In the lengthening tail-off of the pandemic, and with new atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine revealed daily, life can sometimes feel quite bleak. Languishing—feeling joyless, aimless, and experiencing a sense of emptiness—has arguably been the dominant emotion during the pandemic. Languishing "dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you'll cut back on work," as Adam Grant argued in an influential piece in the New York Times. Being stuck in a languishing state of mind can be hard to brush off, but how to find a renewed sense of excitement in life?
The Antidote: Finding Meaning in Life
To fight languishing, try meaning. It involves feeling elevated and energized by a sense of commitment and value. Meaning in life has been shown to contribute to better mental health and functioning—even to longevity. Meaningfulness is an especially valuable resource in coping with adversities. Sarah Ward and colleagues, for example, recently showed that meaning in life helps coping with everyday stressors by making room for positive reinterpretation and proactive planning.
Meaning in life could thus both help to cope with present adversities and help break the downward spiral of languishing. But how to find meaning?
One tried and tested way to find more meaning is to do something good for other people. Several studies have shown that helping others and having a positive impact tends to increase meaning in life. For example, in one of our own studies we showed that playing a computer game where every correct answer contributes to United Nations Food Program enhances meaningfulness compared to playing exactly the same game without the contribution. That was also our recommendation to people struggling with meaning at the beginning of the pandemic: To make your life more meaningful, make yourself meaningful to other people through doing something good for them.
However, while "what we give to life" is important in terms of meaning, meaning can come from "what we take from the world." Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychotherapist and a Holocaust survivor who spent several years in concentration camps. Yet, he believed that even in those inhumane conditions a person could experience moments of meaningfulness. He recalls a moment of watching an especially beautiful sunset where the whole sky was "alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red," providing a sharp contrast to the desolate gray mud huts of the concentration camp. "After minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, 'How beautiful the world could be!'" Moments of beauty can be a strong source of meaning for us, if we just pay attention to them.
Recently, in our research we decided to put this idea to test in seven studies with over 3,000 participants. We wanted to examine whether experiential appreciation – "valuing and appreciating one's life experiences" – indeed is a key source of meaning in life. We found that when recalling the most meaningful experience of the past week, or when answering a daily survey, higher levels of experiential appreciation were associated with a higher sense of meaning in life.
We also found that watching a 2-minute opening sequence of the documentary 'Planet Earth' created a sense of awe, which enhanced participants' sense of experiential appreciation of life, which in turn was associated with sense of meaning in life. Similarly, participants who were asked to write about a particularly valuable experience, in contrast to a place they commonly visited, reported higher levels of experiential appreciation and meaning in life afterwards. Both in daily life and in the laboratory, a sense of experiential appreciation thus seems to be strongly connected to meaning in life.
Cultivating this source of meaningfulness is about developing what my friend calls a "poet's gaze," the ability to pay attention to and be sensitive to the small beauty in life. When Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, enters a Chilean forest "the wild scent of the laurel, the dark scent of the boldo herb, enter my nostrils and flood my whole being." When he sees a snail on the ground, an abandoned stamp album, or a new type of vegetable at the supermarket, he gets excited by the inherent beauty of it. Through the exceptionally cultivated poet's gaze of Neruda, "everything is seen in its best light, everything has value, everything deserves to be the subject of a poem" as Mark Strand describes in a piece on Neruda aptly entitled "The Ecstasist."
While meaning in life is sometimes seen as an esoteric topic to be pondered by philosophers, experiential appreciation is a kind of meaning even young children can experience, much before they can reflect on their lives, as Wim de Muijnck has emphasized: "It is the kind of meaning that is in their Mom's face, in their comfort object or their toys, in the rocking on Uncle's knee, in their imitation and peekaboo games."
To live a meaningful life, you can indulge yourself in projects, you can choose a career with a significant positive contribution, you can create art. You can reflect, plan, and be active. But along with these, there's a type of meaningfulness to be had by just looking at life in the right way. As de Muijnc notes, "it seems that living meaningfully begins with having fun on Uncle's knee, not with pondering what your life is about."
This type of meaning is available to us, if we are just open to it. Focused on future goals and achievements, we lose touch with the present, floating past life like sleepwalkers. But ultimately, life is not about getting somewhere. It is about appreciating the journey as long as it goes on, seizing the small moments of beauty along the way.
For Further Reading
Kim, J., Holte, P., Martela, F., Shanahan, C., Li, Z., Zhang, H., Eisenbeck, N., Carreno, D. F., Schlegel, R. J., & Hicks, J. A. (2022). Experiential appreciation as a pathway to meaning in life. Nature Human Behaviour, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01283-6
Martela, F., & Ryan, R. M. (2016). Prosocial behavior increases well-being and vitality even without contact with the beneficiary: Causal and behavioral evidence. Motivation and Emotion, 40(3), 351–357. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-016-9552-z
Martela, F. (2020). A wonderful life: Insights on finding a meaningful existence. Harper Design.
Frank Martela is a University Lecturer at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. His research focuses on meaning, well-being, and motivation in life in general as well as at work.
Joshua Hicks is a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University. His research focuses on the experience of meaning in life, authenticity, and the true self.
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