Meaning in Life and Human Flourishing

There is a growing consensus among social scientists and philosophers alike that a sense of life’s meaning and purpose is a key aspect of flourishing, and one that is not reducible either to happiness (in the sense of positive emotion) or to goodness (in the sense of personal virtue). There are also nuances and subtleties worth paying attention to here. While “meaning” and “purpose” are sometimes used interchangeably, there are important distinctions that can be drawn. Meaning tends to concern an understanding of the relation of things to one another, whereas purpose is more end-directed and concerns trying to accomplish a certain goal or life aim. And, as we’ll see below, there are additional important distinctions that can be drawn further still.

The importance of having meaning is also reflected in surveys of the general public. For example, a survey of 2,285 American professionals found that the average respondent “would be willing to forego 23% of their entire future lifetime earnings in order to have a job that was always meaningful.” Meaning can also affect other aspects of flourishing. For example, a group of researchers at the University of Michigan published a paper in 2019 that found considerable longevity benefits to having a sense of purpose in life for adults above age 50.

Effects of Purpose and Meaning on Health

In 2020, our team at the Human Flourishing Program examined the role that having a sense of mission in life played among 6,000 young adults in the Growing Up Today Study (GUTS). The participants’ sense of mission was assessed in adolescence, and they were followed up for six years into early adulthood. We explored whether and how having such a sense of mission would affect other aspects of health and well-being. As described previously, we made extensive control for potential confounding variables to try to provide evidence for causality. Even after these controls, however, there was evidence that, over time, a sense of mission subsequently improved flourishing in numerous domains, including life satisfaction, positive affect, self-esteem, emotional processing, emotional expression, possibly fewer depressive symptoms, and more subsequent volunteering. Although we did not find associations of a sense of mission with specific physical health outcomes, it must be remembered that this sample was a relatively young group of participants (essentially in their 20s during the study follow-up), and major health problems usually begin later in life.

By contrast, a subsequent study by our team examined the relationship between purpose in life and subsequent flourishing among about 13,000 older adults in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and found substantial associations of purpose with both physical and mental health. Over the four-year follow-up period, people with the highest sense of purpose had a 13 percent reduced risk of sleep problems, a 43 percent reduced risk of depression, a 35 percent reduced risk of loneliness, and a remarkable 46 percent lower risk of dying in those four years. Purpose in life is clearly not only a key constituent of flourishing but also a powerful determinant of other aspects of flourishing in many areas of life.

A Comprehensive Measure of Meaning

Source: Oleg Kovalevich / AdobeStock

To facilitate a more careful study of meaning and purpose, in 2021, we put forward a new Comprehensive Measure of Meaning and recently published a paper describing its psychometric properties and reliability and validity as a measurement tool. In developing this measure, our team took an approach that is unusual within psychology: Rather than beginning first with focus-group interviews or reviews of existing items, we took as our starting point a series of recent debates in philosophy and psychology about the nature of meaning, which had converged on the view that meaning is experienced in at least three dimensions of life—namely, cognitive coherence (having a sense of the “meaning of life” as a whole), affective significance (having a sense of “meaning in life,” or the meaningfulness of one’s regular activities), and motivational direction or purpose (having important goals and pursuits).

We further proposed, drawing again on the philosophical literature on the topic, that the above dimensions might be further subdivided into global and individual coherence (meaning of life as a whole vs. meaning of my life), into subjective and objective significance, and, for direction, into goals, purposes, and mission (with purposes being larger-life aims that generate more specific goals; and a more unified sense of mission or calling yet broader still, generating our various purposes and life aims). Each of these is arguably independently valuable, and each can be possessed apart from the others.

With these distinctions in hand, our team then undertook a thorough review of existing scales designed to measure meaning and purpose and extracted more than 700 items from these, classifying them into the various subcategories above, and eventually selecting three items in each of the seven domains to form a Comprehensive Measure of Meaning. The Comprehensive Measure of Meaning makes use of a variety of items from those previous scales, but it categorizes these in ways that are consistent with that threefold philosophical-psychological typology and its seven sub-domains. Our evaluation of the resulting scale’s properties is based on data from a longitudinal sample of 4,000 college students and a single survey of about 8,800 employees at a Latin American financial institution.

Happily, the initial data collected using the Comprehensive Measure of Meaning provides relatively strong support for the threefold conceptual grouping of the items into measures of coherence, significance, and direction (as has other work in psychology), and also even of our further subdivision into each of the seven aforementioned subdomains: global and individual coherence, subjective and objective significance, and goals, purposes, and mission. These results also provide some initial empirical confirmation of the proposal we outlined in an earlier piece that the humanities can provide important conceptual clarity, and further insights, for constructs—such as meaning—that the social sciences seek to study.

We hope that the Comprehensive Measure of Meaning will prove a valuable resource in ongoing efforts to understand the distribution, effects, and causes of meaning—including the coherence, significance, and direction of human life. We have begun to embed the measure in longitudinal studies (and we invite others to do the same), and we look forward to discovering what we will learn.

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Meaning and Flourishing

If, as Viktor Frankl proposed, “self-transcendence is the essence of human existence”—if our ultimate happiness consists at least in part in the search to devote ourselves to and fit ourselves within a larger story than our own private pleasure, in losing our lives in order to find them—then cultivating and sustaining meaning is at the very heart of the promotion of human flourishing. We’ve been examining meaning and purpose worldwide in our Global Flourishing Study, and we look forward to sharing with you the results of that research later this year.