On Meaning and Happiness - Must they Conflict?

Emily Esfahani Smith has an article at the Atlantic titled 'There's More to Life Than Being Happy'. The article describes the life of Viktor Frankl who lived a life of extremely difficult circumstances and wrote a book 'Man's Search for Meaning ' that in 1991 was listed as one of the 10 most influential books by the Library of Congress and Book-of-the-Month Club . Frankl's book and Smiths article explore the relationship between being happy, and living a meaningful life. I feel this is an important article with some very interesting findings and is well worth reading. I do feel however the conclusions that Smith and the researchers quoted in the article reach would benefit from a re-framing of perspective.

 Frankls view appears to be nicely summed up with this quote from the article:

"To the European," Frankl wrote, "it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'"

For Frankl, it appears that a better conception of happiness is one where happiness emerges from a meaningfully lived life.

The article references some interesting research on the trends in self reported happiness and life satisfaction with regard to meaning and purpose :

According to Gallup , the happiness levels of Americans are at a four-year high -- as is, it seems, the number of best-selling books with the word "happiness" in their titles. At this writing, Gallup also reports that nearly 60 percent all Americans today feel happy without a lot of stress or worry. On the other hand, according to the Center for Disease Control, about 4 out of 10 Americans have not discovered a satisfying life purpose. Forty percent either do not think their lives have a clear sense of purpose or are neutral about whether their lives have purpose. Nearly a quarter of Americans feel neutral or do not have a strong sense of what makes their lives meaningful. Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. On top of that, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy, according to recent research. "It is the very pursuit of happiness," Frankl knew, "that thwarts happiness."

This research seems to align with Frankls' perspective.  Americans seem more focused on the pursuit of happiness as compared to meaning and report lower levels of 'life satisfaction' than 'happiness'. This line of research also reports the intuitive finding that objective measures of well-being  like mental and physical health,  are aided when we can find purpose and meaning in life.


Smith also cites a new study conducted on 400 Americans aged 18 to 78.The study, which was headed by Roy Baumiester concludes this in the abstract:

Being happy and finding life meaningful overlap, but there are important differences.  Satisfying one’s needs and wants increased happiness but was largely irrelevant to meaningfulness. Happiness was linked to being a taker rather than a giver, whereas meaningfulness went with being a giver rather than a taker. Higher levels of worry, stress, and anxiety were linked to higher meaningfulness but lower happiness. Concerns with personal identity and expressing the self contributed to meaning but not happiness.

Another important finding from the paper relates to how we think about the past and the future, and how we feel in the present. As smith puts it:

"Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of the study, according to the researchers. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting."

And the study researchers conclude that :

"Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life,"

Smith and Baumiester and the other authors of the study all frame the relationships between 'happiness and meaning', 'taking and giving', as being in conflict with each other. They interpret the search for happiness as leading to the reception of benefits including better mental and physical health but less fulfilling life purpose. They also place present experience at odds with introspection into the past and the future. They interpret abstraction from the present as a transcendence of time that leads to more meaning but less happiness. They interpret the search for meaning as a transcendence of the self that leads has the downside of lower mental and physical health. 



The conclusion of the Baumiester research team that a pursuit of meaning leads to more worry, stress and anxiety seems in conflict with the earlier CDC statement. The CDC concluded that those who find life satisfaction through meaning and purpose have better mental and physical health outcomes. This seeming conflict in research findings is not explored in the article.
 
Instead Smith seems to accept and reinforce a conflict between happiness and meaning near the of the paper by concluding:

"By putting aside our selfish interests to serve someone or something larger than ourselves -- by devoting our lives to "giving" rather than "taking" -- we are not only expressing our fundamental humanity, but are also acknowledging that that there is more to the good life than the pursuit of simple happiness."

It seems a natural human condition to reduce concepts to 'good and bad' in conflict with each other. We often think we must get rid of the 'bad' and keep the 'good'. Taking, however is not always bad, and giving is not always good. What we have to give indeed depends broadly on what we have received ( through both nature and nurture ). Similarly, I will argue that being happy and healthy need not be in conflict with the pursuit of a meaningful life. I believe that each of these pairs can coexist in a complementary fashion rather than being conceived to be in conflict.

In the Taoist philosophy Yin and Yang respectively represent the receptive and the creative principles. While these two principles oppose each other, they are also considered to be complementary. The receptive and creative principles cannot be separated. We cannot eliminate one aspect to elevate the other.

So how then should we go about taking and giving? For starters I think we should re-frame the question. Perhaps we should think about how we can orient ourselves to be receptive to that which will allow the creation of something useful to give. 

Sometimes this is as simple getting proper rest when we are fatigued, getting some exercise if we have been to stationary, or eating a balanced diet to be properly nourished. It becomes more difficult if we consider how to nourish our knowledge of the world which informs our beliefs. All of this will impact what we are capable of giving.

This is not an easy approach. Cultivating a receptivity to what will increase our capacity for giving requires us to embrace a degree of uncertainty, and thus a degree of discomfort. If we only expose ourselves to knowledge and ideas that confirm what we already believe can we really expect to transcend ourselves? Transcending ourselves I argue requires a certain relationship that involves both receiving and giving.

The study authors would point out that uncertainty is uncomfortable and thus decreases happiness in the present. My experience however is that if we embrace a certain level of short-term discomfort with the understanding of its long-term payoff we increase our overall happiness. With some practice even the short-term discomfort can become a pleasant experience. Ask any runner about the joy of a good run once the habit has been established to verify this point. Similarly it can be a very rewarding and enjoyable experience to receive a new bit information that changes in some manner the way we perceive the world, rather than reinforcing our prior correctness.


So I think the most interesting aspect of the Baumeister research is that Americans seem to feel as though we need to make a choice between happiness and meaning. Those who choose a narrow search of happiness however may find it elusive. On the other hand those who feel they need to deprive themselves of happiness to obtain purpose and meaning seem in part to be fulfilling that prophecy.


Instead I advocate an approach that explores the complementary relationship between concepts like 'happiness and meaning', 'selfishness and altruism'. They are each two sides of the same coin. If we view them in conflict needing to sacrifice one to obtain the other that is what we will do. Rather I suggest we envision the intersection where each aspect necessarily supports and makes possible the other. I believe then we may find a happy and meaningful way to balance a necessary self interest with a productive altruism.