The most successful people that I've ever worked for or interviewed, and I mean like some of the wealthiest people in the world, they're not people who said, "I've made enough money," but they're people who changed the measure and stopped just measuring themselves based on how much money they have.
If you can align and interconnect who am I, what I believe, and what I'm doing, if you can connect those three dots, your chance of meaning making goes way up. If you can't connect those dots, your chances of meaning making goes way down. You can't connect a dot you've not articulated.
I was biking to work. It was a sunny autumn day. I was enjoying my bike ride, but I was also thinking about climate change, as you do. And I was thinking how it's kind of a bummer that my life's work on happiness had no bearing whatsoever on what I believe is the most important existential challenge of our time.
Most of us feel we have an ordinary life. We are not famous, we have not discovered a cure for cancer or written a great novel. But the psychologist Brian Little argues this view is mistaken. Our lives are filled with what he calls 'personal projects' — the goals and pursuits that animate us and give meaning to our existence.
People who have a lot of awe in their lives tend to feel that they are part of something larger than themselves. And that sense of being part of something larger — whether it's a religion, a community, or the natural world — seems to be deeply connected to well-being.
Ask yourself, am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore? People in the abstract want to live a long time and then you look at how they spend their days and it's on some of the dumbest imaginable, right? They spend it gossiping. They spend it complaining. They spend it working a job they don't like.
People who have more spiritual experiences tend to feel more connected to others, to feel like there's a sense of meaning and purpose to their lives. And interestingly, they also tend to have better mental and physical health outcomes.
People who have more of these experiences feel a greater sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. They feel more connected to other people, even strangers. They're less afraid of death. They're more likely to change their behavior in positive ways. And they report feeling a sense of awe or wonder at the world around them.
People who have frequent spiritual experiences also tend to be happier, have better mental health, and find more meaning in their lives. And this is true regardless of whether they belong to a formal religious tradition — even people who don't consider themselves religious seem to benefit from these kinds of experiences.
People who have more spiritual experiences feel a greater sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. They feel less fear about death. They tend to be more altruistic. They show greater resilience in the face of stress and trauma.
People who have frequent spiritual experiences — who regularly feel a sense of awe, or feel that they are in the presence of something greater than themselves — tend to be happier, more generous, and more connected to other people. They are also less afraid of death.
People who have frequent spiritual experiences are better able to cope with stress and trauma. They also report higher levels of well-being, greater generosity, and a stronger sense of purpose and meaning in their lives.
People who have a lot of awe in their lives tend to feel that they are part of something larger than themselves. And when you feel that you're part of something larger than yourself, the petty concerns, the minor humiliations, the day to day frustrations — they recede into the background.
Psychologist Lisa Miller says our brains also crave something else: transcendence. She suggests that spirituality is a universal human capacity, and that feeling connected to something larger than ourselves may be essential to a fulfilling life.
I do think the purpose of life is exploration. So, how could answers to the unknowable questions of the universe from a from an advanced species, how could that not be catnip? How could you not want to go? But my life as a writer has been about exploration here. How could I not stay?
The footage we had seen was not just data. This was an experience of life. It was reminding me why exploration really matters. It's not just about understanding the world with our logical minds. I believe exploration has huge potential to allow us to experience things with emotion and feel the context of why we're here on Earth.
philosophy thrives when things are disrupted. It is totally not an accident that great figures like Socrates came on the scene in eras of civil war and major disruption because that's when people start to wake up a little bit and realize like, oh my gosh, maybe this is not the good life.
Hannah Senesh, a 23-year-old Hungarian poet who traded her Budapest life for a kibbutz, then traded the kibbutz for a parachute and a near-certain death sentence--and whose poems, scribbled on scraps of paper in forests near the Hungarian border, became some of the most famous texts in modern Hebrew.
Well, I'd have to say happiness. So that's why we do this. And at that time he was doing surveys where he would ask people just tell me how your life is going.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
