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- Belonging. When we are understood, recognized, and affirmed by friends, family members, partners, colleagues, and even strangers, we feel we belong to a community.
- Purpose. When we have long-term goals in life that reflect our values and serve the greater good, we tend to imbue our activities with more meaning. Researcher Adam Grant has found that professions focused on helping others—teachers, surgeons, clergy, and therapists—all tend to rate their jobs as more meaningful, and that people who imbue their work with purpose are more dedicated to their jobs.
- Storytelling. When it comes to finding meaning, it helps to try to pull particularly relevant experiences in our lives into a coherent narrative that defines our identity.
- Transcendence. Experiences that fill us with awe or wonder—ones in which “we feel we have risen above the everyday world to experience a higher reality,” according to Smith—can decrease our self-focus and lead us to engage in more generous, helpful behavior.
- Existentialism
- Absurdism
- Religious Existentialism
- Buddhism
Existentialism is an approach to philosophy that focuses on the questions of human existence, including how to live a meaningful life in the face of a meaningless universe. Many thinkers and writers are associated with the movement, including Nietzsche, Simone de Beauvoir, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. But perhaps the most prominent of the 20th-century ex...
Absurdism is a philosophy created by Sartre’s one-time friend and later intellectual rival Albert Camus. It is based on the idea that existence is fundamentally absurd and cannot be fully understood through reason. It is related to, but not the same as, existentialism. Camus argues that absurdityarises when humans try to impose order and meaning on...
While the primary existentialist thinkers were all atheists — Nietzsche raised the alarm on nihilism when he declared “God is dead” — the founder of the school was an extremely religious thinker by the name of Søren Kierkegaard. A Danish philosopher working in the first half of the 19th century, he turned his rather angsty disposition into a major ...
Another religious take can be found in the works of Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani. Nishitani studied early existentialism under Martin Heidegger, himself a leading existentialist thinker, but provided a Zen Buddhist approach to many of the same problems the existentialists addressed. Nishitani saw the modern problem of nihilism as everywhere...
May 15, 2007 · A standard distinction to draw is between the meaning “in” life, where a human person is what can exhibit meaning, and the meaning “of” life in a narrow sense, where the human species as a whole is what can be meaningful or not.
Mar 31, 2017 · There is the greatest consensus around defining meaning in life as “the extent to which people comprehend, make sense of, or see significance in their lives, accompanied by the degree to which they perceive themselves to have a purpose, mission, or overarching aim in life” (Steger, 2009, p. 682).
- Michael F. Steger
- 2017
Dec 20, 2015 · It is not clear whether any fact or piece of information could be the meaning of life, thereby dispelling your doubts about life’s meaning. Instead, Ellin suggests that the meaning of life might be ineffable.
Jan 8, 2020 · When our awareness intensifies and our senses open up there’s a sense of returning home – to meaning. So what is the meaning of life? Put simply, the meaning of life is life itself.
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Apr 20, 2022 · Some suggest that talk of ‘life’s meaning’ is about: pursuing what is worthy of awe and devotion (Taylor 1989, 3–90); seeking out non-trivial purposes (Trisel 2007), perhaps ones beyond our own happiness; leading a life worth living (Landau 2017, 9–12, 15–16); doing what merits esteem or admiration (Kauppinen 2015; cf. Metz 2001 ...
