For a long time in college, I did activities just to check off the boxes of a “successful student”. I enjoyed most of these activities, but there were also ones I cared less about. I did these ones simply because “society” placed a high value on them. As a result, I was constantly overwhelmed by workload but more critically, often struck by a sense of meaninglessness. This led to an existential state-of-mind where I began to doubt the inherent meaning of my life and the difference between me being alive and not.
A month ago, I moved to the Bay Area to start a new chapter of my life. From a few of the people I have met, some have described their lives as happy but lacking in meaning. With the high salary of many young professionals, hedonic happiness, or pleasure, can be easily fulfilled — by dining at bougie restaurants, dressing in high-end fashion, buying the latest tech, and going on Tahoe snowboard trips. But the fact that some still feel a missing piece in their lives leads me to conclude that happiness and meaning are two distinct dimensions of a good life. It wasn’t until I read Meaning in Life and Why It Matters by Susan Wolf, that I was able to put my thoughts into perspective.
Meaning of Life vs. Meaning in Life
My sophomore astronomy class threw me in at the deep end. Contemplating the sheer fortuity of life’s existence made me feel extremely small and insignificant. From the perspective of the universe, I doubted the inherent meaning of our lives altogether. As this doubt deepens, I would sometimes fall into moments of despair and questioned if it would make a difference at all if I was dead.
Looking back, I realize that my despair may have been an overreaction. Even if our lives are insignificant on the scale of the universe, it doesn’t mean it has no meaning with respect to more immediate entities, for example, our loved ones. We can make a difference in their lives, sometimes simply by being there. There might not be an ultimate meaning of life, but we can always create meaning in our lives.
Creating meaning is incredibly important. It gives us purpose, especially during hardship. Research shows that people don’t commit suicide because they are simply unhappy but because they perceive their lives as meaningless. They lose the reasons to continue living. Similarly, in Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, those who survived the concentration camps were those able to find meaning even in the most desperate situations. This calls us to pay attention to “meaning” as an important dimension in our lives.
Two Areas to Find Meaning
So where do we start seeking meaning in our lives? I propose two areas where almost everyone can start: through our social relationships and through our work.
No matter how many times I question my existence, after contemplation, I always come to the same conclusion: I am extremely lucky to have loving parents and good friends who genuinely care about me. To them, whether I exist or not matters, and vice versa. This leads me to realize the role our social relationships play in our sense of meaning. The deeper the connections we make, the stronger the meaning we feel: taking care of aging parents, lending friends a helping hand, or simply spending quality time. This can explain altruism behaviors. We do them not simply to feel good, but also because they give us meaning and gives us a reason to live. To increase the meaning in our lives, we need to invest time in strengthening the social relationships we have.
The other area to find meaning in life is through our work. Here, work goes beyond just our day job — it could be a hobby, such as writing, music composition, or volunteering. Not all work contributes to meaning in life. Meaningful work is always larger than ourselves. We do these work not to serve our self-interest, but to augment other people’s lives or to continue a cultural tradition. Even if the work that we do might not turn out to be successful or immediately beneficial to humanity, I’d like to think of the attempts as meaningful regardless.
The common thread between these two areas is that they are both larger than ourselves. When we engage in things that go beyond ourselves, we feel fulfilled. It makes us feel worthwhile.
Three Essential Properties of Meaningfulness
What is it that makes a certain relationship/work meaningful to us while others don’t? Susan Wolf’s proposal clarifies this question for me. She argues that “meaning arises from [people] loving objects worthy of love and engaging with them in a positive way.” To decipher this, there are three components to meaningfulness:
- The subjective feeling of fulfillment/love
- The objective value of the activity
- The strong link between the two — deep engagement
There is a long philosophical debate behind this proposal, but I think it provides an extremely helpful framework for us to approach evaluating the meaning in life. Her argument could explain why I didn’t find meaning in the many activities I was doing during undergrad, for example, taking on a research position for the sake of resume. Even though the research has objective value, I did not subjectively care about it to feel meaningful. Similarly, for many tech workers, even if the work we are doing is objectively valuable (for example, impacting millions of users) on the surface, if we don’t genuinely care about the impact, the work will not contribute to the meaning in our lives.
Wolf’s proposal also calls my attention to the idea of “deep engagement”. When I signed up for 6 classes, a club leadership positions, and multiple extracurriculars, I became overwhelmed and wasn’t deeply engaged with any of them. Even if in isolation I would have enjoyed each activity, I simply did not have enough time for all of them to start embracing them. As a result, I created the image of an overachiever but derived very little enjoyment out of the things I was killing myself to do. It’s important to truly invest time and effort into the things we care about, even if it means picking fewer things to focus on.
Upon reflection, I realize that to derive meaning out of the work I do or the relationships I engage in, I have to ensure that:
- The work/relationship is valuable objectively
- I personally care about them
- I deeply engage with them
Three types of work
So how do we approach evaluating our day job? What if it doesn’t provide the meaning that we seek? I believe that work falls into these three categories:
- The work that aligns with your mission or passion in life. For example, many doctors and teachers derive lots of meaning out of their work.
- The work that helps you build skills and connections, and gives you time and resources to find your mission in life. The work might not be intrinsically valuable to you but it provides you with what you need in order to do Type 1 work. Many tech and finance jobs fall into this category.
- The work that only provides the financial means to enable one to pursue what one desires. Many manual jobs fall into this category.
I would like to elaborate on the second type. I think when one’s career is just beginning, it’s perfectly fine or even commendable to take a job that will train you and make you financially independent. However, it’s important that we don’t settle but keep seeking what is truly meaningful to us. It’s not worth spending 8 hours a day in the prime years of our life on something that we don’t care deeply about.
It may seem unrealistic to find a job with meaning on a daily basis. What we can aim for is to find jobs that appear to be valuable and impactful every time that we look back at it — “backward” meaningfulness.
Happiness vs. Meaning
Before finishing the essay, I want to go back to this phenomenon that I started the essay with: people can feel happy but meaningless. This points out that happiness and meaning are two distinct concepts. When people talk about happiness, most refer to the hedonic type, equivalent to “pleasure” or an elevated positive feeling. Happiness in this conventional sense is usually short-lived and self-serving. Meaning, on the other hand, is supposed to be long-lasting and other-serving. It’s possible to live a life full of pleasure (like in Nozick’s experience machine) but lacking in meaning. It’s also possible to live a meaningful life without true happiness-as with significant achievement often comes great sacrifice.
To live a good life, we need both: the joy of the day to day and the fulfillment of affecting things bigger than ourselves. Instead of prioritizing one over the other, we should seek a balance between happiness and meaning. But all this does not necessitate that we give up our hobbies. In fact, the joy we derive from these events often gives us the mental energy to pursue meaning. And meaning can also contribute to the amount of joy we feel. These two concepts, though distinct, augment each other.
To sum up, I have argued in this essay that happiness and meaning are two distinct dimensions to a good life. To ensure that our life goes well for us, which is what we all ultimately hope for, we need to let go of optimizing only for happiness and start treating “meaning” as an important aspect of our well-being. This calls us to build stronger social connections and pursue work that is bigger than ourselves and engage with them deeply.
This blog is published with permission from Mojia Shen)