Fundamental concerns regarding what constitutes a decent existence are brought up by a scientific debate on the connection between meaning and happiness. Philosophers, scientists, and spiritual authorities have all argued on what makes life worthwhile. Is it a life full of happiness or a life full of meaning and purpose? Do the two even differ from one another?
Can you imagine the human rights activist who strives for justice but is imprisoned to be happy? Or the party-hopping social animal who spends his nights (and occasionally days) doing that—is it the good life?
These are not merely scholarly inquiries. They can assist us in deciding where to focus our efforts in order to live the lives we want.
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Several studies have looked closely at these issues in an effort to distinguish between a meaningful life and a happy one. Their findings raise the possibility that there is more to life than happiness and even call into question several earlier conclusions in the study of positive psychology, garnering both favorable and unfavorable press attention.
There may be more to life than happy, but there may also be more to “happiness” than mere pleasure, which is why the discussion surrounding it raises important concerns about what happiness actually entails.
There are five distinctions between a pleasant life and a purposeful one:
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According to Roy Baumeister, a Francis Eppes Professor of Psychology at Florida State University, “a happy life and a meaningful life have certain differences.” This assertion is supported by a report he co-authored with scientists from Stanford and the University of Minnesota and was published in the Journal of Positive Psychology last year.
In a study of 397 adults, Baumeister and his colleagues looked for connections between respondents’ degrees of pleasure and meaning in life and a variety of other elements of their lives, including their behavior, moods, relationships, health, stress levels, professional lives, and other activities.
They discovered that having a purpose in life and being happy don’t necessarily go hand in hand. They also wanted to know more about the variations between the two. Their statistical research sought to distinguish between factors that made life meaningful but not happy and factors that made life happy but not meaningful.
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According to their research, happiness (as opposed to meaning) is related to one’s health, financial security, and level of comfort in life, whereas meaning is not. The researchers narrowed down the distinction between a happy life and a meaningful one to five key elements.
Happy people satisfy their wants and needs, but that seems largely irrelevant to a meaningful life. Consequently, pleasure was related to health, prosperity, and ease of living, but not to meaning.
Happiness involves being focused on the present, whereas meaningfulness involves thinking more about the past, present, and future—and the relationship between them. In addition, happiness was seen as fleeting, while meaningfulness seemed to last longer.
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Meaningfulness is derived from giving to other people; happiness comes from what they give to you. Despite the fact that social ties were associated with both happiness and meaning, happiness was more closely tied to the advantages of social connections, particularly friendships, and meaningfulness was associated with what one offers to others, such as caring for children. Accordingly, people who identified as “takers” were happier than people who identified as “givers,” and spending time with friends was more closely associated with happiness than with meaning, but spending more time with loved ones was associated with meaning but not with happiness.
Meaningful lives involve stress and challenges. Greater degrees of concern, tension, and anxiety were associated with greater meaningfulness but lower happiness, suggesting that tackling difficult or challenging issues that go beyond one’s own or one’s pleasures encourages meaningfulness but not happiness.
Self-expression is important to meaning but not happiness. A meaningful life was associated with self-expression and concern for cultural and personal identity, but not a joyful one. For instance, having a sense of wisdom or creativity was linked to meaning but not enjoyment.
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One of the study’s more unexpected findings was that taking from others was related to happiness and not meaning, whereas giving to others was associated with meaning rather than happiness. Despite the fact that many researches have discovered a link between giving and happiness, Baumeister contends that this association is the result of the meaning one gives to the act of giving.
According to Baumeister, the straightforward result of helping others is that they are happier. Yet, he claims that if you take away the links between meaning and happiness, “helping makes people less happy, thus all the effect of helping on happiness comes by way of boosting meaningfulness.”
The research in positive psychology that connects helpful, pro-social behavior to happiness and wellbeing is called into doubt by Baumeister’s study. Yet, a discussion regarding what psychologists and the general public really mean when we talk about happiness has been sparked by his research.
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What is happiness, anyway?
Researchers, just like other people, have disagreed about the definition of “happiness” and how to measure it.
While some have asked participants to rate their overall happiness or life satisfaction, some have associated happiness with fleeting emotional sensations or even spikes in brain activity in the pleasure centers. Some researchers have attempted to group these components of happiness under the umbrella term “subjective well-being,” which includes evaluations of both positive and negative emotions as well as overall life satisfaction. One such researcher is Ed Diener of the University of Illinois, a pioneer in the field of positive psychology. These variations in how happiness is defined have occasionally produced outcomes that are unclear or even conflicting.
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For instance, family ties—like parenting—tended to be linked to meaning more so than happiness in Baumeister’s study. Researchers like Robin Simon of Wake Forest University, who examined 1,400 persons’ happiness levels and discovered that parents typically experienced less happy emotion and more negative emotion than people without kids, lend support to this result. She came to the conclusion that although parents may see more significance and purpose than nonparents, they are typically less content than their friends who are childless.
The University of California, Riverside’s Sonja Lyubormirsky, a researcher who studies happiness, finds this finding annoying. She objects to studies that “try too hard to exclude out anything associated to happiness” from their study but still come to conclusions regarding happiness.
According to Lyubomirsky, “imagine everything that you believe would be terrific about parenting or about becoming a parent.” “Parents are obviously going to seem a lot less joyful if you adjust for that—if you take it out of the equation.”
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She and her coworkers recently measured parents’ levels of happiness and purpose in life both “globally” (having them rate their overall happiness and life satisfaction) and while going about their everyday business. The findings indicated that parents, on average, were happier and more pleased with their life than non-parents, and that parents found both joy and significance in childcare activities, even during the actual childcare duties themselves.
Becoming a parent brings about all of these positive outcomes, according to Lyubomirsky: “It gives you purpose in life, it offers you objectives to work for, and it can make you feel more connected in your relationships.” “You really can’t talk about happiness without bringing them all up.”
According to Lyubomirsky, since meaning and happiness are inextricably linked, academics who attempt to separate them may be on the wrong track.
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When you remove the meaning from your happiness, she claims, it ceases to be happiness.
But for the purposes of their study, Baumeister and his associates essentially used this definition of happiness. Thus, Lyubomirsky speculates that although the study focused on “happiness,” it may have actually examined something more like to “hedonic pleasure”—the aspect of happiness that focuses more on feeling good than on deeper life fulfillment.
Is there happiness without pleasure?
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But does separating meaning from pleasure ever serve a purpose?
To do this, some academics examine what they refer to as “eudaimonic happiness,” or the happiness that results from worthwhile endeavors, and “hedonic happiness,” or the happiness that results from pleasure or the accomplishment of objectives.
According to a recent study by Steven Cole of the UCLA School of Medicine and Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, those who reported higher levels of eudaimonic happiness had healthier immune systems than those who reported higher levels of hedonic happiness. This finding raises the possibility that leading a meaningful life rather than one filled with pleasure is better for our health.
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Similar to this, a 2008 study found that eudaimonic happiness has a number of positive health effects, including reduced stress reactivity, decreased insulin resistance (which means a lower risk of developing diabetes), higher levels of HDL (“good”) cholesterol, better sleep, and brain activity patterns that have been associated with lower levels of depression.
But according to Elizabeth Dunn, a researcher on pleasure, the line between eudaimonic and hedonic enjoyment is blurry.
Intuitively, this distinction seems to make a lot of sense, but according to science, Dunn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, believes that it doesn’t stand up.
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Many studies by Dunn have demonstrated the link between giving to others and pleasure, both in the here-and-now, as indicated by the presence of only pleasant feelings, and in terms of total life satisfaction. She and her coworkers recently published a paper in which they examined data from several nations and discovered evidence to support this association, including results showing that people who were given the option to purchase items for charity reported higher levels of positive emotion (a gauge of hedonic happiness) than people who were given the option to purchase the same items for themselves, even when the spending did not create or strengthen social ties.
The theory that eudaimonic and hedonic well-being are surprisingly comparable and aren’t as distinct as one might imagine is one that Dunn believes is well supported by his own research. It is erroneous to assert that there is only one route to meaning, and that it is distinct from the route to pleasure.
She maintains, like Lyubomirsky, that enjoyment and significance go hand in hand. She cites the research of psychologist Laura King of the University of Missouri, who discovered that experiencing positive emotions helps people see the “big picture” and notice patterns, which can help one aim for more meaningful pursuits and interpret one’s experience as meaningful. Many people contend that deepening social ties is the most meaningful aspect of life.
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She also claims that the metrics used to separate eudaimonic from hedonic happiness are too closely associated to do so; statistically speaking, doing so can lead to inaccurate results.
James Coyne, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and, in Dunn’s words, a “hardhead” when it comes to statistics, wrote in a blog post from 2013 that trying to distinguish eudaimonic well-being by controlling for hedonic well-being and other factors results in something that isn’t really eudaimonia at all. He offers the analogy that it would be like taking a picture of siblings that resemble one another, taking away everything that makes them seem alike, and then still claiming that the picture is indicative of the siblings.
We probably wouldn’t even be able to distinguish a family resemblance between the two if we were talking about actual people,” he writes.
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In other words, simply because it is statistically feasible to eliminate the impact of one variable on another, it does not imply that the result is inherently different.
The happiness aspect can disappear if you separate meaning from happiness, according to Dunn. “But is it really true that people have to choose between happiness and meaning in their daily lives? I don’t believe so.
Can you have it all?
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Yet, Baumeister makes it plain that he thinks it is important to draw a distinction between happiness and purpose, in part to inspire more people to pursue worthwhile endeavors in life whether or not doing so makes them feel happy. He is aware that they are connected, though.
According to him, “living a meaningful life adds to happiness, and happiness may also contribute to finding life more meaningful.” “I believe there is proof for both of those,”
One word of caution, though: You might not be on the right path to happiness if your only goal in life is to experience hedonic pleasure. Traditional wisdom has held for millennia that pursuing pleasure alone for its own sake won’t ultimately make you happy, he claims.
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According to Baumeister, pursuing happiness without a purpose would likely be a stressful, irritating, and annoying prospect.
However, it might make more sense when aiming for a well-lived life to look for things you find meaningful—for instance, meaningful connections, selflessness, and self-expression with a purpose—than to only look for enjoyment. even if, as King indicates, pleasure enhances one’s sense of significance.
“Aim for long-term objectives; carry out deeds that society values highly—for accomplishment or moral reasons,” he advises. You need to look outside of yourself to discover the meaning behind what you’re doing since meaning comes from a bigger context.
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There’s a good chance that you’ll experience joy and happiness along the journey as well.
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