Ask yourself: How can I help?
As my “tween” daughter Bella’s temperament changes, one of the things that used to feel really meaningful to her—spending time with me, her dad—less often does. Simultaneously, that same thing that felt really meaningful to me—spending time with Bella—is no longer as much of an option, thanks to the terrible inevitability that my child won’t stop growing up.
This dichotomy for me is a microcosm of the way that any of us finds meaning: by correctly relating our preferences to the situations we find ourselves in. Since both of our preferences and our situations constantly change, what we find meaningful changes.
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To look at this on a larger scale, this means no one approach to life—not parenthood nor career path nor romantic relationship—is guaranteed to always be meaningful. This isn’t to say that a meaningful life is impossible, of course. It just underscores the fact that the standard approaches to having a meaningful life are less effective than we are told.
But before we tackle the “meaningful life,” let’s first look at the meaningful moment or week or month, since it is the accumulation of these that make a good life. Frederick Buechner wrote: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” Put it in my own, secular parlance: Meaning comes in the moments when you relate to the world in a way that both reflects your joyfully used talents and the problems in the world that concern you.
This latter part—about world problems—is increasingly important as more and more of us are nagged by awareness of our planetary crises—from accelerating climate change to endemic racism to perpetual war. The world situation is not good, we see, and we feel increasingly meaningless when we don’t rightly relate to that fact by trying to help.
Does that mean we all have to go on marches or change our careers to social work or give our money away? No. But a number of us do—those of us for whom these actions accord with our preferences and talents. The rest of us, if we are looking for meaning, must find other ways to help with world problems that are in line with our “deepest gladness” and that fulfill us when we do them.
If you love to play guitar, moments when you make music in some way that helps with our world crises will give you transcendent meaning. If you love science, times when your rational brain turns to solving a pressing community challenge will give you strong feelings of purpose. Looking for opportunities like these can bring us meaningful moments, months and sometimes even years.
But since, as we have said, what is meaningful to each of us changes, these single choices will eventually feel less meaningful. They cannot make the whole of our lives meaningful. To quote the great humanist psychologist Carl Rogers: The good life is not “a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana or happiness. The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.”
What makes a meaningful life, then, is to have the flexibility of character and circumstance to constantly commit to that direction as it changes, even when it means sometimes leaving old situations that no longer help you and others.
Will buying a fancy house give you freedom to follow your direction or tie you down? Will student debt bind you to a career that you may grow out of ultimately? This is not to say you cannot pursue these things. It is to say you should be aware of the dangers in such choices.
Meaning does not come from having the right possessions or the right job. Meaning comes from your ability to use those circumstances and the parts of your personality that you prize in service of what you care about in the world.
What makes for a life meaningful, then, is the flexibility that allows us to constantly meaningfully relate our changing personalities to our changing world concerns. How can I use the parts of myself that I most love using (my preferences) in service of the things in the world I most care about (my situation)? Or put more simply, the meaningful life is one built on the premise that your main commitment is to follow the changing answer to this simple question: How can I help?
Colin Beavan is the author of How to Be Alive: A Guide to the Kind of Happiness That Helps the World.