Steven Heine is a professor of social and cultural psychology at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Cultural Psychology, the top-selling book in the field. His research has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Newsweek, and New Scientist, among other publications.
What’s the big idea?
A lot of people right now feel lost, anxious, and despaired. During these dark times, preserving a sense of meaning in our lives is vital. Fortunately, meaning can be cultivated and ground us when life feels turbulent. The emerging field of existential psychology is refining practices for tuning in to the worth, purpose, and importance of your life.
Below, Steven shares five key insights from his new book, Start Making Sense: How Existential Psychology Can Help Us Build Meaningful Lives in Absurd Times. Listen to the audio version—read by Steven himself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Meaning in life helps protect against anxiety.
Everyone seems on edge these days. The world is going through somewhat of a mental health crisis as rates of anxiety, depression, and deaths of despair have jumped sharply in many countries. How can we cope with these dark times?
The sense of leading a meaningful life protects us from anxiety and uncertainty. When people feel that their lives are meaningful, a sense of purpose guides them, and their life makes sense. They feel that what they do matters and can make a difference in the world. People who feel their lives are meaningful can stand strong in the face of the slings and arrows thrown at them by these uncertain times. They enjoy greater well-being and fare better in coping with their anxieties.
The emerging field of existential psychology has provided evidence-based answers to what makes a life meaningful. Ultimately, meaning is about connections, and a meaningful life is richly connected. For example, interpersonal connections play a key role because people feel that their lives are more meaningful when they spend time with their closest relationships, especially when taking on a caretaker role. People also feel more meaningful when they are part of a community because it gives them a sense of belongingness and identity. People’s connections to their work can also provide a sense of purpose and mastery. And people feel meaningful when their lives are connected to the transcendent realm, feeling that they are part of something much larger than the material world.
When people’s lives are sufficiently connected in these domains, they are existentially grounded. Their lives make sense, they feel a sense of purpose in what they do, and they feel that their lives matter in the grand scheme of things. This mindset helps people thrive during trying times.
2. We tell stories to make sense of life.
Our lives only feel meaningful when they seem to make sense. But the key challenge is that life often doesn’t seem coherent. For example, we may seem like quite different people in different situations. We might act silly with friends, but on our daily commute, we may be short-tempered, and then at work, we become ambitious and responsible. Which persona is the real self?
Or we might struggle to identify a common thread connecting the different chapters of our lives. We might realize that the person we were in high school shares little in common with how we now think of ourselves. How can we weave all the different threads of our self together? We accomplish this by telling stories.
We create stories with our self as the central character, going on a journey where we confront all the experiences and challenges in our lives. These stories help us organize our understanding of who we are, what we are doing, and why we are doing it. It lays the foundation of self.
“Stories integrate those inconsistent facets of ourselves because they allow us to focus on particular episodes and edit out parts that don’t quite fit.”
Importantly, the stories we tell are not typically literal accounts of what happened but improvised tellings that make our lives feel sensible. Stories integrate those inconsistent facets of ourselves because they allow us to focus on particular episodes and edit out parts that don’t quite fit. When we tell our stories well, we feel that our lives make sense.
While each story we tell about ourselves is unique in certain respects, it often shares features in common with stories told by others. Many of our stories share common themes, such as redemption, when our story highlights how we conquered a challenge, or a theme of contamination, when our story explains how our life suddenly went off a cliff.
Also, our stories rest upon simple but extremely important premises that guide how we experience the events in our lives. Our stories might be built around key premises such as “I am good” or “People get what they deserve.” These premises serve as a lens through which we see how our life unfolds. Part of leading a meaningful life is learning how to narrate the events in our lives through a compelling and sensible story.
3. When meaning is threatened, we seek to rebuild it.
A key challenge with leading a meaningful life is that things often don’t feel meaningful. Feelings of meaning ebb and flow like the tide. But we have a psychological need to feel that things are meaningful. When things feel meaningless, we become especially motivated to make things seem meaningful again. It’s akin to feeling hungry when we haven’t had enough food. Likewise, our brains signal to us when our lives aren’t sufficiently meaningful.
Research points to our brains having a sense-making system that strives to keep things feeling meaningful. When things feel meaningless, our brains detect a signal indicating a lack of sufficient meaning, and we are prepared to try to regain a sense of meaning. It’s a homeostatic system, much like your thermostat at home, that only becomes triggered when meaning is insufficient. This is all occurring beneath our awareness.
There are different ways to rebuild a sense of meaning. Much research finds that people feel more meaningful after engaging in nostalgic reflections. Remembering how we were in past chapters of our life stories provides us with a better appreciation for how we became the person we are now, boosting our sense of meaning.
We are most likely to drift off in a nostalgic reverie precisely when we feel that life is unsatisfyingly low in meaning. For example, our lives feel more meaningless when we are lonely or bored. When a sense of meaning is hard to come by, we make unconscious efforts to boost meaning. So, we often turn to memories in an effort to regain an existential footing. We may play songs from the soundtrack of our youth or flip through a photo album. Our sense-making system was tripped, and nostalgic reflections are one way to regain a sense of meaning.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that since the 2010s, the world has undergone a nostalgia boom. Movie theatres are playing remakes of films that were created decades earlier. New television series set in previous decades are discussed as much for their plots as they are for how they nailed the décor, fashion, and music of those times. During this anxious period, we’ve felt a collective need for meaning, and the world has been turning to the past to gain the meaning-boosting effects of nostalgia.
4. Life struggles can provide greater meaning.
Feeling meaningful and feeling happy share much in common. However, there is more to meaning in life than positive feelings. We can learn a lot by focusing on how meaning is distinct from happiness.
Jean-Paul Sartre perceptively observed that “human life begins on the far side of despair,” and much research supports this contention. One study explored the characteristics of people with more meaningful lives and found that they reported more negative life experiences, even though these experiences came with a cost to happiness. Our struggles can often feel meaningful.
Likewise, we can see this relation when considering where meaningful lives are commonly found. Curiously, you are more likely to find them where life is harder. On average, the poorer a country, the more meaningful its citizens report their lives to be. The comfort and ease that people living in wealthier countries can enjoy appear to come at an existential cost: it often doesn’t provide the struggles that people rely on to build resilience and meaning.
“People’s spiritual lives often become deeper after a trauma.”
Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” Research finds that people often do rise to the challenges that life throws at them. The most common reaction to trauma is post-traumatic growth. People make more meaning in the aftermath of trauma because their relationships often become closer, as they usually receive a great deal of social support. It is also common for people to develop a new sense of purpose as they re-evaluate their lives, and they often become more altruistic toward others who have experienced tragedies. People also tend to grow because they discover that they had inner strengths that they hadn’t realized. In addition, people’s spiritual lives often become deeper after a trauma. And last, the realization that so much can be lost in an instant makes survivors of trauma more appreciative of what they still have. They no longer take their lives for granted.
We can never lead a life without suffering, and our struggles certainly come with a cost to happiness. But it is reassuring that difficult times can help make our lives more meaningful.
5. Meaning in life can be cultivated.
Meaning in our lives can be nurtured. We are not born with a certain amount of meaning; meaning can be cultivated, just like any other ability.
First, there are existential exercises that provide temporary boosts to feelings of meaning, which can be invaluable for helping us get out of a rut. I think of these as the existential equivalent of a shot of espresso. One simple exercise helps people feel existentially grounded—a clear understanding of who they are and what they stand for. People will feel more grounded after reflecting upon their most important values. Simply writing a brief paragraph about your most important values puts you in a better position to respond with greater resilience to challenges.
A second way to cultivate a more meaningful life is to examine your life’s foundations for meaning: our connections, especially with closest relationships, with communities, with work, and with a transcendent realm. I encourage you to conduct an existential audit of yourself to evaluate how deeply connected you are in these domains and identify where you have the most room for growth. Hardly anyone is richly connected in all these domains, but meaning is fungible. That is, the meaning you derive from one domain of connections can make up for a shortfall of meaning in another domain. It’s as though we can pay for the meaning in our lives from different accounts.
Remember that our life stories tie together the threads of our lives and provide a sense of coherence, purpose, and importance. We cannot change the past, but this doesn’t mean that our life stories are carved in stone. As the author Gabriel Garcia Marquez put it, “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” Some ways of telling a life story provide more meaning than other ways, and you would likely benefit from reflecting on your own life story in a different way.
One of the most successful templates for stories, which the mythologist Joseph Campbell calls the Hero’s Journey, focuses on an individual conquering difficult challenges with a band of allies. When people are instructed to think of their own lives in terms of the individual elements from the Hero’s Journey template, they come to feel that their lives are more meaningful. If you try to identify your transformations, allies you’ve relied on, or seemingly insurmountable quests, you too can likely learn how to reflect on your life in a more constructive, meaningful way.
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