The Power of Meaning: The true route to happiness

by Emily Esfahani Smith

Second, purpose involves a contribution to the world.

living purposefully requires self-reflection and self-knowledge.

Each of us has different strengths, talents, insights, and experiences that shape who we are. And so each of us will have a different purpose, one that fits with who we are and what we value—one that fits our identity.

Researchers at Texas A&M University have examined the tight relationship between identity and purpose, and they’ve found that knowing oneself is one of the most important predictors of meaning in life.

“We are capable of something unique, each one of us, but it takes time to find out what that is,” she said. “There are all these layers that cover up our true potential, and it’s not until the time is right that we might discover who we are truly meant to become or transform into. Just like Lord Hanuman.”

THOUGH LIVING WITH purpose may make us happier and more determined, a purpose-driven person is ultimately concerned not with these personal benefits but with making the world a better place. Indeed, many great thinkers have argued that in order for individuals to live meaningful lives, they must cultivate the strengths, talents, and capacities that lie within them and use them for the benefit of others.

However, he sees himself in comfortable circumstances and prefers to give himself up to gratification rather than to make the effort to expand and improve his fortunate natural predispositions.” What should this man do? Should he abandon the cultivation of his natural talents for a life of enjoyment and ease? Or should he pursue his purpose?

Frederick Buechner put it, your vocation lies “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Grant points out that those who consistently rank their jobs as meaningful have something in common: they see their jobs as a way to help others.

And it was a mindset adopted by a food cart owner a few years ago when my friend realized, after ordering, that he had forgotten his wallet. “My job isn’t to take your money,”48 he told my friend. “My job,” he said, handing my friend his taco, “is to feed you.”

Not all of us will find our calling. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find purpose.

Each of us has a circle of people—in our families, in our communities, and at work—whose lives we can improve. That’s a legacy everyone can leave behind.

“Erik,” she said, “for every ten kids we see with this injury, nine of them die. There is only one Kate. We need to come back and we need to see her, because she is what keeps us coming back to work in this place every day.” “This is the redemption,” Erik realized. “This is the good.”

They should have settled in the storyteller’s mind so that he or she can reflect back on the experience and pull out its meaning. “Sometimes,” Burns said, “when you get on the phone with someone, they think they have a story worked out, but you’ll see that it’s not resolved.”

Burns has seen that the process of crafting a story helps the storytellers connect the events of their life in new ways, gaining insight into their experiences and learning lessons that had previously eluded them.

“each of us has worked by improvisation, discovering the shape of our creation along the way.”4 Our identities and experiences, in other words, are constantly shifting. Like a jazz musician in the middle of an improvisation, we may follow one path, then abandon it for another. Storytelling is how we make sense of that act.

By taking the disparate pieces of our lives and placing them together into a narrative, we create a unified whole that

allows us to understand our lives as coherent—and coherence, psychologists say, is...

Our storytelling impulse emerges from a deep-seated need all humans share: the need to make sense of the world.6 We have a primal desire to impose order on disorder—to find the signal in the noise. We see faces in the clouds, hear footsteps in the rustling of leaves, and detect conspiracies in unrelated events. We are constantly taking pieces of information and adding a layer of meaning to them; we couldn’t function otherwise. Stories help us make sense of the world and our place in it, and understand why things happen the way they do. “Storytelling is fundamental to the human search for meaning, whether we tell tales of the creation of the earth or of our own early choices,”7 writes Bateson.

In the months after his surgery, Emeka spent a lot of time trying to make sense of his injury—of the moment when the story of his life took an abrupt turn. Before his injury, he said, “I was climbing up the wrong mountain.” When he broke his neck, he fell down that mountain and “hit rock bottom.” Then he discovered another mountain—the mountain he was supposed to be climbing all along, the mountain that contained his true path. He has been slowly climbing that mountain ever since.

McAdams describes narrative identity as an internalized story you create about yourself—a personal myth, as one writer puts it, “about who we are deep down—where we come from, how we got this way, and what it all means.”

Like fictional stories, it contains heroes and villains that help us or hold us back, major events that determine the plot, challenges that we overcome, and suffering that we have endured. When we want people to understand us, we share our story or parts of it with them; when we want to know who another person is, we ask them to share part of their story in turn.

It’s important to understand that an individual’s life story is not an exhaustive history of what happened to him. Rather, we make what McAdams calls “narrative choices.” Our stories tend to focus on the most extraordinary events of our lives, good and bad, because those are the experiences that we need to make sense of, those are t...

to divide their lives into chapters and to recount key scenes from their lives, such as a high point, a low point, a turning point, or an early memory. He encourages his participants to think about their personal beliefs, values, and philosophy of life. Finally, he asks them to reflect on the story’s central theme.

People who are driven to contribute to society and to future generations, he found, all share a common pattern: they are more likely to tell redemptive stories about their lives, or stories that transition from bad to good. In these stories, the tellers move from suffering to salvation—they experience a negative event followed by a positive event that resulted from the negative event and therefore gives their suffering some meaning.

The redemption “doesn’t make the crisis worthwhile,” Erik said, “but it makes it worth something.”

McAdams has found that beyond stories of redemption, people who believe their lives are meaningful tend to tell stories defined by growth, communion, and agency. These stories allow individuals to craft a positive identity for themselves: they are in control of their lives, they are loved, they are progressing through life, and whatever obstacles they have encountered have been redeemed by good outcomes.

The stories we tell about our lives reveal how we under-stand ourselves and how we interpret the way our lives have unfolded. They can also reinforce different aspects of who we are.

One of the great contributions of psychology and psychotherapy research is the idea that we can edit, revise, and interpret the stories we tell about our lives even as we are constrained by the facts.

Even though the fundraisers knew they were only telling their stories as part of a study,

they ultimately “lived by” those stories, as McAdams would put it. By subtly reframing their narrative, they adopted a positive identity that led them, like Emeka, to live more purposefully.

IN ADDITION TO story-editing, one of the best ways for people to make meaning through storytelling is to reflect on the pivotal moments of their lives—the central scene or scenes from their personal narratives—and consider how those ...

But when he thinks about those critical moments in his life and the alternative paths his life could have taken had things turned out differently, Emeka is not just engaging in wishful thinking—he’s making sense of his experiences and, in doing so, building meaning.

The exercise of imagining how life would have turned out if some event had or had not occurred is what academics call counterfactual thinking.

“Looking back, list the broad sequence of things that led to your decision.”

“Describe all the ways that things could have turned out differently.”

Why is counterfactual thinking so powerful? The answer, Kray suggests, is that this kind of exercise engages the sense-making process more rigorously than does simply thinking about the meaning of an event. First, it helps us appreciate the benefits of the path we ultimately took. As the study participants thought about what their lives would be like without the pivotal event, they mostly imagined alternative lives that were worse, not better.

Second, counterfactual thinking leads us to tell more coherent stories about our lives.

“I don’t know if it’s possible to think of future nostalgia,” he said. “But I do sometimes get nostalgic for the future I could have had.

“Yes,” he said, “it would have been an easier life. But does that mean it would have been a better life?

Adversity also led to “moral growth,” he said.

King asked these three groups of research subjects to write two versions of the story of their future—the narrative of their current “best possible self,” or how they hoped their lives would unfold, and the counterfactual narrative of their “lost possible self,” the self that could have been had

they not had to inhabit a difficult role.

Ego development measures how an individual sees and interprets reality—the extent to which they are able “to master, to integrate, and make sense of experience,” to think about themselves and the world in complex ways. In other words, it’s a measure of emotional depth, something that becomes clear in the stories King collected for her research.

“Avoiding thinking about loss may be one way to be happy,” as King writes, “but it may also preclude the kind of examination necessary for growth.”

“The world isn’t just the way it is,” as Pi says. “It is how we understand it, no?”

These readers were most moved by the parts of Julia’s story that related to their own narratives. As a result of reading “The Trout,” they gained more insight into themselves.

But what it really is is reaching out into the void and connecting with people and letting them know they’re not alone.”

This is the power of transcendence. The word “transcend” means “to go beyond” or “to climb.”

A transcendent, or mystical, experience is one in which we feel that we have risen above the everyday world to experience a higher reality.