One of the distinguishing characteristics of human beings is our shared desire to understand the meaning of our lives. And as social scientist and happiness expert Arthur Brooks points out, there’s a direct connection between finding meaning and experiencing happiness.
In fact, according to Brooks’ website, “today’s unhappiness epidemic has a root cause: a crisis of meaning.” And his latest book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, attempts to define the reasons why so many people struggle to find purpose, while offering advice on discerning the “why” of our lives.
This matters to leaders for several reasons. For one thing, leaders want to be happy as much as the next person. For another, happy workers are more efficient, more productive, and less likely to leave their organizations. So leaders want happy workers.
In my experience, and the experts on happiness tend to agree, enduring happiness (or joy, as I prefer to call it) results when we find meaning in values that take us outside of ourselves and emphasize serving others and the greater good. Thus …
We can’t find enduring happiness if our meaning is tied to a sense of entitlement.
A disheartening aspect of the modern cultural landscape is that so many people are dead set on winning over their opponents to their way of thinking. And if that’s not possible, they want to humiliate and demonize those who won’t come around. There is no middle ground.
This results from what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, authors of The Coddling of the American Mind, call the “untruth” that life is a battle between good people and evil people.
Here’s how that “untruth” plays out according to my friend Joe Sanders: “People believe they have the right to rewards without having to learn from challenges, the right to get what they want if it feels good, and the right to justify their actions against anyone they consider evil—which is anyone who disagrees with their point of view.”
That approach leads people to “focus exclusively on advocating for themselves,” Joe notes. And if that’s where we find our meaning, we will be perpetually unhappy.
We can’t find enduring happiness if our meaning is tied primarily to our money, possessions, and achievements.
The trouble with finding satisfaction from “worldly rewards,” wrote Brooks, is that “as soon as we acquire something, our desire resets and we are looking to the next reward.”
When we’re young, we often move too fast and work too hard to notice this endless cycle. And if we slow down enough to feel the pangs of regret and depression, we ignore it, justify it, or run from it – usually by pursuing more achievements.
Eventually, it catches up with us and we experience what Brooks calls the “striver’s curse,” which is particularly unavoidable when high-achievers hit retirement years without some deeper meaning in their lives.
“People who strive to be excellent at what they do often wind up finding their inevitable decline terrifying, their successes increasingly unsatisfying, and their relationships lacking,” Brooks wrote in From Strength to Strength.
We can’t find enduring happiness if our meaning is tied to always feeling happy.
Life is unpredictable and uncontrollable, so periods of unhappiness are unavoidable. Friends betray us. Clients leave. Deals fall apart. Bones break. Loved ones die. And, of course, we screw up along the way.
But as Viktor Frankl discovered while enduring the tortures of life in a Nazi concentration camp, we can fall back on meaning that transcends our circumstances.
“If there is a meaning in life at all,” he wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”
Or, as Helen Keller put it in The Simplest Way to be Happy, “A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.”
I haven’t read Brooks’ latest book, so I don’t know his solutions for finding the type of meaning that yields enduring happiness. But for me, it’s pretty simple. To paraphrase a line from Sir William Osler, we are here to add what we can to life not to get what we can from life.
And what should we add to life? For starters, how about kindness, service, encouragement, peace, faith, hope, and love. If that’s where we find our meaning, enduring happiness will follow – at work and in all of life.
