A Practical Guide to Finding Meaning (according to science)
Meaning-making is a reflexive skill. It is also a process that can be shaped from your thoughts, actions, and environment. Previously, we’ve discussed the gory details of how this unfolds over time but we haven’t summarized these observations in a way that you could immediately, confidently apply to your life. Today this changes–today we break somewhat with modern scientific tradition and transform scientific meat into practical sausage.
(Feel free to skip to the end if all you want is a few easy bullet-points to follow–otherwise, strap in!)
First, some background (which will be familiar to people who have my read previous work).
When we talk about meaning, we’re talking about a dynamic process where your immediate experience–i.e., living in the moment–and your narrative purpose–i.e., the story that underlies your life and which you feel drives your actions–influence each other. An extreme example: If we put you in an empty white room with nothing to do, feeding you only when you sleep, you will find it difficult to look forward to any kind of future that feels meaningful–every day feels endless and every thought feels useless and bland. Of course, less extreme examples are abundant–if you work a job that doesn’t stimulate and push you, this will impact your ability to look forward to and pursue meaningful long-term goals. We can of course imagine the opposite case: if you surround yourself with vibrant company and compelling, dynamic work, you will find it natural to imagine and orient yourself towards meaningful long-term goals.
Then there’s the flip-side: losing a compelling narrative purpose can lead to a diminished immediate experience. Returning to the work example, if you feel like your career lacks direction and purpose or that you are replaceable or dispensable (this one is personally salient!), your immediate experiences will be drained of their richness. Activities that you used to feel joy in will suddenly seem meaningless, or at least diminished in quality–and that’s not you getting older and more cynical. This is a real, genuine phenomena.
Together, we’ve described these as the “slow” and “fast” senses of meaning. Slow meaning is narrative purpose underlying our experiences and fast meaning is the meaningfulness that accompanies experience.
Understanding this, we can now apply these concepts and generate some practical wisdom.
If your goal is finding more meaning in your life–and it should be, on a fundamental level–you should first examine which parts of your fast and slow meaning are floundering. This can be difficult, as fast and slow meaning are dynamically connected. For example, you might find that your work feels meaningless or at least lacking in meaning, but simultaneously acknowledge that your work is actually pretty good, relatively speaking. Maybe you work for a good company doing good work, rationally speaking–but somehow, you still find it difficult to remain motivated. This is a point where thinking in terms of meaning dynamics can be especially useful, as it indicates that two things are possible:
- You know on some level that your work is not actually that good or useful but are suppressing that knowledge in order to feel comfortable. This is not shameful–this is completely understandable and in fact reasonable, as being too fixated on doing ideal work going to make you struggle with meaning even more. It’s okay to settle–to an extent. You do have to fully buy into settling or you’ll be left with that nagging knowledge you could in fact make some changes to better your situation. This will also depend on your situation. If you have dependents, it’s easier (and again, healthy) to relax your expectations of meaningful work in order to get what you need out of your work–money. Still, this is a tricky balance and a bit of a game you play with yourself, where you know that you could do something else but have decided to compromise for the sake of other goals–this knowledge can still be wearing and really only works if you can continue believing in the trade-off. Or, if you haven’t done so yet, you can go ahead and convince yourself there is a valuable trade-off being had.
- The work itself fails to engage your mind and body. Some work is simply not going to feel meaningful. The kind of work you find meaningful in and of itself will depend on your personality and abilities. For example, while I love playing tennis and am decent at it, I know that–were this physically possible and it’s not–I could never find being a professional player to be sustainably meaningful. This is because my brain hates extreme competition and sustained performance pressure–it gets over-heated and over-stimulated. Even were I able to push through my being overwhelmed and win money and esteem, I’d be constantly stressed out. So too with a job that requires being in conflict or managing large numbers of people. I know this about myself by now–and you know your own preferences. There’s also the question of intellectual engagement. For some, it’s important that their work be more centered around flow states and instinct, as opposed to lots of thinking, talking, and managing. **Even if you’re good at something or if that something is a highly practical and useful occupation, this is no guarantee that you will feel good doing it.** If you don’t feel good doing whatever it is that you do, it will be extremely difficult to keep doing that thing and still feel as though that thing has meaning for you, even if you’re the best who ever was at that thing.
If we take a look upwards, we see that 1 is a problem of slow, narrative meaning and that 2 is an issue of fast, immediate experience. It is of course possible that you are struggling with both ends, in which case, you really ought to change your occupation if this is at all possible. Work that both fails to engage you and which you don’t enjoy in and of itself is going to severely undermine your meaning in life. If it’s just one of these, there are workarounds. As discussed in 1, you can convince yourself (rationally and usefully) that your work is necessary. For 2, it’s a bit less straightforward. You can try to find a niche within your work that better aligns with your mind and body. For example, when I was a software engineer, I was able to partly pivot to user experience and interface work, which engaged my creative and social muscles in a way that coding didn’t. Something so straightforward might not always be possible, of course–but there are probably adjustments you can make within your work that can make a difference. The goal is to to feel as though your work is right for you.
One dimension to explore is connectedness. Meaningful work will be high in connectedness. This includes feelings of self, other, and world. Your work should feel aligned with who you are as a person–if you are someone who likes to focus deeply and flow, work that includes interruptions and constant changes will be jarring and abrasive. On the other hand, if you like working alongside other people, any work that involves extended periods of isolation will feel disconnective. Thinking about this in terms of self, other, and world can help clarify your preferences, which you normally just unconsciously wield. For me, I don’t care too much about my working world so long as it is quiet and consistent. I do love to work with likeminded people–this is fundamental to me, to the point that I could earnestly say the primary reason for my choosing my current path is because I wanted to make really cool friends (working on really cool problems). For self, I know that I like being flexible with my time and efforts and that I don’t mind spending time in my own thoughts, so long as I know I can spread those thoughts later–unlike many software engineers, I don’t relish technical work for its own sake nor do I feel good about being correct or optimizing everything. This makes me a pretty poor software engineer (don’t tell my ex-bosses) and I know it. But that’s enough about me–this work is for you.
Consider your work in these dimensions. Is something lacking? If it is, you can either try to make some adjustments or take a wilder step and pivot your career. Doing this might seem dangerous and indeed it can be if you have a great deal of external dependencies. But it is surprisingly common and surprisingly tenable. There’s a pernicious untruth that we hear–that switching careers is a reset. It isn’t. You still get to keep your past experience and even if your new employers-to-be don’t fully respect your unrelated résumé, you will find yourself better equipped than younger people on the same track to succeed. And, much more importantly, you’ll feel your work is more meaningful so you can suffer a little wage and status indignation. There’s some interesting data to support this conclusion that comes from an unlikely source–a podcast host. Tens of thousands of people volunteered to be part of an experiment where they committed to following the advice of a coin flip on an important life decision where they were split. Among breaking up with their significant other and moving was switching jobs. They ran the experiment, flipping digital coins and telling each participant which choice fate had decided for them. Then, they followed up, asking each participant how satisfied they were with the outcome. The result? Those whose coin flip decided they’d make a switch (versus staying) were more satisfied with the outcome (happier, feeling better off, and would make the switch again if they had to) than those who were told to stay, in all conditions. This effect continued several months later.
Taking these results at face value, we get a straightforward conclusion: when you have difficulty making a decision to do something or to do nothing, you do something. This roughly tracks with how we’ve conceptualized meaning. Making a decision will necessarily alter one’s self, other, and/or world. If I change my job, I change my environment, the people and places that occupy my world. This is not of course guaranteed to be a good thing but it is more likely than not to be a good thing when it’s done with deliberate intention, as it would be if you changed your career–or moved or split up.
Logotherapy
So far, the discussion has been biased towards career-related advice but meaning is found outside of work. For more general advice, we can turn to the principles of logotherapy. Logotherapy is therapy that’s oriented around finding meaning in life. This breaks somewhat from more common forms of therapy–such as psychotherapy–which have distinct objectives. Psychotherapy is all about evaluating one’s thoughts and feelings and giving an account for what brings them about. It asks us to look backwards towards our childhoods and outwards towards our surroundings, identifying the source of our ills. Logotherapy was created in part as a rebuttal to this. Instead of looking backwards and focusing on problems, logotherapy asks us to creatively reframe events as fitting into a proactive, purposeful narrative. When something bad happens to us, logotherapy asks us to come up with a positive way to frame the outcome. More formally, this is captured as a diagram:
Logotherapy has three components: Freedom of will, meaning of life, and will to meaning
- Freedom of will: This isn’t a claim that we have ultimate free will but that we can locally feel as though our decisions and free and therefore shape our lives with intention.
- Meaning of life: Often misunderstood, we are not assuming some ultimate purpose to the universe but are instead acknowledging that within each human life, there are limited possibilities that we could pursue and that some of these are more or less aligned with our values.
- Will to meaning: Having a will to meaning is a meta desire–to want to find meaning must precede its pursuit. Such a thing often comes along with being a human but can attenuate when we’re otherwise struggling to find meaning.
These three components feed into each other in a dynamic relationship, in the same way that fast and slow meaning do. In fact, the conceptualization of fast and slow meaning we’ve used is strongly inspired by the logotherapeutic framing.
What practical advice can we get from this? Hopefully, a great deal, as logotherapy was designed for the express purpose of helping people find meaning. And indeed this is what logotherapy has been doing for upwards of 60 years–even though it hasn’t fully escaped its Austrian birthplace. What has escaped Austria is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which is strikingly similar to Logotherapy:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Instead of the above triad, CBT forms a triad of thoughts, feelings, and behavior. This is roughly similar to logotherapy in the sense of being oriented around meaning. However, logotherapy is centered around slow, narrative meaning and CBT is centered on fast, immediate meaning. Ideally, we can become aware of and wield both approaches simultaneously.
Logotherapy for slow meaning
To apply logotherapy to yourself, you will intentionally take a step back from your current feelings and instead evaluate your overall direction. Do you have work that fits whatever purpose you feel is a fit for you? Are your relationships aligned with your values? If not, you are left with a pair of options–as discussed before. You can either make a significant change to the overall situation or you can do as much as possible to make the best of what you have. Again, with intention. You can’t squeeze water from some stones but you can squeeze a surprising amount of meaning from what you might otherwise consider a meaningless situation. This is a skill that you can cultivate. If it becomes clear that whatever misalignment with purpose you have cannot or should not be resolved through reframing and recontextualizing, then the only logical thing is to change your situation. Even though this carries some risk, once you’ve determined that your situation is not something you can resolve, the only path forward is to change tracks. This is the essence of logotherapy. You use your freedom of will to find meaning where you are or to find a path that brings you meaning–but to do this you must have a will to meaning in the first place. If you’re reading this far, it’s a fair assumption that you already have this to some extent. Now it’s just a matter of acting on it.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for fast meaning
For CBT, self-help can be difficult, as your thoughts themselves will be distorted by your emotional signals. This is partly why it’s a formal therapy practice that involves a trained professional holding your hand most of the way. However, CBT is entirely practicable without outside assistance. In fact, thinking of CBT in terms of meaning frees it somewhat from its clinical tethers. How so? Understanding fast meaning is understanding that every experience you have can be made more or less meaningful. Something that causes you stress but that you can’t do anything about should be thought of as less meaningful. A good trick for this is to inject the word “just” in front of the offending feeling/situation. For example, if you have to give a talk that you’re anxious about, you can willingly think of it as just a talk in front of other human people just like you who wouldn’t really bother judging you because they’re more worried about the things that worry them personally. You can intentionally defuse whatever you’re anxious about by consciously considering the situation in its starkest form. On the other side, if you find yourself struggling to be motivated and excited by something you think could or should motivate you, you can examine that absence of motivation and see whether you’ve been unintentionally putting a “just” in front of it. Cynicism and jadedness follow when we reflexively or intentionally diminish the potential for some event to be meaningful.
Put together, CBT and logotherapy can help heal your meaning dynamics.
Straightforward advice
Some final, practical, potentially speculative advice that follows from all this:
- Surround yourself with objects that are both familiar and personal: gifts, creations, hand-crafted, unique, positively valenced items should form the background of the spaces you spend the most time. Even though it’s practical and useful, do not surround yourself with merely functional objects that do not have a felt depth or richness to them. It’s better to have a barely functioning blender your grandmother gave you than the latest and fruit obliterator you know was mass-produced to be the optimal, ultimate liquid meal tool.
- Travel to unfamiliar places and try new things: This will make your fast meaning go into overdrive, potentially helping you cultivate your slow, narrative meaning.
- Journal: Journaling can help you cultivate your narrative meaning, so long as you use it for that purpose. Think about what you are doing each day and how that all fits with your hopes and dreams. (Journaling can be written or spoken or dictated, of course.)
- Stay busy: Filling your time with meaningful or at least useful plans will keep you from ruminating and worrying too much about negative possibilities. (Note that being too busy is also a crutch for some–if you are constantly giving yourself busy work, you risk losing sight of your slow, narrative ends. You need a balance.)
- Come up with things to look forward to: These don’t have to be cosmically important things–they can be some movie you’re looking forward to–but the best will be events that ask something of you.
- Seek responsibility: Even if it seems like a hassle, you need to willingly commit yourself to taking responsibility over different things, be they community service or coaching or tutoring or tending to a garden–you need to pursue things that demand some sacrifice. This helps fill in your slow, narrative meaning and gives you opportunities for fast meaning.
This list should look familiar, as this is more or less universal wisdom found in whatever happy elderly you find around the world. Familiar or not, following this list will work to help you find meaning in life. My hope is that by framing this in scientific terms, you can take this advice more as a prescription than as vague, mystical wisdom. If you are struggling with finding meaning–and if you are alive, you are–you ought to do all of these things, regardless of situation. The only thing you are left with in every conscious moment is how you feel and that feeling can be improved with intentional, focused meaning-making.
As for the more ambitious shifts (changing jobs, houses, etc.), really consider them. If you are split about making a change or not, you should make the change. Again, all you have at the end of this is how your life feels and that can in fact be controlled. It’s a miracle of free will or whatever you want to call it–use it!
