How to live a meaningful life, according to science

The Dalai Lama once said that our main purpose in this life is to help others – and maybe he was right. Researchers have found that having a positive impact on other people appears to be a key element in feeling meaningful in our lives.

A non-romantic might say that human life has no real meaning, but it’s still a question that philosophers have pondered for thousands of years. Joffrey Fuhrer at the University of Eastern Finland says it’s important to understand because determining what activities, thoughts and actions lead to a sense of meaning could help therapists and counselors guide people toward it.

To answer this age-old dilemma, the Fuhrer and his colleague Florian Cova at the University of Geneva in Switzerland conducted a series of studies, each involving online surveys of hundreds of US residents.

In some studies, participants were presented with fictional characters and asked to rate the extent to which their lives seemed meaningful, happy, and enviable. For example, they evaluated the life of Amélia, who won a lot of money in the lottery and now regularly donates to charities fighting poverty and hunger, and who travels to different countries to help these organizations.

In other studies, the pair asked participants to rate and rank several definitions of a meaningful life or to rate the extent to which they perceived their own life to be meaningful and fulfilling across a range of measures.

“We found that there are four different dimensions,” says Fuhrer. Three of them—coherence, or understanding of your past, present, and future life; your life has meaning or direction; and your life matters – were pulled earlier in similar previous studies. But Fuhrer and Cova say they have found a crucial fourth dimension to feeling that our lives have meaning: when what we do has a positive impact on others.

Other psychologists have argued that the basics are understanding, purpose and matter – a sense that your existence is consequential and of lasting value.

However, recent work argues that “significance” and “matter” do not capture what people perceive as the positive impact of their actions and how this leads to a sense of meaning. “I absolutely agree that this kind of concept is fundamental to the experience of meaning,” he says Tatjana Schnell at the Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society MF in Oslo. “But what’s the difference between impact and significance? There isn’t really one.”

Schnell’s own work proposes distinct four aspects of meaning, p existential togetherness – a sense of having a place in this world – alongside meaning, coherence and purpose. A paper recently discovered this social support can give people meaning.

No matter how many measures there may be, Schnell says that feeling like your life has meaning doesn’t mean making sure it’s fulfilled in every possible meaningful way. “It’s more about not having an area of ​​your life that is problematic, without coherence, without meaning, without importance, or without belonging,” he says.

Frank Martel at Aalto University in Finland gives the example of people who say they lack meaning in their work. “They do their job, they get paid, but they feel like nothing positive will come of it,” says Martela. It’s in situations like this that people can begin to feel a lack of purpose and feel hopeless or depressed, he says.

To make a bigger impact, Fuhrer and Schnell say we should move beyond self-centered interests and invest time and energy in activities that benefit others. “Find out who you think you are, who you want to be, and what you can bring to this world, and then see how you can apply that to something that’s sustainable for others,” says Schnell.

Even the little things you do every day can have meaning, Martela says, like bringing a cup of coffee to a colleague.