Hi Andrew Soren here. And today on Meaningful Work Matters, I'm joined by Mohsin Joseonlu, a leading social scientist in Korea whose research spans cultural perspectives on wellbeing. Mohsin and I unpack some of those differences, especially on whether we think that our happiness is rooted in a sense of me or we. We also explore topics like the fear of happiness, which Mohsen says some people feel almost everywhere in the world and its implications for how we think about happiness at work.
We look at global studies for how a sense of purpose can influence the relationship we have between how we feel about income and life satisfaction. And we also tackle the ways that feeling happy and pursuing purpose can predict our experiences of both over time. Join us for a fascinating conversation that may just change the way you think about happiness. Welcome to the Meaningful Work Matters podcast. I'm your host Andrew Soren, founder of eudaimonic By Design.
On this podcast we'll dive into the world of meaningful work, explore its complexities and examine its impact on people and the organizations they're a part of. Each episode features insightful conversations with cutting edge experts who are successfully navigating the challenges of meaningful work. We hope to offer you ideas, frameworks and tools to unlock potential and design work that's fulfilling, impactful and supports everyone's well
being. Subscribe or follow us now and like Make Meaningful Work Matter. Mohsen Josen Lu it is a pleasure to be able to have you on meaningful work matters. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Maybe we can start by you just sharing a little bit about yourself and what makes your work meaningful. Yes, my name is Mohsen and I am as psychologist. More specifically I'm a cross cultural psychologist and personality psychologist.
Broadly speaking, I also look at myself as a social scientist so I teach and also I do research and my variables of interest in my research are well being, emotion measurement, culture,
successful aging. I think social science has a very important purpose and is serving us well and I believe that we are at the end of the day human beings and we have this very hungry and complicated cognitive system that is always looking for meaning, looking for understanding and making sense of the world, our surrounding, other people, our own
behavior, other people's behaviors. And so people are always looking for new understandings and there are many sources of information that provide these kind of understandings is religion, philosophy, popular culture and one of them is social science. I am biased because I'm a social scientist, but I think social science is special here. What distinguishes social Science from other source of information is the empirical constraint. Like we have to check everything with the data
first and then we can say it. So I think I find it valuable and I think that what I'm doing is to spend a lot of time fighting with the data, playing around with data, and then learn something and then share it with other people in the class or in the form of a publication. Overall, I think this is something great that we social scientists are doing. I'm just happy that I'm contributing to this social science project.
That's a wonderful articulation of, I think, what the social sciences do bring in terms of a multidimensional perspective that we can take on. I guess what makes life worth living. At least those are some of the questions that I think both of us are interested in. You do, I think, have a very specific expertise in data in big data sets. And so I am going to be really interested in unpacking some of the things that you have learned specifically about a sense of purpose or meaning in life through
the work that you've done around data. But before we get there, I actually want to take a step back and talk a little bit about theory.
The last paper that I read of yours that you recently published was a very different paper for you, at least of the ones that I've read, because it was really all about the theory of well being and how we arrived at the place that we are, especially in kind of weird countries, Western educated, industrialized, rich, democratic countries, where we place so much emphasis on the individual and on self actualization when it comes to well being.
Whereas there are other frameworks of well being, what you described as more traditional frameworks of well being that are much more about the collective, that are much more about a cosmic, a sense of cosmic alignment. Can you just give us a nutshell of what that argument is all about and kind of help us try to understand how we got to this place? So, yeah, every few years I kind of feel forced to publish something like this. And every few years, me and my colleagues, of course, together,
we try to have a new perspective. Last year the focus was on genealogy of this, like looking at the root, historical and cultural roots of it coming from like hundreds of years ago. We have these beautiful Western models of well being. You can call them scientific models, equally valid terms, Western models, scientific models also you can call them dominant models. Cultural psychologists somehow keep nagging about these models. So what
is the problem? The problem is, just look at them. You see that self esteem, self efficacy, self actualization, self, self Self, Self. So cultural psychologists don't say these are bad models. They say, just look at the common themes in these models. You see that there is a kind of individualistic bias here. It's too much focus on the self and sometimes doesn't pay enough attention to the broader context of the cell. But making this kind of criticism is very difficult because it has a very clear
answer. So whenever cultural psychology says that, many psychologists say that, oh come on, who doesn't want autonomy? Like any culture that you go, people want more freedom, more autonomy. Now no one wants less freedom. So of course these ideas are universal and models applies, apply everywhere. And probably something is wrong with the cultural psychologist perspective, like thinking that these ideals doesn't apply some people where in fact they do apply
everywhere. So it's kind of like I'm, we have a biased opinion. But the criticism is not that these things don't apply to different cultures and other cultures don't want autonomy, purpose in life, efficacy, competence. That's not the criticism. The criticism is that, and this is what we, I, in my own writing on this matter have been trying to emphasize that let's say every culture wants autonomy, but the definition of autonomy is different in different
cultures. Every culture wants meaning. Like I started this conversation by saying that as human beings we have this cognitive system that is hungry for meaning. So I'm actually agreeing that meaning is important. It's an important part of well being everywhere on the planet for most people. But now let's talk about meaning in a collectivistic context and individualistic context. In an individualistic context, you have to create personal meaning for yourself.
As if, if you get your meanings from conventions and other people, like something is wrong here, like you're just a follower, you're just a conformist. And this doesn't meet standard for being, having high well being. But in a collectivistic, more traditional context, it's absolutely fine to get your meanings from tradition, from conventions, from people who are older than you, people who are higher in
hierarchy than you. It's absolutely fine. And that probably is more, that's closer to being happy to accept your cultural knowledge, cultural, the identity that your culture is giving you and find your own place in the hierarchy, in the cosmic system that is defined for you by your culture. You don't need to recreate everything for yourself. I mean, of course in traditional cultures also people try to personalize things for them. But this is not considered a bad thing if you accept meanings
given to you by your culture. So you don't need to defy cultural meaning. You don't need to work hard to make personal meaning for yourself with the assumption that conventional meaning is always something is wrong with it and that doesn't really create well being. So yes, the whole idea is that cultures define these ideals differently. And we have to acknowledge that these models are beautiful, they are useful, and we use them, but that doesn't give us
the license to impose them on anyone. That doesn't mean that we can go around. And if someone wants to accept meaning from tradition, they don't want to really create a personal meaning for themselves. We cannot judge them as unhappy or having low well being because of that. So yes, that was the message that we tried to emphasize.
And for doing that, we try to show that these Western models of well being, these dominant models, which are very popular and very powerful, but these are actually, if you look at it, these are just modern phenomena. And in the past few hundred years they have immersed. So we cannot claim that they are natural or universal. Yeah, that, that was a very quick summary of what we tried to say in that paper. And it is a very, it's, it's a wonderful paper.
It's a wonderful, dense, great paper that, that honestly, I read word for word in a way that I often don't read academic or scientific articles. It made me think a lot. I mean, certainly the genealogy was really interesting. As somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about where do our ideas of well being come from? And of course, I think a lot about that in a context of a Greek perspective, an ancient Greek perspective in the context of Eudaimonia versus Hedonia.
But I also spend a lot of time in indigenous communities in Canada, and I'm very aware that there are very different perspectives about what
wellbeing can. And there was something about the way in which you articulated this message in this paper, which really, it really sparked something in me and helped me connect the dots on, I think, a number of things that have been in my mind, and I'll oversimplify your argument to say that there's kind of a distinction between a me and a we orientation of well being within these different kinds of models.
And of course, for myself, I grew up in positive psychology working with folks like Martin Seligman, and his perspective of well being is very much anchored in a me orientation. I mean, his latest work, what he considers probably his greatest work, it's all about agency, individual agency and collective agency. But even that sense of collective agency is still rooted in, to a certain extent, in orientation around me.
And even when people talk about things like, well, relationships, you know, Chris Peterson used to say, one of the founders of positive psychology used to say if you boiled all of positive psychology down, the tagline would be other people matter. But other people matter to what? Other people matter to my well being. Right. I need other people for me as opposed to I need to be here for other
people. Right. That kind of fundamental we orientation, which frankly seems to me to be much more what Aristotle was trying to get at when he was talking about Eudaimonia. He was talking about it in the context of the policy of the political sphere. Right. We are flourishing when we can create a flourishing society. And our individual flourishing is only the degree to which we can bring the best of our resources to the collective, to the group, group, to the other.
And when I think about other work that's happening right now, that's really challenging what positive psychology and this whole movement around the science of well being is. There are people like Mike Steger talking about regenerative positive psychology. There's people who are looking at a fourth wave of positive psychology that's trying to understand our collective responsibility for something that is bigger
than just ourselves. Whether ourselves is literally the individual or whether ourselves is humanity at the expense of a planet, at the expense of a cosmos. You know, that seems to be a direct dialogue between these different ways of thinking about well being. So you said it very well. Better than me as a cultural psychologist. When I write, as a cultural psychologist, I should be very careful, do not side with any of the opposing views
that I'm presenting. So if you look at the paper, you see that we never take any sides. So the whole idea is not to really say that Western models are not good or non western models are good, or it's not about that. So it's just let's recognize that there are two different perspectives and let's stop saying that there's only one and this one is the natural one. The words that you may use, the universal one, people may use these words.
So it's just the whole idea, but it seems that you are talking about a balance between both of them. And also you are sad that the traditional and collectivistic or collective side is not valued enough or as much as the personal side, the me side of it, which is a very interesting perspective on this debate. Yeah, I think that there's a Mi'kmaq elder, which is the indigenous population that is closest to where I live in Mi'kmaqi here in Halifax in Canada, and his name is
Albert Marshall. And he talks about this idea of two eyed seeing, that we can look at the world with one eye, which could be that traditional, you know, kind of way of knowing. And we can also look at the world through a Western, scientific, dominant. Whatever, whatever, whatever. One of those words you want to particularly use, way of seeing. And you know,
if we just covered each eye, we would see certain things. But if we actually tried to look at the world through both eyes, we'd see so much more. Which I think is a beautiful way of trying to, to say we need both. It's not one or the other, it's both. And that there are implications, I really do think that there are implications for the way that we think about society, the way that we think about politics, the way that we think about the sense of a collective well being,
not just an individual well being. Yes. And I'm happy that someone has read the paper, at least now I know that one person on the planet has read the paper. I believe that it has stimulated some thinking in you like you are trying to do something with. Like it gave you some, some new ideas for food, some new food for thought. So I'm very happy that. And that's exactly what, why I like my, my job as a social scientist. I sometimes create questions, sometimes create answers. Both of them are good
really. I make people busy sometimes. Well, hopefully more people will read the paper now. We'll link to it. I believe it's an open access paper so we'll make sure that it's linked on the show notes to this episode so that if other people are interested, they can dig in. Let's go into a slightly different angle of the work that you do. Maybe a little less theory and a little more data driven in the angle.
Let's talk about the fear of happiness. So there's this really interesting angle of work that you've done that talks and looks at the relationship that some people, some individuals and some cultural perspectives view happiness as something that's potentially harmful. Can you just help us understand what does that mean? Fear of happiness is a sense of a negative feeling. It doesn't need to be fear, it doesn't need
to be really intense fear or something. Can be very mild fear or anxiety, suspicion, any kind of negative feeling that people find unpleasant at any, in any degree. And this comes with an idea. You think that happiness can have negative consequences and these negative consequences are different. It depends on the person and culture. Cultures are also different.
In some cultures, the evil eye, for example, is something that is feared and happiness can really Invite that in some cultures, envy from other people. Some cultures have the idea that if you express happiness, you will lose it, so it's better to hide it. Some cultures even consider some types of happiness sinful. Some cultures believe that happiness makes you careless and makes you forget about your responsibilities. So yeah, there are many different reasons. Some people attach happiness
to disaster. And disaster can be also different, like losing your happiness, losing something, or even some people. So it's really a diverse set of negative consequences and beliefs that people can have about the experience, expression or anticipation of happiness. So we started studying this with my colleagues 10 years, like 12, 13 years ago, I think more than 10 years ago. And at that time there was no data like cross cultural data. And in our first project we studied it in 15
countries. We didn't. It was very interesting. That's what makes our research job interesting for us. Before running the survey in 15 countries, we didn't know, are they people who really endorse these beliefs? Like are there people who choose. I completely agree or I agree a lot with this statement that I don't want to be happy. Happiness can cause bad things to happen. So we didn't know. So we ran it, ran it in a large number of countries and we found that fear of happiness
is not very common, but it's not also rare. So the average in some countries are really near the midpoint of the scale. So it's not really rare. But what matters is that in every single culture that we have studied fear of happiness so far, and now I can say more than 25 countries have been studied. In every single country, there are people who have extremely high scores on fear of happiness and there are people who have moderate degrees of fear of happiness.
And there are many people who have low or nearly zero degrees of fear of happiness. But it's relevant. In every single country there are individual differences. Also there are cultural differences. In some cultures, the average score is higher. Mostly collectivistic, traditional cultures, religious cultures, for example, most of Islamic. Every, I would say most of the Islamic countries that we have studied have usually high levels. But also East Asian countries we see have some,
some of them have high levels. So fear of happiness, why do we need to study it now? First of all, it's interesting and people want to know about it. And like I said, many people are actually experiencing it. So they need to know more. We need to know more. Psychology needs to know more. It's relevant to many people. But you can look at it from a clinical perspective. There are studies showing that these beliefs and These experiences go with, you know, depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms and
unhappiness. So lower levels of well being. So it has some clinical relevance. But I'm not a clinical psychologist, so that part of it, I just have left it to clinical psychologists. They are studying it carefully. But there's also another aspect to it which is more important for me
as a cultural psychologist. So the whole idea of fear of happiness, and now that we know that there are people who don't want to be happy and we are talking about emotional happiness, so there are people who want to avoid, they want less happiness. And why this finding is important because it's challenging the claim that happiness is one of the highest emotional happiness, one of the highest, and the ultimate goal of humanity. And everyone wants it. It's a universal goal and ideal for people.
And this, first of all, it helps us to have a more realistic understanding of the ideal of happiness. There are people who don't want to be that happy. So this is really an important finding. So there are people. And so we cannot really assume that everyone wants to be happy. And happiness, emotional happiness is the greatest goal for humans, the ultimate purpose of humanity. No. And this is also relevant to the theme of your podcast, this beautiful podcast,
Eudaimonic Wellbeing. There is at least one major, another major way to define well being not based on emotional happiness. It's based on skills and psychological, social and psychological skills and virtues, which doesn't conceptually depend on emotional happiness. So I mean, maybe emotional happiness results from it or contributes to it, but it's not defined based on emotional happiness. So maybe some people prefer that kind of
well being rather than emotional happiness. And it's because of the culture, it can be because of their genetic makeup or whatever reason, like the life history, anything. So for me it's important because we should start acknowledging that people have different opinions about well being and happiness. People have different beliefs, different feelings about happiness. And that's important because we don't want to make a
religion, a cult out of emotional happiness. We don't want to impose it on everyone, even someone who doesn't want it. Also, we don't want to stigmatize people. So in my opinion, the fear of happiness research has this important message that we have to acknowledge diversity on views on happiness. Each person can have a different opinion, define happiness differently, have a different connection to happiness, and we should start acknowledging this diversity.
I'm a big fan for those who listen to this podcast, of thinking about the dark sides of things that we all think are good and in some ways this seems like a pretty substantial dark side of happiness is just the assumption. And again it's a very Aristotelian assumption that the highest order of goodness is, is happiness. But how you define happiness
becomes really important. So I guess one question that I just have is in your research how you talk about emotional happiness, but can you just unpack that? What does, what does that mean? Like how, how do people define happiness when they're talking about happiness and answering these surveys? Uh, in my opinion, when a person is reported that I'm afraid of happiness, they are talking mostly about happy feelings and expression of those feelings because.
And that's why I use the word emotional happiness. This is a happiness based on how much you experience positive feelings and how much you don't experience negative feelings. So let's call it emotional happiness. But if you look at philosophy, you see that when they say happiness, classic philosophy. Actually they almost never are talking about emotional happiness and subjective happiness always secondary and they are talking about something else.
I'm not sure if happiness is even a good translation of what they are talking about, but I don't think there are many people who are scared of having skills or having meaning in life. So basically fear of happiness in my opinion is fear of emotional happiness. And emotional happiness in its immoderate degree, not just a smile. I don't think anyone is really has any negative feelings. Most people but very mild version of emotional happiness or not having negative
feelings. But when we talk about an extended experience of happiness and immoderate, however the person defines it, a very expressive version of emotional happiness. And that's what I think when people say I really have concerns about happiness, I think they are talking about that. But. A version of happiness that in modern psychology we usually call it eudaimonic well being. That version I don't think is feared really. And that's an alternative.
If some of your listeners or are have this fear of happiness ideas sometimes or they know someone who has these ideas, that's not the end of the world. You can choose a different type of happiness and well being for yourself, which is not based on emotional happiness. It's based on skills, experiences, meaning, purpose. Yes, I care a lot about eudaimonic well being.
I do in some ways perhaps maybe because I have a little bit of the fear of happiness, at least the kind of, the kind of happiness that leads to a form of toxicity. Certainly in workplaces in North America there are, there are these terms that, that underpin some of the ways in which things like positive psychology get applied
in organizational conte. The term toxic positivity is often applied to workplaces and specifically it's I think a climate often that a leader creates within a team or an organization where you have to be happy all the time and if you're not happy all the time, it's a problem. And that forced emotional side, the feeling of happiness is counter to how life operates. And I think that this is the primary insight of not only elements of eudaimonic well being,
which can be really hard. I mean acting in a life of virtue, which is in some ways what Aristotle would have been talking about when he was distinguishing between that approach of thinking about happiness as more of a feeling oriented or a pleasure oriented hedonic thing versus is this more eudaimonic way of thinking about happiness as. Or flourishing or well being as activity of the soul in alignment or in accordance with virtue.
Those would have been kind of his words of talking about it, which can be hard, it can be unpleasant, there can be a lot of suffering involved. It's something that probably makes sense at the end of a life when you're looking back than it is necessarily on a daily basis. But it's much more satisfying, it's much more fulfilling, it's much more a condition of flourishing or thriving. All of these other words or synonyms that actually aren't happiness that are perhaps better words for what they
were talking about. And thinking again about organizational cultures and about work and about why thinking about meaning and purpose is what this podcast is all about as opposed to how do we just be happy at work is something that I'm deeply passionate about. And I'm really glad that you're kind of bringing in deeper and richer scientific. Scientific lens on. Yes, I hope that many people can find a balance. I mean both of them are good. Emotional happiness
is also important. It's good. We want it, but we don't want to abuse it. I mean ice cream is good, but if you eat a lot of ice cream every, every hour, every, I don't know, then it will have some side effects. So that's also good. Your dymatic well being is also good. I hope that most people can have both of it, but I know that occasionally you have to choose, like should I have fun or work for my future and work on my purpose,
carry out my plans. So that's the moment. I think these are really challenging moments in everyone's life when you are making such a big decision. Should I focus on having fun? I mean there are in Popular culture and even many philosophers is saying that just have fun. One, don't take it seriously, just relax. Also, again, a lot of writers, scientists are saying that no work on your future, have plans, have purpose, try to learn skills, try to grow. So at some points in our lives, we need
to make a decision decision for ourselves and for other people. For your children, do you want to focus on the emotional happiness or on the eudaimonic well being? I pose this question sometimes to my class when I teach well being, mostly young people in my class, and say, imagine you have a child and you have a specific amount of money. How much of it would you invest on having fun and hedonic well being, and how much of it you would want to invest on eudaimonic wellbeing?
And it's so beautiful to see how diverse the answers are and how, how people start talking about these, really. In my own research, I. I did a couple of studies looking at the relationship between hedonic wellbeing and eudaimonic well being over time. So now cross sectionally, they are correlated. And we know that they are correlated. They come together, but longitudinally we can talk about which one comes first, which one predicts the
other one better future. So I did a couple of studies, two studies in USA and one study in Japan. And all of them showed that hedonic well being is good. It predicts its own levels in future, after five years, after 10 years is. So if you have high hedonic well being, there are chances that you will have high hedonic well being in future. Eudaimonic wellbeing has the same stability. If you are high now on eudaimonic well being, I can predict that in future also you will be high.
But eudaimonic wellbeing has another side effect. It also predicts higher levels of hedonic wellbeing in future. So it predicts two things itself and hedonic well beam. But hedonic wellbeing does not predict. So this was very interesting for me. And well, I, I started by saying that we need both of them. But if you need to make a choice based on these results, I would say you have to choose eudaimonic because it contributes to future hedonic welding. But still, let's have
both of them. Okay, let's talk about money. One of the studies that you have that you have done, or some of the research that you have done has looked at giant, kind of giant samples of many, many countries. So like one one 94 nation study, I think has looked at the relationship between a sense of purpose and income and its relationship to life satisfaction. Tell us a little bit about that
work and what you've learned about the relationship between those two things. I was looking for a global pattern on the relationship between these variables, so including a large number of countries. And I wanted to. My hypothesis was that people who have a sense of purpose, people who say that I have meaning and purpose in my life in comparison to people who say I lack a clear
sense of purpose in my life. My prediction was that the relationship between household income satisfaction, household income satisfaction and life evaluation is stronger for people who lack purpose. And this relationship is weaker for people who say I have a sense of purpose in my life. Why?
Why? I had this idea because I believe that if you don't have a coherent and powerful sense of purpose and understanding of what is happening to you, you then simple things such as money, that we call them extrinsic things. Extrinsic motifs such as money, beauty, status and power, they become more important for you. And that's what was exactly what I found. People who say I have a purpose in.
In life. First of all, household income satisfaction is universally correlated positively with life evaluation. But. But this relationship is stronger for people who say I don't have a clear sense of purpose in my life and people who say I have a sense of purpose and meaning in my life. For them, this relationship becomes weaker. My argument is that because these people find alternatives to simple objective criteria that doesn't require much effort.
Like money is good, of course. And I can judge my life by money. It's very simple. Everyone can accept easily. But if you need a. A refocus to other values, then it requires some effort. And that's where coherence, sense of purpose comes in. Okay, so let me just see if I can re. Articulate that. If I. If I. If I don't necessarily feel like I have a strong sense of purpose in my life. Money is really important to my. To. To my belief in what makes a good life or a
satisfied life. If, if I do have a sense of purpose, I care less about the money when it comes to my evaluation of my life. Exactly. Are there differences? I mean, why was it important to look at this across 94 nations? Instead of just testing the idea in a single nation, I just wanted to test it in as much as many nations as possible. And that's a kind of type of research that we cross cultural psychologists do. We want to test in as many countries as
possible. And the data was available So I took advantage of the big data that was available to me. And were there different? I mean, did you notice differences across nations or was this universally significant research design? I mean, sometimes cross cultural psychologists look for cultural differences, and that's where you start looking at moderators, especially culture,
as a moderator. But this is specific. Another type of research that cross cultural psychologists do is just to test an idea in as many countries as possible and find a universal pattern. And in this specific study, my goal was, which was a short report, like I think less than 3,000 words. My goal was just to see if I can find support for this general idea across the planet. And I found support for it. So this makes me think about everything that we're talking about today.
Makes me think about many things that we talk about in a work context and specifically things that we talk about in meaningful work contexts. And so just to bring this finding and see whether there's a relationship, some of the, some of the work on meaningful work in organizations has said that when people find their work deeply meaningful,
they do tend to care a lot less about money. There's actually studies that say if I think that the work is meaningful, I'll literally go into the job interview expecting to earn less, suggesting a lower salary, being very okay with, with making less money, because the work itself seems really important.
Findings which are not replicated. When the level of work is not meaningful to the individual, then the most important thing, or one of the top things that I care about is how much money am I going to make out of this particular situation. And so there seems to be an interesting parallel. Of course, now that can
be taken advantage of. So again, going to the dark sides, that often means that people who are engaged in deeply meaning meaningful work are engaged in contexts of work that are exploitative or where there's a lack of decency or a lack of equity that they should be receiving. But there is definitely that relationship in a work context too. Absolutely. Thank you for connecting the dots here. I really love this connection. So that's
what we can call the magic of, of meaning. If you look at the history of psychology, there was a time that psychologists believed that meaning doesn't matter. Behaviorism school was dominant in the past century. They said meaning doesn't matter. And at some point, cognitive revolution happened and redefined psychologies. And now psychologists are obsessed with meaning. Why? Because meaning matters. Meaning can change behavior. Meaning can change lives, the meanings that we find
for ourselves. It matters where you get your meanings from. You know, wherever you get your meanings from. I mean, at the start I said, my favorite place to get my meanings from is social science, right? But you can have other sources of meaning, but it doesn't matter. When that meaning becomes part of you, you will change. You will see things differently, your behavior will change, your emotions will change. So this is what distinguishes us from animals, these, these meanings.
And, and if you look at life, an important portion of, of life is spent on finding new understandings, meanings. And those meanings, things redefine us every moment. So it really matters from a psychological perspective what you think and how you see the world, how you see your job, how you see your income. So that's why we invite people to try to have a sense of meaning, purpose about things and update that sense of meaning as much as possible every
day. From the perspective of psychology, this is really adaptive.
If I think about this whole conversation and just try to connect some of the dots back to the workplace we've talked about me and we've talked about we orientations or kind of Western versus traditional, scientific versus traditional, dominant versus traditional ways of thinking about well, that me and we orientation of well being to me suggests that in a workplace we're going to be having different people who are valuing different things when it comes to
why they show up at work, what's important to them, what makes their work worthwhile and significant in and of itself. And we need to be able to recognize those things. We've talked about fear of happiness and potentially its relationships to things like what happens if we create workplaces that are too focused on a feeling of happiness as opposed to a broader sense of the contributors to things like eudaimonic well being or flourishing.
And therefore the importance of expanding the bucket from just hey, let's feel happy all the time to let's have a sense of meaning. Let's feel like we're bringing the best of ourselves to the work that we're trying to do, that we're pursuing excellence, more of these eudaimonic
ideals at work. We've talked about the relationship between purpose and meaning and money and the fact that probably the most important thing at your organization is not going to be how much people, what the compensation is, or at least it might not be the most important thing for everybody. And that that will probably be distinguishing. There's a lot of one size fits none in this research is,
I guess, the way that I would put it it. But I'm curious to you if you were to think about an insight that you, if you were a leader or somebody in an organization or Somebody helping organizations think through, kind of, how do we create more of a flourishing workplace? From your research, what guidance would you give to somebody? I see a close connection between a sense of purpose and meaning and another
type of belief which is more foundational, in my opinion. So a sense of purpose is founded on a more fundamental belief and a more fundamental mindset. So I see a connection here. So I would like to, to clarify this connection. I believe that in order to have a purpose, in order to have plans and be a purposeful person, we need to first think that we matter.
So there is a lot of research from psychology, from humans, and now even we can say animals, animal research also showing that the moment that a person thinks that they don't have an impact or they cannot make a difference, or they don't matter, that's a moment that they will give up. And then that's a moment that unfortunately and sadly you should expect a lot of negative results can be bad mood, negative mood, pathological mood, mood, lack of activity. So this is really.
If a child, if an adult, or even if an animal realizes that I tried, I cannot make a difference. And that's the moment that you should expect some, some negative consequences. Let's hope they are not very highly negative to. But you will see some negative consequences. So, but the moment that the person start realizing that I can make a difference,
I can do something. You know, life is difficult, I have problems, you know, I, my, my genetic makeup is not really happy, whatever challenges that I'm facing, but I can do something about it. I can make a difference. Difference that is a protective shield against all those negative consequences of these challenges. And so that's again why I say meaning matters, why psychology says meaning matters,
because you know, such a meaning that I can make a difference. This idea really matters in terms of what kind of consequence you should expect. Now if you want, as a manager, as a leader, as a teacher, you, you want to have purposeful employees, just make sure that they feel that they matter and they can make a difference. I think without that feeling, it's very difficult to expect people to be active,
to try hard to be purposeful. It's almost impossible to, when I think about it, if you don't have that foundation, it becomes very difficult. So let's look at purposefulness more fundamentally and let's recognize that you cannot make people feel they don't matter and then expect them to do a lot, to have a lot of plans, to be optimistic about future, to take, take initiative, to be purposeful. Almost impossible in my opinion,
it is terrific. I will say that previous guests on this podcast, including Zach Mercurio and Isaac Valentinski, would completely agree with your perspective on the importance of mattering. And it's also a reason why the podcast itself, called Meaningful Work Matters, is a nudge to help people think about the way that they are, helping people feel valued and valued. Mohsen what a rich, wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing.
Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today. Thank you so much for your awesome questions and also for summarizing my points even better than me. So I really, I really enjoyed it and I really appreciate it. Bye for now. Foreign thank you for joining us for another episode of Meaningful Work Matters. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform. And if this episode resonated with you,
please take a moment to leave us a review. Your feedback helps us make this podcast better and reach more listeners. You can connect with me, Andrew Soren on LinkedIn or Virginia. Visit www.eubd.ca to learn more about Eudaimonic by Design. Finally, if what you heard today spoke to you, tell your colleagues and people in your community about our podcast. We really appreciate your support in making Meaningful Work Matter. See you next.