significance. We are better able to deal with our awareness of death if we feel that there is something meaningful to our existence or place within the cosmos.
The ancient Greek word eudaimonia meaning ‘living well, successfully and responsibility’ or the Japanese term ikigai meaning ‘that which makes life worth living’ both get to the essence of significance that is fundamental to meaning in life. Significance is an evaluative property of meaning in life that we gain from referencing against some conceptual criteria.
George and Park identify significance as ‘mattering’ which has to do with feeling that we have some importance and value in the world. Humans strive to have a sense of ‘cosmic specialness’ that gives us a sense of value beyond time and context. To deal with existential realities of death and being 1 person of billions, humans will engage in self-enhancement where they perceive themselves in overly optimistic or favourable ways than objective standards. It is understandable that we have to buffer the realities of our existence but it can come at a cost of reducing our ability for accurate self-awareness. See Self-Awareness Tool. George and Park discuss the properties of self-enhancement that people will engage in to boost their self-esteem:
To see oneself in a positive manner and preserve one’s positive self-views, individuals engage in various strategies such as feedback preferences and expectations, channeling of attentional resources, strategic information search, and biased information processing (George and Park 2016. MiLaCPM 214)
If we are able to find suitable meaning in our lives, we can live with the knowledge of death and be able to enjoy with fulfillment every moment of our lives. Death allows and motivates me to be alive, make decisions and live well!
Significance Greater than Myself
Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, offers a very good understanding of significance through connecting our life to a greater meaning than ourselves. Seligman begins his argument for significance as contributing to meaning in one’s life by summarizing Robert Wright’s book ‘NonZero.’ The thesis that Seligman discusses from Wright has to do with societies and cultures engaging in win-lose or win-win relations with each other. The conclusion of Wright’s thesis is that cultures that promotes win-win scenarios are more likely to survive and advance to greater complexity. The notion of helping society advance to greater complexity through win-win social and cultural relations is the first part of Seligman’s understanding of being part of something greater than ourselves to bring significance to our lives.
The second part of Seligman’s significance meaning in life is displayed through a summary of Issac Asimov’s “The Last Question,”
Story opens in 2061, with the solar system cooling down, Scientists ask a giant computer, “Can entropy be reversed?...”Not enough data for a meaningful answer.”...next scene, Earth’s inhabitants have fled the white dwarf that used to be our sun for younger stars. As the galaxy continues to cool, they ask the miniaturized supercomputer, which contains all of human knowledge, “Can entropy be reversed? …”Not enough data.”...continues through more scenes, with the computer ever more powerful and the cosmos even colder. The answer...remains the same. Ultimately trillions of years pass, and all life and warmth in the universe have fled. All knowledge is compacted into a wisp of matter in the near-absolute zero of hyperspace. The wisp asks itself, “Can entropy be reversed? “Let there be light,” it responds. And there was light. (Seligman 2004, AH 258)
Seligman is extrapolating the complexity of human society through win-win relationships to its final end with the story of ‘The Last Question.’ If human development continues to extend to the point until we live beyond the life of the universe, would our future be that of creating our own universe? Seligman discusses properties of God as an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good being. If there was a possibility that humans can grow and develop towards a super complex being to the degree of that in Asimov’s story, these three properties are essential to that being coming into existence. If we are able to help society advance through power, knowledge and goodness we are contributing to the development to something greater than ourselves and our lives have meaning. Our ability to gain significance in our lives is relative to the breadth of purpose that we commit ourselves to.
A process that continually selects for more complexity is ultimately aimed at nothing less than omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness...The best we can do as individuals is to choose to be a small part of furthering this progress...the door through which meaning that transcends us can enter our lives. A meaningful life is one that joins with something larger than we are...the larger that something is, the more meaning our lives have. (Seligman 2004, AH 260)
The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power, or goodness. (Seligman 2004, AH 260)
To have meaning in life, according to Seligman, is to derive meaning from directing our purpose to the advancement the three attributes of knowledge, power and goodness. We have the choice how we spend the limited days that we have in this life and if we orient and organize ourselves towards these ends we will have a sense of meaning.
George and Park Well-Being Outcome
(Mattering)
1) Death Buffer for Existential Anxiety:
- Terror Management Theory suggests that significance and sense of mattering reduce negative emotions with the fear of death
2) Equanimity and Security when Existential Value Threatened:
- Gives a buffer and comfort to threats to one’s sense of self-worth and sense of value in the world
What is the meaning of life?
The meaning of life is to have a sense purpose, coherence and significance towards the cosmos. If we are able to create unity with our selves and others for these ends we will be creating meaning everywhere we have influence. Each part of the system I have organized has a place for each person to construct a meaningful life. Begin with Self-Awareness, then Revaluation of Values, and compose a Course of Action that leads you to the future being you identify with becoming. Once you have established this for yourself, the next step is to begin building a community and then a Social Phalanx which upholds these values for the good of each Agent within and non-agent without.
AJ 26.2.18, 15.3.18, 27.3.20
Martela and Steger. Journal of Positive Psychology. 2016 ‘The Three Meanings of Meaning in Life: Distinguishing Coherence, Purpose, and Significance.’
George and Park. Review of General Psychology. 2016 ‘Meaning in Life as Comprehension, Purpose, and Mattering: Toward Integration and New Research Questions.’
Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1998). On the self-regulation of behavior.
New York, NY: Cambridge University. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139174794
Link to Howard Cutler and the Dalai Lama’s ‘The Art of Happiness’:
ISBN: 978-1594488894
Link to Seligman’s ‘Authentic Happiness’:
ISBN: 978-0743222983
© Achilles Atlas Justice and achillesjustice.com, 2018 - 2021. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Achilles Atlas Justice and achillesjustice.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Comments