64: The Power of Meaning

have Emily Esmehani Smith on the show. Emily writes about psychology, culture, and relationships. Herating has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, and other publications. Emily is also a columnist for The New Criterion, as well as an editor at the Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where she manages the Ben Franklin Circles Project collaboration with the ninety second Street Why and Citizen University to build meaning

in local communities. Her latest book, just out is The Power of Meaning, Crafting a Life that Matters. Thank you so much for chatting with me today, Emily Scott. It's great to be here with you. It's great to be here with you as well. Wow, what a delightful, beautiful, touching, existentially meaningful book. Thank thank you so much that you have written. I was trying to think of all the adjectives that come to mind when I think holistically about it.

Really enjoyed the book. I know I'm going to enjoy chatting with you today. I want to ask you a question. What is so fit a cave and pronounce it? What is Sufisism supism? Sure? And what is your personal experience with it? Yeah? Of course. So I grew up in Montreal in a cup meeting house that my parents administered. So basically the main floor of the house was a place where seekers came twice a week in the evenings

and meditated for several hours. And they were Sufi's And Supism is a mystical It's a school of mysticism that's associated with Islam, and it involves the practice of meditation, the practice of loving kindness. And basically, what seekers are doing on the path is trying to break down the south the ego so that they can grow as close as possible to God or the ultimate reality. And the way that they do this is through practices like meditation and loving kindness and service and so this is the

environment that I was surrounded by as a child. I grew up with people coming over to our house and meditating and being examplars of love and service, and I think it made me think from an early age about what it meant to lead a meaningful life. What does a meaningful life look like? And do you have to have some sort of spiritual or religious affiliation in order to lead a meaningful life? Right? So you started thinking about these questions at a very early age, Right, Yeah,

that's right. Did you have any existential angst as a kid? Did it? Did it give you any profound sadness as well as joy? I think maybe not so much as a child. I think maybe as I as I grew older and came into adolescence and later in college and started really reflecting more deeply on religion and whether you could know for sure if there was some sort of higher being out there and what that meant for or

whether life has meaning. I think at that point in my life I started maybe asking questions and feeling a little bit more uncertain about the meaning of life and what makes our lives meaningful in general. And I think struggling with that uh is ultimately what you know? What led me to write this book because I wanted to understand can you you know, what are the building blocks

of a meaningful life? Can you lead a meaningful life regardless of what your metaphysical beliefs are, regardless of whether you have faith and something beyond? And I was inspired by the many people I interviewed, by the research that I came across in psychology, by the philosophy and literature that I read and write about in this book, I was very inspired to see that yes, indeed, you don't have to be a person of faith to leading meaningful life,

though of course you can. You can have religion and be person and have meaning as well. But they are untapped sources of meaning all around us that we all can drop on, no matter who we are and what we believe and what we do. Absolutely, and I think that you know that your book is very has a lot of religious undertones, but it's a very spiritual book as well. And I think that you do talk about

these non secular forms of meaning that exist. So I really want to get at this distinction you make that kind of lies at the heart of a lot of your book, and that's between happiness and meaning. And I know you wrote that delightful article for the Atlantic that went viral about the difference between happiness and meaning, and you impact that a bit more in your inner introduction. So yeah, maybe we could talk a little about that.

How does a philosophy experience like notesis experiment illustrate a little bit of this difference? So so Robert knows it was a philosopher a Harvard and he was kind of one of, you know, one of the happiness skeptics who I write about in my book. And basically he wanted to take aim at this idea that happiness is the be all, end all of life, which is an idea that a lot of us live by. You know, if you ask people what their top value is, that they'll

say happiness. You know, the host self help industry, the multi billion dollar industry. There are coaches who are you intended to help us all lead more red, happier lives. And as a Nosick was question this idea that happiness should be our end goal. And the way that he illustrated it to us was through a thought experiment where he said, you know, imagine that you can plug into a machine that gives you that can give you any

experience that you want. And so if happiness is our end goal, then we would plug into the machine and constantly be asking for experiences of happiness and pleasure and good feelings. And you know, you can plug out of the machine whenever you want and figure out what next, what further experiences that you want to have, and but ultimately you could be in the machine and you could lead a happy life. And he asks us, is that

would that be a good life? Is that the kind of like you would want to lead or you'd want your children to lead? And I think the answer for most of us is no. And the reason is that, you know, we don't just want to feel a certain way, We don't just want to feel happy. We want our

lives to amount to something. We want to do things in the world that are significant and that make a difference in the lives of others, and so so you know, we want to lead active lives, lives that contribute in some way and that and I think that's right, and I think that that really that that gets at this distinction between meaning and happiness, and happiness is really a positive mental and emotional state, which is how psychologists define it,

then me is bigger. It's about connecting and contributing to something beyond the self. When psychologists ask people whether their lives have meaning and people say that they do, it's usually because, you know, there are three conditions that have been satisfied. The first is that these individuals feel that their lives are driven by a sense of purpose or a goal that in some way contributes to the world

or to other people. The second is that they think that their lives matter, so that their lives are significant and have worth in some way. And the final one is that they believe that their lives are coherent, so they don't conceive of their experiences as random occurrences, but rather as part of a larger narrative that explains who they are and where they come from. So you can see that, you know, we may use meaning and happiness,

you know, changeably, but actually they're quite different. And when I'm trying to argue in my book is that what we really want is to lead a meaningful life, that humans are meaning seeking creatures. Wow, there's so much in what you just said, So I'll try to my brains start to compute which part to pick out and focus on. But let me, let me, let me, let's get into the science a little bit. You know, the research does show that meaning and happiness are strongly correlated with each other.

But correlation, it's not perfect correlation, of course, and correlation doesn't mean causation. So this is the interesting thing is, you know, it seems like happiness doesn't really predict meaning, but meaning actually does predict happiness, right, So you know, you don't get happiness by striving for happiness, but you kind of get happiness as an epiphenomena of meaning. I get that. That's right. That that's what the research that I cover in my book shows as well. That you know,

pursuing happiness can actually backfire. It can actually kind of make you feel unhappy, make you feel anxious about the fact that you're not feeling as happy as you want to. But when you set your sights on leading a meaningful life instead and pursuing meaningful endeavors like you know, practicing a musical instrument, studying, volunteering, that you actually experience a

deeper form of well being down the road. Yeah, so, you know, there seems to be like it seems to be like hot right in hell to like have a backlash against happiness. Have you noticed that, Like, I mean, your book is important in singling out the importance of meaning, But if you notice there's a lot of books that the books are just about like why happiness is like the happiness trap I just bought, you know, there's like, yes, the happiness anxiety Nation or whatever it's called. So there

seems to be a big backlash. Do you think, like, like, if enough people like start hopping on your bandwagon that you you know, like you're you did such a beautiful book. Are you ever worried that people are gonna like people love, like there's gonna be a backlash against meaning, I'm sure or its meaning full proof? Is meaningful proof? Yeah? I don't know. So I don't think that meaning is full proof.

And I think that there are definitely there, you know, if you think of happiness and meaning as goods that a human life can have, I don't think that meaning is the highest good. I think that it's higher than happiness, but I think that, you know, the highest good might be something like you know, being a good person or being a person of character. And and if if your kind of desire to lead a meaningful life conflicts with being a good person. Uh, then I think that I

would not advise meaning in that case. I would advise kind of referring to your conscience and to your sense of morality. And I say this because there are a lot of examples of people who in the name of meaning have done horrific acts, you know, whether it's you know, the obvious example of you know, the Nazis during World War two, or the members of ices today, to you know, more local examples. So I think that meaning is important,

but it's not the high is good. That said, I do think that if you do lead a good life, a life that is a life of character, that you will feel like your life is meaningful at the end of the day. Cool. And also, you're not saying that that there's anything wrong with happiness. I mean, do I need to feel guilty if I'm happy? I like? Like? Am I like? I just I got recently got the PlayStation four VR and it's like so much fun to play, like because I get no meaning from that, but it's

really just fun. Can I enjoy it? Am I allowed to enjoy that? Of course? I say, I think that there's nothing wrong with with happiness. I think obviously, you know, we want to be happy, and we want the people we love and care for to be happy. But I just think that when we're prioritizing our own lives and our goals and our hobbies and the things that we do, that you know, meaning is probably a better you know, signposts and happiness to guide us good. And yeah, let's

get really really serious here for a second. You know your book, you talk about the meaning crisis, which is real, and you highlight some just concerning trends in society that I think people should become aware of. So can you

talk a little bit about this meeting crisis? Yes, So in one of the chapters in my book, I try to highlight the fact that there are millions of people today who don't know why their lives are meaningful, who don't have who don't believe that their lives are meaningful, don't have a strong sense of purpose, and the result is that it is suffering basically they you know more, the rates of depression have been rising, rates of anxiety and loneliness have been rising. At the suicide rate has

been rising. In fact, last spring it reached a thirty year high. And I would argue that part of the reason is that people are struggling to understand what makes it their own lives worth living. And you know me, meaning has been found to kind of be a buffer against some of these signs of malaise that we're seeing across the culture. And in one of the studies that I write about, it was it was found to be a predictor of the suicide rights, so explaining in part

why people were committing suicide. And I think that's obviously it's obviously very tragic, and I think part of the reason that people feel so adrift and like their lives don't have meaning is that we've placed meaning on such a pedestal. We've kind of, you know, turned it into this really grand pursuit as something that you can only have or do if you're a sage, a religious master, or you know, curing cancer or writing the Great American novel.

But what I want to argue, and what I found by turning to the research and interviewing people, is that actually, it doesn't matter who you are or what you do, you can lead a meaningful of life. And and it comes by kind of relying on these little sources of meaning that are all around us. And that we all can tap into everyone who feels like there's a loss of hope. Your book, like is page after page of just it's like filling up my meaning tank just reading

the book. Let me give one example something I found really profound. You talked about a story of the Greek hero Sisyphus. No idea if I pronounced that correctly, But you know, so one could tell a little bit about that story, because I think it's a really nice illustration of how you know, even if you feel like you think yourself well, for the rest of my life, I

will have to I will have hopeless. You can actually reframe the situation, right right, So the mydth of Sisipis is that Sisyphus was this ancient Greek hero who did something to upset the gods, and so the gods punished him by wrapping kind of a large boulder around his angle with and condemning him to forever have to climb up the mountain with this boulder wrapped around him. And but but right as he gets to the top of

the mountain, he falls back down. And so hour after hour, day after day, and month after month, he's climbing the mountain and right before it gets to the top, he falls back down. And so this, I mean, you can just imagine a life that's like this. You feel like nothing you do matters, that you are, you are shackle to some faith that is not in your control, that

your life is futile. And yet Albert Camu, the French philosopher who I write about in that section of the book, he kind of he invites us to reinterpret the Sisyphis myth as actually a wonderful example of a meaningful life because Sissyphis kind of embraces his task. He doesn't let the gods kind of ruin his own sense of himself. He embraces the task with defiance and with freedom. And every time he falls back down the mountain, he facees a choice whether to lay down there in despair or

to get back up and try again. And every time he gets back up and he tries again, and and so Camu says, so we have to kind of imagine that Sissiphis is satisfied with this faith. And I, you know, it sounds like you took comfort from that story, Scott, and I do too, because I think we've all been there.

I think we've all kind of been on some path that we just feel like isn't going anywhere, or we keep trying to do something and we keep putting ourselves out there and it goes nowhere, We get rejected, our sense of worth and a steam starts falling apart. And yet at the end of the day, we each have a choice to kind of get up and seize the day again and to embrace those things that make life

meaningful totally. And you know, I think that I struggle, and you and we all struggle when the struggles with this, with the feeling of like nothing I do is enough, you know, thing I do is and and the story is just his point because like if one person can you know, if it can be enough, just if the

process can just be enough. Right, What a beautiful way of framing your life, Like there's so much pressure for the for the for you not to be enough until you achieve a public a recognized success right now, I think I think that's right, and I think it reminds me of this, uh, this effect in psychology that's called the Ikea effect, and it's it's based on social science that they in the lab, that researchers have done and the idea is that you know, when you put together

a piece of Ikea furniture, even though Ikea makes it more complicated than it has to be, so that you put more work into it, that at the end of the day, you actually like the furniture more and you value it more because you put that work into it. And I think it's the same thing with our lives.

If you put the work into it, if you if you devote yourself to it, to the processes that kind of take up day to day life, then ultimately you'll value your life more, uh than you would if it was just kind of if you were just coasting by and getting everything that you wanted to. I like that phrase, valuing your life. It's not very poetic, that phrase. Just like think about the publication. It's like like you unfold in your values that are poort into you your life,

right right exactly exactly? I don't know anyway. Okay, So let's talk about some of these pillars of meaning that you have found across various sources. You've kind of aggregated these kept reoccurring these themes. One is belonging the importance of belonging. So tell me about what is what is the heart of this of this need and this pillar

of meaning, and what are its benefits. I think a lot of people when they think about what are the building blocks of the good life, they think, oh, relationships everyone. You know, if you have valuable relationships, then you're you'll be living a good life. But I'm arguing that it's actually a specific type of relationship that matters to meaning, and it's a relationship defined by belonging. And so we

were just talking about about value and valuing your own life. Well, belonging is all about whether another person values you, whether they think that you matter, and they treat you like you matter, in other words, with respect and with care. They don't they're not trying to harm you emotionally or physically.

They're not rejecting and ostracizing you. And if you think about it, it makes sense that this would be a pillar of belonging because when other people think that your life matters, you think you'll think that it matters as well. So it is it's a sense of I matter to others, I'm valued by others. And the benefits, there are so

many benefits to belonging. It's you know, it's associated with better health, with better physical health and emotional health and with having more meaning in life, and so it's a very important pillar of meaning. It's probably it's probably for most people, the most important pillar of meaning because when you ask people, you know, what are your top sources of meaning, they end up saying my close relationships, you know,

time and again and surveys. Yeah. And then there's a flip side of that which you talk about, you know, extreme loneliness is it's really important predictor as well of a lot of negative outcomes in life, right exactly. So, so extreme loneliness is associated with all kinds of you know,

physical and mental health problems. And when researchers kind of induce feelings of social isolation in the lab setting by, for example, having you feel like you're rejected by a group, then you actually end up feeling both like your life is less meaningful and like life in general is less meaningful. So there's something really vital about this sense of belonging and feeling like like other people care about you. It's

i mean, brought about my stern Mark. Larry Leary wrote a famous paper years ago called the Need to Belong, and it really is in need. It's it's it's as important to our physical and emotional health as as you know, as water and food are, because without it we suffer and we can we even die prematurely. I absolutely agree and uh and Maslow put that as one of his assessor I have to mention Ma's name at least once podcast episode pardon me, let's talk about your your next pillar. Purpose?

Can you tell me a little bit about Bill Damon's research on this? And yeah, just a little bit about that some of the most important things he's found that that drive purpose Bill Bill Damon is a researcher at Stanford and he is a leading expert on on youth purpose and on purpose in general. But he has his research focus is on how young people develop or fail to develop purpose, and so he defines purpose as a long term goal that organizes our lives and that involves

making a contribution in some way to others. And you know, purpose, I think sounds can sound really big, like my purpose is cure and cancer, or my purpose is reducing the achievement gap in education. But actually purpose can come in all shapes and sizes. So while certainly you might have a grand purpose like you know, care and cancer or writing the Great American novel. You can also have a purpose that's more immediate and local, like being a good

friend or being a good parent to your child. There's one study actually that shows that when teenagers do chores around the house, like you know, babysitting or doing the dishes, that they actually feel a greater sense of purpose. And it's because you know they're contributing. They're making a contribution to something that lies beyond themselves, and so that's purpose is now Builds research has found that young people are more and more growing up without a sense of purpose,

which is troubling because purpose. Being purposeless basically amounts to being adrift in other aspects of life as well. So if you don't have a strong sense of purpose, you don't end up doing quite as well in school. You're not as motivated, you're more likely to fall prey to

distractions like like drug and alcohol. So and on the flip side, if you have a sense of purpose throughout those young adult years, you end up being more motivated, You do better in school, your emotional and mental health are better, You're more resilient in the face of adversity. So and what build has found with young people I think has been replicated with adults as well, the critical importance of purpose and in a meaningful life and in a healthy, full life. And I like how you link

purpose to another topic. I love authenticity. You know, we had I actually had you know, Breune Brown on this podcast recently, and she has done a lot of work on authenticity. Really convinced me of the power of it. And you talk about how being reminded of your authentic self can kind of renew your purpose in a sense. Is that right? So sometimes just being yourself can be a purpose. Does that make sense? It does? And I

think so. I think one way to think about purpose, if it's a purpose, is about contributing to the world. What you're basically, what you're contributing is you is the best that's inside of you to the world. And so it's important to know what the best parts of yourself are. But what are your talents and strength and interest, and how can you cultivate them to contribute to the world and to give to others the best version of yourself? Cool?

And yeah, you talk about a purpose driven life and you say, look, it's not all about smiling the happiness and PlayStation fours vrs. But but it's you know, but it's it's still it's good on its own right exactly. I mean, if you think about so many of the things that we do, like like you with your research, Scott, me with my writing. I know you have a background in music as well, you probably spend a lot of time as a kid practicing. I have my brothers a

play sports. He spends a lot of time practicing. So if you think of so many of the things that we do, they don't necessarily make a happy moment to moment. They're hard work, they're stressful, they're effortful, and yet we do them anyways because they give our lives a sense of purpose and they are about kind of connecting with something that's beyond ourselves. So tell me a little bit about how Adam's Adam Grant's research on meaning relates to purpose.

I love Grant's research. Adam has has shown that one of the ways that you can find meaning in a workplace setting is by contributing to others. So he points out that the jobs that have the most meaning, where the people working those jobs right their jobs is the most meaningful, tend to be service jobs, like you know, being a surgeon, being a clergyman, being an educator, and and it makes sense. These are the jobs that you would think of if you when you think of meaningful careers.

But of course most of us don't necessarily work in jobs like that. You know, there are lots of corporate lawyers out there, lots of administrators, retail clerks, and so the question arises of how, you know, how can you find well, can you find meaning in those careers as well? And Adam Adam's work suggests that you can. And the way that you can is by adopting what I call

in my book a service mindset. So even if your job isn't directly tied to saving someone else's life or educating someone or giving to them in some way, you can still think about the way that what you do you makes a contribution to others or to your office culture. So an example that I love is comes from John F. Kennedy, President John Kennedy when he was visiting NASA in nineteen sixty two, and the story goes that he was walking through the hallways and he encountered a janitor there, and

he asked the janitor, what are you doing here? And the janitor said to him, mister President, and helping to put a man on the moon, And I just I love that that's one of you know, it's one of my favorite kind of little anecdotes that I came across while researching the book. And the point is that, you know, we're all contributing to something bigger, and so much of how much meaning we feel an experience has to do with how we understand that contribution and to remember that

we're contributing to something bigger. Oh Man, I absolutely love that. That's a big theme of the book, right, is just something outside yourself, you know exactly, whether another person or or a task you know. Anyway, So the next pillar you talk about is storytelling. Can you tell me a little bit about why? What was that to do with

wanting to make sense of the world. Storytelling was actually the pillar that I guess, in a lot of ways was the most unexpected for me to include in the book, and that was the hardest chapter to write as well. So if you remember back, if you think back to the definition of meaning that I gave earlier in our conversation, I said that it involved three things, purpose, mattering, and coherence, And so storytelling really taps into the coherence leg of

the definition. And what do I mean when I say storytelling. Storytelling is how we make sense of our experiences and our place in the world. So we don't conceive of our experiences it's just random and disconnected occurrences. We tend to craft a narrative about them. So, you know, you you know your book and Gifted, Scott, you you created a beautiful narrative about Gifted, Yeah, I did. So that how you got to where you are today because of

experiences that you had when you were younger. And I think that all of us, whether writers or not, we're constantly doing that. We're constantly thinking about what our experiences mean for us and how they define who we are. And so and that's what I call storytelling. That's what I mean by it. Yeah, totally. I mean I was thinking about the narrative I presented on a Gift when I was reading your book, because I was thinking about

how my gosh there. I mean, there's so much that we omit, you know, when we tell our stories, you know, and we kind of like create something that's coherent. You've said that you know earlier about the importance of coherence, but it seems to be particularly important with our story or narrative, or as Dan McAdams called our narrative identity. Right, my narrative identity as a kid wasn't gifted. And then I decided an adult to change my narrative identity not

just a competent human being. Well, I know, I love that, and I think that it shows that what you just said shows the power of storytelling because we all have the power. We're the authors of our own stories, which means we have the power to change them. And if we change our stories, that we can sometimes change the way we lead our lives. Because our identities kind of affect how we interact with the world. The identities that we cast on to ourselves that we have the power

of changing affect how we interact in the world. Yeah, no, absolutely, I think that's right there, the you know, changing our narratives. So you you mentioned something that I thought I was so intrigued by this, this phrase future nostalgia? Did you

try nostalgia just as contexts for listeners? Basically what this this particular individual, his name was Carlos Air, was telling me about a future that was that that was cut off to him because he grew up in Cuba and had to leave after the Cuban Revolution, and so he ended up coming to the United States. But he constantly thought about the future that he could have had in Cuba had the revolution not occurred, and he felt nostalgic

for that future. And the point that I'm making in that part of the book is that, you know, sometimes reflecting on our stories can be painful because we have to think about the things that we lost, Like Carlows said, you know, losing his childhood in Cuba. Sometimes reflecting on our stories can be painful because we have to think about what we lost, and we can feel nostalgic about it. And that's what future nostalgia is. I just love that expression. Okay,

so let's talk about the next pillar. Transcendence. You know, this is a word that has different meanings. How do you use this term and how does that relate to meaning? Transcendence is about connecting to something that is just far beyond the ordinary waking experience that we are living in day to day. So it's kind of it's what some

people call them mountain top experiences. It's those moments when you just feel lifted out of yourself so you know, I've had those experiences in nature before, I've had them occasionally in meditation, small versions of them, and these are and the reason these experiences are so powerful is because they force you to shift how you think about yourself and the world, and they bring you a greater sense of clarity and wisdom about your place in the world.

So William James is one of the greatest writers about these types of mystical experiences, and he says that they're ineffable, in other words, they're difficult to describe, and also that they're no dit which they leave you with some kind of deeper knowledge about yourself and your place the world, and that knowledge kind of stays with you and can just confuse your life with meaning in a really powerful way. Yeah, and I get to work with too modern day William

James is James Poolski and David Yiden. Yes, So let's talk a little bit about David Aiden's research, which is really, you know, quite revolutionary, kind of scientifically operationalizing some of these ideas, right, yeah, exactly. So David Is his research is wonderful and he shows that there's two steps in

a transcendent experience. Basically, you the first step is your sense of self diminishes, and then the second step is that as that sense of self diminishes, you connect with something that is beyond the self, which and then this goes back to the ineffable part that William James talks

about what that something is that you're connecting to. People call it different things, some people don't even have a word for it, but usually what they're talking about is kind of some higher reality, some alternate reality, some some larger truth that they feel that they have understood. Right, is that what all is? So awe? The emotion of awe,

I think, is what that's what you feel. That's the emotion you feel during a transcendent experience, and it's you know, with all your kind of you're overwhelmed by this whatever stimuli is stimulus, it is that you're experiencing, and this feeling of overwhelmingness forces you to shift the way that you think about the world. So I think transcendence and awe are very related. Yeah, I definitely agree. And you know there's this line of research as well in all

by doctor Keltner and his colleagues. And then also, can you tell me a little bit about the work of Roland Griffiths. Roland Griths is a is a professor at John talking To University, and he's kind of he's reviving a tradition of research that was very controversial basically, which is the research on loucin agenic drugs that begin in

the nineteen sixties with Timothy Timothy Leary. The drugs were then outlawed in large part because people like Leary were basically becoming kind of evangelists for them, and we're seen as destructive elements of society, fairly or not. But Roland has has in a very responsible way revived this body of work. And he brings people into the lab and he assigns them to either a control condition or an experimental condition, and those in the experimental condition receive psilocybin,

which is the active ingredient in mushrooms. And what Roland and his team are trying to do is they're trying to understand how does a mystical experience occasion by psilocybin, How does it affect to our lives, how does it affect our sense of meaning in life? And other outcomes.

So he studied atticts, cigarette addicts, He studied people facing terminal cancer, and he studied just normal way individuals to see and what he's found is that among these people that the mystical experience does indeed infuse them with a profound sense of meaning, and that sense of meaning kind of stays with them long after the experiment is over. Fascinating Lee, He's also found that giving people this mystical

experiences helps them overcome their addictions. So one of the people I spoke to told me that after he was in role and study and after he had the mystical experiences with silocybin, his urge to smoke cigarettes just completely vanished, and he'd smoked a number of packs a day and it just went away. And he said it's because he realized how small and insignificant that addiction was in relationship and to what he now knew as a result of

the transcendent experience. Another person I spoke to was suffering from terminal cancer, and sadly she died during the process of writing this book, but her story appears in my book, and the study that she was in was all about how and whether a transcendent mystical experience can help alleviate the sense of fear and anxiety. We have towards death, and in her case it indeed did. It brought her a sense of peacefulness as she was approaching the end

of her own life. That was such a touching story. And yeah, you ended the section saying sadly she passed away, but you know it was nice to know she passed away with peace. Yes. Yes, So let's talk about your last pillar of meaning, personal growth, And let me ask you a question. Why did you order them the way you did? You know, why is personal growth? Is there

a meaning to personal growth being the last pillar? Well, so, I guess I don't know if I would, I would necessarily, I don't conceive of personal growth as one of the pillars. I think of it as the way all of the pillars, the four pillars belonging, purpose, storytelling, and transcendence, how they come together to lead us to grow. And thank you for that clarification. Thank you. No, of course, I think

it absolutely growth. So that chapter is about adversity and traumatic experiences and how how we can grow in the face of them rather than being undone by them. What I found. What I found was that the way that people cope with and are resilient in the face of adversity is by both relying on the pillars of meaning that they had already built in their lives prior to the trauma, and also by further building those pillars in

their life after the trauma. So if you want to, if you want to kind of weather adversity in a resilient and healthy way, it's important to have pillars in your life already, And then if you want to grow at the trauma, the best way to do so is by leaning on those pillars. Yeah, no, that that's great. And you talk about some very interesting research by James Pennabaker that people who keep their traumas a secret throughout their lives don't show as much growth than those who

expressively write about it. Is that right? That's right. So penny Baker had asked his research subjects to come into the lab and to write expressively about the darkest moment of their lives, and he had he had the research subjects do this either three or four days, And what he found was that the more people made sense of the trauma, the more they tried to understand it, you know, tell a story about it, to go back to the storytelling pillar, the more they were ultimately able to overcome

the trauma in a healthy way. And his research specifically shows that they visited the doctor, lass that they had better health indicators later on, and that they did better in school. And I think that he also found that

their mental and emotional health was better as well. Right, So that research is important and it links to this emerging field of post traumatic growth that you talk about in your book, that we can grow from our adversity, and that expressive writing might be one tool that increases the probability that will grow exactly. That's right. Very cool. Okay, so let's talk about lastly, let's talk about cultures of meaning. I was very excited. I almost fell off my bad

actually when I saw that you mentioned the Future Project. Yeah, because this is an organization that I am a big proponent and I'm on their advisory board as well. But you could talk a little bit about about how their work creates a culture of meaning. The Future Project is an organization that is working with inner city kids to help them figure out what their purpose is, and I highlight them in the book along with a number of other cultures of meaning because the Future Project is part

of a broader movement in our culture. That of organizations and leaders and institutions trying to create cultures of meaning for people that help people lead more meaningful lives. And you know, we talked about Bill Damon earlier. I think Bill Damon is also involved with the Future Project. And as we were discussing, Damon's research shows that a lot of young people are struggling to understand what their purpose is.

And when you don't find a purpose, when you don't have a purpose, you kind of drift through life aimlessly. And so the Future Project is really trying to combat that and to apture young people at the time of life when it matters most for them to find a purpose, to get them on the right path and to help

them along it. And what I love about the Future Project is that they you know, they want your purpose to they want they want to help young people find a purpose that really does involve contributing to others in some way. So it's not just about all my purpose is to become a celebrity. It's about how can I make a difference in the world, how can I make the world a better place? Yeah, that's so great. And then you talk about you know, when you get to

be seventy eighty ninety years old. You don't have to stop meaning then, do you no? And in fact, I think it becomes even more important as you get older. And the research does show that as people age, their sense of purpose declines, and you can understand why, you know what, Once once we reach retirement, so many of our old identities and roles, like you know, being a mother, being a little league code to being a supervisor, they kind of weaken or they vanish all together. And so

we're left wondering, well, how can I contribute now? What value does my life have now? And you know you don't want to You don't want to answer those questions. You don't want to reach that point in your life and answer those questions in a negative way. And so it's just as important to not just kind of think of the last third of your life as the time

when you know you're retired, you're checked out. It's a time really to double down on your engagement with life and to really contribute and figure out how how you can live a meaningful life. And one of the organizations that their profile in this section of the book is called Encore, and Encore is trying to help people find their purpose in the second half of their lives. And I love it. I love the idea that you know, sixty five and onward is not about just being on

vacation full time. It's about using all of the recent versus you've developed right your life to give to others. Yeah. I love that too. I'm glad that you talked about them. You talk about this idea of being at peace when the final moment arrives. That also was very poetic to me, that that way of phrasing it, you know, and this idea that even those you talk about, those who even you know two they find out like they might have two weeks to live, there's still so much you can

do in that two weeks of meaning. Yeah, no, absolutely, and especially I mean, you know, reflecting on your life and trying to make sense of it all too so you reach that sense of resolution. Yeah. And you also say, meaning in death are two sides of the same coin. I mean, that's quite a profound statement. You got you gotta agree, that's like that's not like, you know, like, oh I like flowers. You know, that's a heavy statement. Can you unpack it a little bit? Well, One of

the people I interviewed for this book. I didn't end up ultimately including his story in it, but his wisdom remained with me, and he was he's a BuddhismA, and he told me that he spends three hours every day meditating on death. And it's you know, I thought that was pretty profound. And he's a cheery guy, very cheery guy. Yeah, exactly,

But I think I think it makes sense. I think the reason why it's so important to human beings to find meaning in life, to understand what everything means, is the fact that we are mortal, and so many of the ways that we try to try to find meaning is by trying to defeat our own own mortality, you know, by leaving a legacy behind, by creating something permanent that lives on after we die. So I think that, you know, meaning and death, it's really they're part of the same.

They're they're being driven by the same yearning in us to show that our lives matter at the end of the day. And if you you know, there's some really wonderful research on people facing death. They're you know, they're there, they have terminal cancer and they're lives are going to end soon. And even though their time is so short.

Just by reflecting on the meaning of their own lives on on the on the pillars, they are able to face their end with much more peace and resolution because they're able to, you know, to find meaning at the very end. Emily, I think that's a great, a great place to end this podcast. Thank you so much for the book you've written. You obviously put your heart, soul, and mind into it, and also I honestly can say that your book has has created a light in this world.

So thank you. Thank you, Scott. That's that's so kind. It's so great to talk with you about these these topics, and I'm so happy that we're able to come together for this. Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought for booking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com.