“Humans may resemble many other creatures in their striving for happiness, but the quest for meaning is a key part of what makes us human, and uniquely .

The pursuit of happiness and meaning are two of our most central motivations in life. Happiness and meaning are, in fact, essential elements of well-being. Happiness and meaning are strongly correlated with each other, and often feed off each other. The more meaning we find in life, the more happy we typically feel, and the more happy we feel, the more we often feel encouraged to pursue even greater meaning and purpose. 

But not always. There can be substantial trade-offs between seeking happiness and seeking meaning in life. Consider, for instance, the “parenthood paradox”: parents often report that they are very happy they had children, but parents who are living with children usually score very low on measures of happiness. It seems that raising children can decrease happiness but increase meaning. Or consider revolutionaries, who often suffer through years of violence and discord for a larger purpose that can ultimately bring great satisfaction and meaning to their lives and the lives of others.

Factors such as feeling connected to others, feeling productive, and not being alone or bored contributed to both happiness and meaning. However, they also found some important differences:

• Finding one’s life easy or difficult was related to happiness, but not meaning.
• Feeling healthy was related to happiness, but not meaning.
• Feeling good was related to happiness, not meaning.
• Scarcity of money reduced happiness more than meaning.
• People with more meaningful lives agreed that ‘relationships are more important than achievements’.
• Helping people in need was linked to meaning but not happiness.
• Expecting to do a lot of deep thinking was positively related to meaningfulness, but negatively with happiness.*
• Happiness was related more to being a taker rather than a giver, whereas meaning was related more to being a giver than a taker.
• The more people felt their activities were consistent with core themes and values of their self, the greater meaning they reported in their activities.
• Seeing oneself as wise, creative, and even anxious were all linked to meaning but had no relationship (and in some cases, even showed a negative relationship) to happiness.

It seems that happiness has more to do with having your needs satisfied, getting what you want, and feeling good, whereas meaning is more related to uniquely human activities such as developing a personal identity, expressing the self, and consciously integrating one’s past, present, and future experiences. 

In contrast, the two measures of meaning were positively associated with most of the measures of adaptation. In particular, cognitive processing was very strongly related to grit (passion and perseverance for long-term goals), and self-distancing was robustly related to gratitude and well-being, and negatively related to emotion suppression. What’s more, the interaction between cognitive processing and self-distancing was additionally associated with measures of adaptation. It seems that meaning-making is particularly adaptive if one can maintain a self-detached third-person perspective .

Often human beings are happiest when they are engaged in meaningful pursuits and virtuous activities. Indeed, when we are deeply engaged in an activity that is in accordance with our best self, we often report the highest levels of life satisfaction .

In my view, similarities and differences between happiness and meaning can contribute substantially to our understanding of this ‘sweet-spot’ of well-being: that seemingly magical combination of happiness and meaning that sets off the virtuous cycle that can ultimately lead to a life well lived. Now, that would be really meaningful.

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