Meaning and Happiness

In a recent posting in practical ethics Hannah Maslen considers happiness meaning and well-being. Let us accept that happiness and meaning in life are both part of well-being. There is usually a positive correlation between happiness and meaning. Usually happy people have a more meaningful life and vice versa. However some research by Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky shows this correlation is not always positive (1). Maslen wonders if when this occasional incompatibility occurs whether we must make a decision about which of these two goods to pursue. In what follows I will consider this question. I will however use a slightly different approach to what is meant by meaning in life.

Before examining Maslen’s question I must consider what is meant by meaning in life. Firstly I must make it clear I am not going to consider what a meaningful life is from some objective viewpoint. I am going to consider what living a meaningful life actually means to the person who lives that life. According to the researchers’ results meaningfulness involves doing things that express and reflect the self and in particular doing positive things for others. This involvement can increase someone’s stress, worries, and anxiety. Secondly meaningfulness involves being a giver more than a taker. Lastly meaningfulness integrates past, present, and future, and sometimes meaningfulness means feeling bad. I agree with Maslen that these results rule out a purely hedonistic life as a meaningful life. Moreover these results seem to be incompatible with a meaningful life being based on desire fulfilment. For as Maslen points out stress, worry and anxiety are associated with frustrated desire, rather than desire fulfilment. It might be thought that a meaningful life is one that includes a number of objective items, items such as friendship and good health. Personally I believe such items may well contribute to a meaningful life but that they do not define it.

I now want to return to a common thread of this blog. I want to suggest that in order for someone to have a meaningful life he must ‘care about’ or love something. Indeed I would go as far as to suggest that for someone, whose life is totally devoid of any ‘caring about’, he has a life totally devoid of any meaning and as a result is not really a person at all. He is simply a wanton, see (2). In what follows I will treat the terms ‘caring about’ and ‘loving’ as interchangeable in much the same way as Harry Frankfurt does. Someone who ‘cares about’ or loves something identifies himself with what he cares about and makes himself vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefits depending upon whether what he cares about flourishes or is harmed (3). The researchers’ results showed meaningfulness involved doing things that express and reflect the self. Caring about something means identifying with what is cared about. Identification involves doing things that express and reflect the self. Secondly the researchers’ results showed that meaningfulness can increase someone’s stress, worries and anxiety. Caring about something makes someone vulnerable and so can also increase his stress, worries and anxiety. Lastly these results show meaningfulness integrates past, present, and future. According to Frankfurt caring about involves consistency, steadiness of behaviour, and some degree of persistence (4). It follows caring about must integrates past, present, and future to some degree. In the light of the above it appears accepting that, meaning is imparted to someone’s life by what he cares about or loves concurs very well with the researchers’ results.

Let us accept that meaning in someone’s life is dependent on what he loves or cares about. If someone’s beloved flourishes then he is susceptible to the benefits of this flourishing. He is happy. It is important to be clear that someone’s beloved can refer to things as well as people. Someone’s beloved might for instance be a cause, his religion, or a place. If someone’s beloved is harmed then he is harmed. He is unhappy. At times caring about or meaning is incompatible with our ideas about being happy. Some positive psychologists such as Martin Seligman might disagree. Seligman would incorporate meaning into the meaning of happiness, see PERMA . In such cases happiness seems to mean well-being. Such a meaning seems at odds with our intuitive ideas of happiness and in what follows ‘happiness’ will refer to these intuitive ideas. Let us return to Maslen’s question, must we sometimes make a decision about whether we should pursue happiness or meaning? I will now argue the question is meaningless because if meaning depends on what we love or ‘care about’ we cannot make such a decision.

We cannot make such a decision because we cannot make a decision to love. Someone cannot simply decide to love someone or something. According to Frankfurt the will of a lover is not free. On the contrary he, because of the very nature of loving, is captivated by his beloved and his love. The will of the lover is rigorously constrained. Love is not a matter of choice (5). It follows if meaning depends on what we love that we cannot simply choose to have less meaning in our lives in order to be happier. This conclusion has important consequences for any pursuit of happiness. This pursuit is limited at least for our intuitive ideas of happiness. This limitation means that whilst we may of course seek to modify our life in order to be happier, that these modifications cannot be based on consciously altering or lessening the meaning in our lives. Of course I accept that what matters, what we love or what has meaning, may change over time but this change is not a matter of our own volition. I also accept even if we cannot simply will love we can nonetheless sometimes situate ourselves in situations in which love might grow.

1. Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker & Emily Garbinsky, 2013, Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2013, volume 8(6)
2. Harry Frankfurt, 1999, Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge University Press, page 114.
3. Harry Frankfurt, 1988, The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge University Press, page 83.
4. Frankfurt, 1988, page 84.
5. Frankfurt, 1999, page 135.