The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness

by Emily Esfahani Smith

The naturally resilient people, the researchers found, took a different attitude toward the speech task. They did not view it as a threat the way the nonresilient participants did; they saw it as a challenge.

What the researchers discovered is good news for more resilient and less resilient people alike. People who were naturally resilient recovered quickly whether they saw the task as a challenge or a threat. But for those who were less resilient, reframing the task as a challenge erased the gap: those who were told to approach the task as an opportunity rather than as a threat suddenly started looking like resilient people in their cardiovascular measures. They were able to bounce back.

The reason these exercises worked, Yeager and Henderson found, is that the students developed a “purpose for learning.” Those who remembered their sources of meaning were able to reframe a tough class—or, in the case of Abelson’s study, a nerve-racking interview—as a necessary step toward accomplishing their purpose and living according to their values rather than as an annoyance to be avoided or feared.

Keeping meaning in mind also protects us against the damage stress can do. As Stanford’s Kelly McGonigal writes, summarizing a large body of research: “Stress increases the risk of health problems, except when people regularly give back to their communities. Stress increases the risk of dying, except when people have a sense of purpose. Stress increases the risk of depression, except when people see a benefit in their struggles.”

As much as we might wish, none of us will be able to go through life without some kind of suffering. That’s why it’s crucial for us to learn to suffer well. Those who manage to grow through adversity do so by leaning on the pillars of meaning—and afterward, those pillars are even stronger in their lives.

Psychologists call this “the deathbed test.” Imagine that you’re at the end of your life. Perhaps a freak accident or diagnosis of disease has suddenly shortened your life, or maybe you have lived a long and healthy life, and are now in your eighties or nineties. Sitting on your deathbed, with only days ahead of you

to live, reflecting on the way you have led your life and what you have done and not done, are you satisfied with what you see? Did you live a good and fulfilling life? Is it a life you are glad that you led? If you could live your life over again, what would you do differently?

Their principal regrets included not following their true aspirations and purposes, giving too much of themselves to their careers rather than spending more time with their children and spouses, and not keeping in better touch with their friends. They wish they had spent more time during their lives building the pillars of meaning.

question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.” For one man, it was his young child, who was still alive. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he hoped to finish writing. As Frankl observed more and more inmates, he saw that those men and women who knew the “why” for their existence, as Nietzsche put it, could withstand almost any “how.”

He was also struck by how some people were

able to maintain their dignity despite the dehumanizing conditions by choosing how to respond to the suffering they faced and saw others endure. “We who lived in concentration camps,” he wrote, “can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the l...

Then Frankl had an epiphany. On that cold and grim march, with nothing except the warm memory of Tilly to bring him comfort, he realized that he understood the meaning of life. “For the first time in my life,” he explained, “I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers.” That truth, he writes, was “that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

“I understood,” he wrote, “how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’ ”

The act of love begins with the very definition of meaning: it begins by stepping outside of the self to connect with and contribute to something bigger. “Being human,” Frankl wrote, “always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is.”

That’s the power of meaning. It’s not some great revelation. It’s pausing to say hi to a newspaper vendor and reaching out to someone at work who seems down. It’s helping people get in better shape and being a good parent or mentor to a child. It’s sitting in awe beneath a starry

night sky and going to a medieval prayer service with friends. It’s opening a coffee shop for struggling veterans. It’s listening attentively to a loved one’s story. It’s taking care of a plant. These may be humble acts...