Michael Steger || Meaning, Purpose, and Significance

today we have Michael Steeger on the podcast. Doctor Steeger is a professor of psychology and the founding director of the Center for Meaning and Purpose at Colorado State University. He studies the link between meaning and life and well being, as well as the psychological predictors of physical health and health risk behaviors, and the facilitators and benefits of engaging and meaningful work. Michael, really an honor to talk with

you today. Thank you. I'm excited to be here and it's an honor for me to be invited to talk with you. Oh, that was very kind of you to say. So. I'm a you know, a grand miner of your work, and I consider your work meaningful. And I know I'm not just saying that to be like to come with some corny, you know thing, you know comment there, Like, seriously, your work is has a lot of meaning in itself because what is you know, you really cut at the

core of human existence with your research. I mean, you don't like mess around with like no offense like I'm thinking of like visual cognition researchers or like those who study like you know, the fourth cortex of the visual neuron. But you know that's important work for sure, But I'm saying, you know, in terms of what really resonates right with like what it means to be alive, your work really cuts to the core of that, right Well, it's really

nice for me to say. I mean, I think you know that that V four cortex of you know, that visual processing area probably is the one that maybe that processes que kittens and babyfaces. Life would be pretty pretty

bad without it too. So what I would say the I'm just attracted to the situation we find ourselves in that were these complicated blends of abstract ever seeking aspiring creatures within these messy bodies that get angry and make weird smells, and you know, this whole combination of the limitations that we have as individuals, along with the knowledge that there's something really huge out there that we might

strive for. I think that's to me the human condition and why not try to learn more about that if you can? For sure? Yeah? Why not? Right? Yeah? And you could you know? Well, I mean, what was your dissertation topic? What was your topic? As a grad stent?

Was it meaning? It was? So my dissertation topic I as a little background, I got my PhDa in counseling and also a specialization in personality psychology at Minnesota, and a lot of psychology would tell you that behavior is the foundation of psychology, and that Minnesota there the motto seemed to be that measurement was the foundation of psychology.

So when I said I was interested in this weird philosophical topic of meaning in life, my advisor, doctor Patricia Fraser, was fine with that to some degree, but she basically said that we have to prove that it's a real thing, and the way you do that is to measure it. So my dissertation was trying to figure out how to get a maybe easier to use, more recent and modern measure of meaning in life. And so that was something

I ended up calling the Meaning of Life Questionnaire. Wait, so you one of the first ever researchers in the history of the field of psychology to operationalize and measure meaning.

Oh that's a statement. No it doesn't. It'd be cool, but no. The first measure of meaning from which a pretty decent sized research body came about, was published in nineteen sixty four and Life Tests by Crumbau Maholic, and then nineteen seventy three had another one called the Life Regard Index, and that was a decent Almond sort of

psychiatric bunch. Psychiatrists were the folks who developed the first couple, and then there's another batch in the mid eighties from Gary Reeker and Paul Wong who collaborated on the Life Attitude Profile. And then the biggest, well even at the biggest but a very important one that occurred nineteen eighty nine was Carol Riff's Psychological well Being model includes a measure of purpose purpose subscales as well, And there's even one more notable one out there called sense of coherence

by Aaron Antoniovsky early nineteas. So there's a long history of people trying to figure out how to get a read on where people fall on thinking that their life does or doesn't have meaning. I think my attraction was to try to get a little bit easier to use version of something like that. Well, I started the measurement project in about two doesn't two, and we just happen to know a lot more about how to develop solid

psychometrically robust measures. So I was able to target trying to have a really nice, clean measure, pretty easy to use, really strong psychometric properties. And it also measures something love full turn sit in regarding search for meaning, how intently people are motivated to parry more meaning in their lives. So I think you know, it wasn't a new idea to try to study this, It wasn't a new idea to try to measure it. I just wanted to bring, you know, the rigor of my of my training at

Minnesota to this topic and maybe a new way. It's nice that you mentioned and those who came before you. It's very important to give credit, and that's great, But a lot of them, I'm not sure you're giving yourself enough credit. I guess this is the point I'm trying to make. So a lot of them came up with scales of purpose, but a big point of you know, what you're doing here is you're saying that meaning is not necessarily you know, purpose is one source meaning, but

meaning might actually be a broader umbrella. So I feel like you actually brought to the table, maybe for one of the first times legitimately more sort of broader, deeper understanding of meaning than what had come before you. Is that at least a fair statement. Will you take that? No, you won't. I'll probably deflect that a little bit as well, Okay, because I think the issue is it's not something that I feel as one individual person. Everything really back my

head around. I think the way that I entered into this topic was trying to just understand. I guess my main curiosity was how of people and maybe even the best of us tried to figure out what it's really all about to be a human and how to try to be the best version of that we can. I mean, there's almost an endless number of problems facing our planet, basing our societies, the bumble among us, and we need to figure out what the best part of ourselves is

to bring together and work on these issues. And I certainly don't have any better answer than most people. And if you take a look all the way back to the epic of Gilgamesh, which I love to talk about. I've been talking Tosh for like a decade. I mean, that's the world's oldest written, solid, tangible story, and it's about one person's sort of struggle to find meaning in

a finite life. So I think for me, understanding the way in which people have tried to understand meaning from a philosophical, from a historical, cultural, theological perspective is really important. And I'm not the first person to do that. I'm even the first psychologist to do that. So the lot of what I do is try to understand what's out there and try to just push it forward and keep

learning as we go. Yeah. Absolutely, one of your influences goazally back to Victor Frankel, right, And how did he refer to a meaning when he was using the term? I don't speak German, but I was in a conversation with an Austrian existential psychologist who certainly does, and in fact was a student of Frankel's. This is Alfried Lengla,

and I heard him given a presentation. I had the wonderful opportunity to have a conversation with him a little bit later, and he said that there's a reason why Francle translated his word for meaning into meaning and purpose.

So there is a little confusion in our field about you know, kim meaning and purpose as terms be used interchangeably, and it sort of goes to Frankle because he wanted to capture this sense of, you know, knowing where we are in the fabric of existence as well as trying to figure out, you know what task, what big grand adventure especially for us in our lives. So as an influenced Francle was of course where psychologists, psychiatrists, you know,

social scientists really started to try to understand meaning. And from the get go, Francle saw it as a complex, large notion that was going to be hard to nail down in little bite sized chunks. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And he did kind of tie it up with this process that allows us to overcome obstacles or allows us to overcome there's very much this element of post traumatic

growth in his work. That's the modern term, but the post traumatic sort of purpose, postramatic purpose or something, you know, is sort of how he viewed it as like, what is the thing that the task that you believe you can fulfill that is very future oriented, that will help energize you to a certain degree, that will help you overcome sort of any optical that gets in your way or any hardship, including the Hall cost. I mean he generated all these ideas while he was in the Hall Cost.

You know, he was a prisoner as a child, so you know he saw that a lot of people who thought there was some sort of task and fulfill when they get out. It kind of got them through things. Yeah. I mean, once you've once you've read an encountered Pronkle, you just assumed that everyone knows such a profound and amazing story. And this was one of Freud's circle in nineteen thirties of Vienna, trying to understand how people work and trying to develop some of those early theories of

the human mind. And you know, as I understand how things unfolded, he'd already begun to gravitate and try to write his thesis that humans are, at their most fundamental level, strivers for meaning and purpose, that what motivates us is a desire. He called it, a will deep within us to have some thing that makes living worthwhile. And you know when it takes a form of a purpose something

to accomplish. Then that's a huge motivational step up. When we really can set ourselves a strong aspiration or mission, we can surmount the challenges and obstacles that come our way. And Frounkel lost essentially everything when his family, his loved ones, his colleagues, his culture, his people were you know, some to the atrocities of World War II, concentration camps and the Holocaust. And it's stunning to think that he came

out of that with an optimistic mission for all of us. That, yeah, what he saw making the difference between the people who were able to somehow find their way through the concentration camp misery and damage were those who had some reason out there still to get through it. And when you think about that as a founding story for why we would want to study meaning as psychologists, social scientists, coaches, consultants, whomever, I think it's an amazing place to launch. It starts

from this incredible survival and triumph story. Bruncle had a lecture career of almost fifty years after that, where he was trying to reach out and trying to help people feel empowered and motivated and liberated to pursue meaning in a world that oftentimes seems to have none or seems to propose false dead ends for having a better life.

And you know, tapping into those deep well springs of motivation to strive for something huge and magnificent in our lives is such an amazing foundation, in my opinion, for building an understanding of how people thrive. Absolutely, those are very well said. So you've studied other meanings of meaning, there's two different directions we canet two different things we talk about. We talk about what are the different meanings of meaning? And then I want to talk about what

are the different sources of meaning? Because I think that's a different question. Right. So yeah, so that's I think. Yeah, I think we're struggling as a field too, don't We don't make philosopher is very happy. Let me just put that way. In the way that we define meaning in life, I see meaning in life really and in kind of operational terms. Right. So, the definition of meaning of life at some level is people say that their lives have meaning.

That's not super helpful. If you unpack that box a little bit more, you can see that people seem to consult according to a lot of the literature out there. People seem to consult three kinds of judgments that they make about their lives in order to say, yes, my life has meaning. The first judgment is, as we already mentioned, purpose, as Francle talked about, this central sort of self organizing, almost life force giving, striving for something big across one's lifetime.

The second piece, also is wrapped up in from work, is this idea of coherence or comprehension, that we can make sense of our experience, that we can make sense of our identity, our place in the world, so we just kind of get it makes sense of our lives. And then the third dimension is significant or what we call significant. But this notion that our lives are worthwhile,

we maybe even make a difference. It matters that we exist if the world and the universe in some small but perceptible way would be diminished if we weren't around. And I think you could probably trace all three of those ideas into the writings of Franco and for sure they're present in varying proportions and the research and theory that psychologists have done in the years since. So that

is a definition of meaning. Would suggests that life is meaningful when people feel that their lives have a sense of purpose, that they make sense, and that they are intrinsically worthwhile and worth living. From a philosophical standpoint, that still is. It's still positioned as a subjective judgment that people make, and that's been part of the tradition in psychology.

But it does put us in a difficult spot where we might have despots and tyrants and serial killers and who knows who el it's saying that their lives have meaning, and we don't at this point in the evolution of the field have a place where we can stand and say, well, no, that person doesn't have mean, They just think they do. We are still at the point of measuring whether people think they're meaning or not. Well, I've studied the issue from one angle and that I've done some large scale

studies on the dark triad of personality and meaning. I don't know if I've told you about this research I've been doing recently on you know, psychopathy, narcissism, and macavilianism. And they do self report low or meaning in life. So they do. Okay, so I did, right, at least there something particularly, you know, the antagonistic, those who are tendish more interpersonal antagonism on Rife's measures doud score or

in purpose. So yeah, well, I mean I can remember, you know at Deaner wrestling with similar issues around subjective well being, that it's very difficult to come up with a prescriptive list. You know, a lot of people would turn to Aristotle's writings to try to develop a daimonic approach to well being, you know, to try to come up with like these qualifications that would say, well, well, you might think that you're happy, but you're not. You know,

the experts have convenient and said that you're not. It'd be great if we get to that point. I mean, I think the striving of almost any science is to develop objective measures that are external to the phenomenon you're

trying to study in the first place. At this point, it's not impossible for one of those people that you study with a dark triad of psychopathy to insist that his or her life is nonetheless meaningful, and with our given progression in the field, we could we can make guesses about ways in which that meaning that that person feels exists in her his life is worse in some ways are qualitatively different than you know, the meaning of a Nelson, Mandela or Archbishop Tutu or Gandhi or whether

there's a king or all these other paragons of you know, human triumph. But you know, we kind of do end up with this idea at this point. We're still studying people's attitudes about themselves for the most part. Yeah, and was that you who came up with the Hitler problem? Right? I don't think no blame Hitler me Okay, sorry, that was going to be it was either you or Ken

Shllon rights about the Hitler prompt. But I think we're all aware of it, right, Because so let's say that that we agree for now that that meaning of life is when someone feels when a person feels that her his life has a sense of purpose, something big you're trying to accomplish, sense significance. The world notices that you exist, that you have some sort of impact, and life makes sense.

You have some sort of worldview. So huge and disturbingly huge stretches of Hitler's life as a you know, just unbridled force for evil in the world, It's possible to imagine that Hitler would endorse highly any one of or maybe all three of those things, just as Hitler might endorse high levels of positive motion on particular times, low levels of negative affect at particular times, high levels of

life satisfaction. You know. So for a lot of well being researchers, the Hitler problem is shorthand for that notion that we don't have really an objective way to say, you know what, you might think you're happy, that you're not like. That's where that leads us to, Well, there's a very it seems like that there is a very important distinction between life satisfaction and having a lot of

meaning in your life. You know, we do find on our narsis the questionnaires, they do score high in life satisfaction, but they don't score high on purpose. So there is at least amongst that population, there is that distinction, you know. Yeah, and one can just be like just feel you know, one can have a lot of meaning but not feel happy as well. Right, can you have the reverse cain?

You have like a great purpose, you feel like you're moving towards it, but you're not necessarily feeling like pleasure in your life. Yeah, I think that all of that

is true. There is debate about whether people have different kinds of well being, but they can experience the two big two most notable divides I supposed to be between psychological well being, which Carol Riff, Rich Ryan and DC are kind of associated with that side, and then subjective well being, which maybe you might argue that at Deaner a Deaner developed that term subjective wellbeing, but that other maybe positive emotion researchers might be more on that side

if they also argue that, you know, like the hedonists of ancient Greek philosophy or utilitarians of more recent times, that what is good and what is happiness is that

which is pleasurable. So the dictum to maximize pleasure minimize pain is is one way of trying to argue for a particular type of happiness maybe that exists separately from what others might consider to be consistent with the more eudaimonic approach, which is kind of developing oneself toward a higher and more maybe actualized state and reflection on the duties and obligations one faces to those around him or her.

So it meaning oftentimes is put over into eudaemonic area, and you know, subject of well being White SaaS faction gets put over with kind of clumped together with positive emotions and pleasure pain dynamics. But it's if you take a look at life satisfaction, if you're satisfied with your life, you might argue that's a lower bar to clear. Then my life is profound, meaningful to some degree, you know.

But there's there's still elements of more complex calculations about one's life adds up to then yes, I'm in a good mood. No, I'm in a bad mood, you know. So so what we see with the with the research evidence is that the correlations among all three of those ideas meaning in life, life satisfaction, will just pick positive emotion for now, are pretty good. They're pretty solid point fives and a lot of in a lot of research, and sometimes as high as you know, maybe point seven

for life satisfaction and positive emotion. So that means that a lot of people are saying, yes, my life is very meaningful, but I hardly ever experienced pleasure or joy, And a lot of people are saying life is super fun, I'm always thrilled, but there's no meaning to it. So there are people in both ends of the spectrum, but generally speaking, most people who are you know, experiencing joy and love in their lives also find those lives be meaningful.

And most people who feel like life has no purpose or point to it also feel a little bit miserable. You know, I'm not very good at articulating this point that I'm trying to articulate that's in my head right now, so I'm trying to I don't even know if I should go for it, but I feel like there's a really important distinction to be made that isn't made between

like momentary pleasure and like forward looking pleasure. Like again, and please just bear with me, you know, as I try to get this expressed, so like, you know, like I don't want to get dark here, but like serial killers, Sarah killers their purpose killing people, you know, like I don't think they viewed as a purpose. I think they viewed as a compulsion. I think that a lot of things that bring us, like Ory Baumeister has found, doesn't

necessarily bring them pleasure. You know. It's more of like a dry reduction thing than a you know, like they need to do it to like move on with their life as opposed to bring pleasure. And I realized that's really dark, but we can build that up. We can generalize that to more beautiful things, you know, like pizza. Pizza is beautiful. Eating pizza good of good pizza or whatever. You know. Sometimes like if I'm really hungry, there's a certain kind of drive reduction pleasure there versus a like

I'm going to grow from this experience pleasure. So yeah, I feel like even within the pleasure to mean, there needs to be a finer distinction. Am I articulating this at all? You are and definitely, you know, utilitarian philosophers, moral philosophers will will kind of persei part the different types of pleasure, anticipatory pleasure, moral pleasure, physical pleasure, sensory pleasure, superiority of pleasure, you know, things like you can find

different ways of finding pleasure. When I think about meaning position within this whole area of trying to understand not necessarily whether one type of well being is better, but that perhaps we can understand different predictors and outcomes of different approaches to well being. I tend to think about that same sort of time frame. You are a bit or so had a book on the handbook of view diimonic well being. I was able to write a little chapter in there to try to articulate some of these ideas.

And you know, one of the ideas I felt that to some degree, meaning captures this orientation towards enduring well being or enduring investment and also a constraint of one's own immediate impulses for gratification towards some consideration of not just long time frames, but also the fact that we're in webs of relationships, obligations, and reciprocal impacts within upon

other people. So if to me, then meaning is a lot about durability, It's a lot about sustaining effort towards becoming the type of person that that coexists really positively with other people over time. And you know, that's not to say that someone who's you know, super oriented towards meaning can't ever do anything fun. I think a lot of people who know me would say that I'm pretty

interested in meaning. And you know, if I find myself at the spare hour on a decent day, one of my favorite things to do is find a nice, nice craft brew, go out on my back and you know, grab a block. And it's not I'm not talking about I'm trying to you know, penetrate Seneca or any like Roman philosopher, and I'm talking usually mystery novels or something like that. And that's an awesome hour spent, even though it there's nothing for me in the long term, and

it doesn't benefit anyone else either. So life is going to be about a blend in as long as that blend in my personals, as long as that blend includes a sense of responsibility that we have to be embracing the full nature of our lives and moving through them in ways that improve our chances of creating something important and beneficial with our lives. I think any blend that you have is is pretty good. It's good. Has anyone

ever studied meaning and exhaustion? Can you burnout? Can you exactly? Like? It just made me think of that that could be a new construct where like it's like cheez, I need a break from like my purpose. Yeah, I'm sure that happens. You know. The research body that I think would be a really interesting pathway into that notion is Robert Valleron's

work on harmonious versus obsessive passion. There's a lot of overlap between passion and purpose and trying to parse apart the type of pursuits that people embrace and love for intrinsic or self concordant reasons and those that people embrace for sort of you know, you might think of drive reduction reasons as fitting well with while around obsessive passion, you might think of extrinsic motivations as fitting well with that.

And if people are really pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, and that love of being in the moment of striving is subsumed by other concerns, I think people would still keep pushing because they're committed to that outcome. Sorry about that, but they wouldn't. They wouldn't get much out of it, and they might burn out. They'll keep working, but they're not getting fed by the process any longer. That's a good point, Yeah, idea, I think you could actually distinguish

between obsessive or ceremonious meaning. Yeah. And another piece brings into play the social contact. I've done a little bit of research and thinking on meaningful work, or you mentioned sources of meaning. Work could be a source of meaning, but it's also one of those domains that we enter into with lots of energy expenditure, oftentimes lots of consequences and almost as often not a lot of guidance as to how we can have work become a source of

thriving and vitality in our lives. And in meaningful work, you see people with a lot of passion, dedication, commitment to doing something they feel is extremely important, using work as a conduit for that, and in workplaces where that sense of dedication is exploited or where people start puppeting

words like yes, we're a purpose driven and they're not. Actually, you see, cynicism and burnout really do happen as a part of the context in which people are operating, not necessarily as any particular shift in how any individual person views what they're trying to accomplish. Yeah, I love your work on meaningful work. I actually wanted to talk to you today a little about how organizations can cultivate more of it. Oh, I'd be happy to Yeah. Is that

the question that how cat of organizations got? Yeah? Yeah, okay, I mean we can go there. I have that in my list of questions later on. But you brought this topic up, so yeah, a lot of times we do so. A lot of the well being research, there's a model, a framework that talks about top down versus bottom up. So in life satisfaction or subjective wellbeing research, there's a huge body of work on domain satisfaction and its relationship

to life satisfaction. So that might be work satisfaction, relationship satisfaction, and all those sorts of variables. I'm pretty sure that a similar thing is happening within with regards to meaning. So you can have great confidence in the meaning of your life, and that may exist separately, but it also might partially aggregate the meaning that you feel in your relationships and your hobbies and your personal development, physical health,

whatever it is. So when we take a look at domains, you know, there's only a few that are just massively important to almost everybody, and work seems to be one. I mean, I think you can learn a lot about the more general case sometimes by looking at the more specific case. So in the case of work, what research and scholarship on meaningful work highlights for me in a

lot of cases is that huge contextual dynamic. So in the workplace, we're very comfortable with the notion that the culture of the workplace and leadership and even work related policies, even work related policies around things like physical danger would play into how meaningful a person is likely to find that work. So someone can come to you with incredible, overflowing amounts of commitment towards meaningful work at your organization, you can kill it. Someone can come to you with

never having thought about having a meaningful job. They just want to, you know, survive in a world that demands monetary transactions about every five seconds and seems like And you can as you create conditions where you inspire them

to see their work as doing more than just paying bills. So, if you think about life in similar terms, one of the big blind spots in my research, and I think in other people's as well, is we oftentimes don't pay a lot of attention to the context You know, who are the leaders in our individual lives that inspire us or fire us to find meaning or murder it through

cynicism and exploitation. What are the contexts that help us see how we have impact and contribution, and what are the contexts that systematically or randomly disempower us regardless of who we are or you know, what we're like on the inside. And I don't think we do pay very much attention to that. I would say that Paul Long is at the forefront of meaning, I guess, advocating for

meaning around the world world. He does talk a lot about the need for us to understand social justice issues with regard to all the positive psychology, but also meaning. And you know, so it's really valuable to take a look at what might meaning look like in the context of parenting, or what might meaning look like in the context of psychotherapy, what my meaning look like in the context of business, as a way also of continue learning

about how meaning might operate in life more broadly. Bit, yeah, I really like that. And I'm also thinking of Amy Rescu's work. Yeah, Andsky's work. I actually just talked to her today before you She's awesome. Yeah, I can remember. I'll just give you a little I think this captures so well Amy's amazing personality, and every one of her

collaborators I've ever met is is incredible too. So I don't mean to say that she's the exception to this rule in that area of positive organization scholarship, but I remember, I think it was too. I was or maybe at one of the early positive psychology summits. And this is a loaded story, I guess because I remember that was the summit that there's still the GAALP organization at the time,

and Shane Lopez was organizing that one. Shane Lopez, of all people who offered my very first talk at any kind of positive psychology event, you know, so I always think about where I've come as being facilitated by Shane, as so many people in our area do. I chose to present some research i'd just begun working on looking at kind of calling and meaningful work and whether people viewed those as sort of secular or sacred types of pursuits in their lives. And I gave this old talk.

It was I probably overworked some angles and totally neglected others like I intended to do when I was a grad student. And Amy ros Newsky was kind of in the back of the room. But I was freaking out about that because you know, from nineteen ninety seven on, she's had such a powerful impact on our understanding of calling. And you know, she was very nice. If you've met her,

she has this amazing smile. And then later on in her keynote, she referenced that I was one of these people who was interested in this topic even though you know, just a little a little dude. Well I'm a little tall, but I was a tall little dude, you know, just trying to talk about this new idea I had, and she was so generous and in donating to me, you know, some credibility in an area where she was so massively influential and important. Oh that's a nice story, true story too.

I might have gotten the dates wrong, but everything else is for sure true. She was very nice in what she did, and you were very kind right now and giving your credit for that. So all around the feels as they say. So, you know, meaningful work any paid or unpaid work or occupational role people fulfill that is

judged by them to possess meaning, purpose, or significance. I keep going back in my head to this distinction you've made between meeting and significance, and I'm trying to, you know, I want to know empirically, like do we know empirically that those are three separate things? Like has anyone actually created a scale to measure how much we have each of those and done like a factor analysis? Like have we really like gotten to the nitty gritty of this?

We have gotten the nitty grit of this? Yeah, to say, yeah, the initial the initial nitty gritty, so maybe the nith of it or the Monty python is knee. I guess you'd say so. Logen George and Crystal Park have a scale, a multi dimensional meaning scale that measures purpose and coherence more or less, I think, and then their third dimension would be mattering. And you know, they find that there's a slightly differential pattern of predictors with other psychological variables.

The factor analysis looks nice and fancy, and I also am working with the good friend Frank Martala at University of Helsinki to develop a similar measure tracking onto the three theoretical dimensions as we've articulated them. Hopefully we'll all come together and have a nice you know, three dimensional meaning jamboree someday. But just to get the ball rolling, we need we need data looking at a bunch of

different things. And you know this is not published yet, so take it with a grain of salt, not pere review. But the factor analysis looks clean, and we're continuing to collect data to try and analyze the pattern of differential

correlations with the types of variables you'd expect to correlate. So, for example, you know, variable like dogmatism, the right wing authoritarianism, you'd expect would correlate with coherence, Right, so people have their one way of looking at the world, and it's solid. It might be I want to actually expect that. I

wouldn't expect that, I would expect a negative correlation. No, So, going back a few years now, I did collect data on just meaning a life and dogmatism right with authoritarianism, and those folks do report higher levels of meaning than the typical person. So there's something reassuring about thinking you've got the answer, as opposed to people like me who are like, oh, maybe it's this I did not done yet,

I need to keep asking questions. So we think, you know, when you consider what the functional role of dogmatism is, which is kind of having you know, your set playbook that no one should challenge, that would seem like that would help people make sense of life. So we would expect stronger positive relationships between dogmatism and coherence. We would with like purpose necessarily, which is much more motivational in nature. So we are at that point. It's really exciting that

two things had to happen. You know, there had to be enough research and enough smart people thinking about this stuff. So you know, like Laura King and some of her amazing students have been super influential in helping us delineate what meaning looks like and generating really interesting experimental data. And you know, Logien George has already mentioned was interested in this sort of triumvirate that was threading through the research and the scholarship for a long time, but hadn't

had a measure to pull it apart. So I think

it is cool we've got three the field. If I can say the field is a person, the person, the field is pretty certain that those three dimensions are at least important to meaning, and the field is starting to generate data on that because to be a little bit frank, well into the thousands of studies now on meaning in life as sort of a unidimensional construct, and pretty much any question you have about whether meaning is a good thing a bad thing you live longer you have less Alzheimer's,

we can answer that because after a few thousand studies, almost all of which happened in the last eight years or so, we know a lot. We know a lot about just the general proposition, is meaning in life a good thing? It sures how get it. So it's cool that we can move into learning more about it. And the ultimate play for something like having three dimensions of meaning is that it gives us different ways to understand how to help people find and create and reinforce meaning.

You know, if we can show that purpose is a unique pathway into meeting, that we can start really working on purpose and understanding that better and so on. Yeah, speaking of purposes, we chatted a couple months ago just for fun, and since then I crafted a definition of purpose that I'm going to be using in my book I'm working on. Can I run a by you? Yeah? Yeah, let's hear it all right. This is the need for an overarching, self organizing, future oriented aspiration that energizes your

efforts and infuses your life with meaning and significance. So I love the middle part. I would say that, you know you're talking about a need for purpose. Then if you say it's a need for those things, it's a need. Yeah yeah. So then it's just whether purpose infuses your

life with meaning and significance. And then it just gets into like the obnoxious profit storial hair splitting, where I would say that meaning already in those purpose but so I would say that probably you know that you're right. I mean, when people have a sense of purpose and it self organizing, it captures their aspirations, it propels them forward. That they do in the little bits of data that we think we have that speak directly to that, they

do pull out of meaning. From that, they do feel like life is significant and that they matter, They're making a difference somehow, and it also helps them understand themselves better. So just because I have probably a lot more stake in defining three dimensions of meeting than anyone rightly should, yeah, I would probably sneak it back into that kind of dynamic.

And then, you know, as purpose helps reinforce a sense of significance of such significance helps inform us about who we are and maybe the sense that there's something special about us. And then we use that to gain a sense of coherence that then tells us well, maybe we can try for this type of purpose as well. So all those three in my mind work together then to generate this sense that, wow, life is really meaningful. I'm not one hundred percent convinced that we can neatly separate

the mattering instinct from purpose. I get the coherence difference. But I feel like I'm a humps and sold yet that significance and purpose are like these different things. Like I'm trying to get the core humanity drive here, and I feel like the major drive underlying purpose is the mattering instinct, as Rebecca Goldstein refers to it. Yeah, I would probably take up a position to argue against that

or for that either way. But I think in terms of differentiating the two, you know, the shortcut is to try and think of mutual exclusive cases. So can we think of someone who would say that they have a very strong self organizing, centrally important, long term sort of aspiration. Let's say we've got that person. Person comes to feel like there's no particular worth or value to his or her particular individual life. Is that possible that configuration? Like,

is it free to say? But you know, someone's striving, striving, striving, striving and for what maybe that's the case, or striving striving striving but feels somehow just inherently worthless or bad, or has come to view the self as only important because of maybe some future promise that would be delivered upon the satisfaction of the purpose someday, and maybe you would say that one's hard to think of, but I bet the next one isn't quite so hard to think of.

So someone who feels life has inherent worth, even my life has inherent worth. Life is worth living. But I'm not really striving for anything. It just is what it is. Life is fantastic. It's about being, and being is great. I matter because people love me no matter what I do. Right, So you can imagine can you imagine people achieving that state? You can imagine a kid experiencing that perception about his

or her life. I think, not necessarily thinking yeah, I've got to develop this big plan for my life at some point. Yeah, I definitely understand the logic behind what you're saying. You know, I think that I could agree with the argument that there are multiple things that give us that fulfill that mattering instinct and then still say that purpose is one of the biggest ones, like, out of the mall that tends to be in the human population, one that like is a fast track it's significance in

a sense. Yeah, I wonder. I mean, part of it is trying to figure out to what degree are we influenced by the culture in which we live. I don't know that this is true that because we live in a fair striving, hard work, valuing, capitalistic kind of make it on your own type of society, that we tend to assume that having a plan and working hard for

things is important. It's possible for me to reflect on some forms of you know, some ways of if you think about maybe some religions as providing road maps for how to live, I mean, there's some out there that don't necessarily charge people with lofty goals. Instead they charge people with breaking free of desire and breaking free of striving.

That's true, well regardless, at this point, I think it's useful to at least hold open the possibility that that's true, and to try to figure out a way to test. Are there people out there who feel like their lives are significant, who feel like the world in some way notices that they exist and that's good, who feel like there's at least some reason to stay alive rather than

to end life. Can we find people who'd say that that's true, but don't also say, yeah, and I've got this huge life ambition that I want to accomplish at some point down the road, and I'm working towards it every day I see the source of our superficial disagreement in which I think that is superficial when you get down to it, because I think what I've done is I've baked significance into my definition of purpose. So I can't be wrong in the sense that, like, that's how

I'm conceptualizing purpose. Some of the cases you're giving me, I wouldn't say they have a purpose. I don't think everyone who has a goal that they strive for has a purpose. It would be the point that I'm trying to make here. I think that, yeah, yeah, yeah, do you see I'm saying it's almost like a definitional thing as opposed to you know, it's like a conceptual like

how are we conceptualizing purpose? You know? When I think of purpose again, I don't quit it just with That's why I defined it as I did, because it's not just having higher level goals that you strive for. It's having goals that you strive for that give you a sense of significance. So in a sense, I'm saying, there's a unique thing called purpose that maybe combines some multiple

aspects of meaning. Yeah. I mean, it's really hard because I think that is definitely consistent with that's definite cost with Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's definitely consistent with what

purpose kind of feels like when you hear it. It just happens to not be It happens not to be very clean empirically to could mix too many ingredients together, right, So if we mix, you know, let's say we define purpose as a strongly self concordant goal that fits who you think you are and how you view the world around you, that delivers to you a sense of mattering and significance in life. That would feel like purpose, but that also mixes together pretty much any other part of

meaning as well. Part of the job as I see my role as a meaning researcher that I think probably annoys a lot of people who just are regular humans and living life and understanding life as it happens instead of trying to cut in little pieces. Is I really am curious about whether each of these things that we fold into very complex terms like meaning and purpose, whether they're really different from each other or not, or whether

they can be separated out. So part of the big problem with meaning as a researchable topic was that the definitions of it tended to be pretty fuzzy around the boundaries. And so I think part of one of the reasons why meaning research has taken off the way it has over the last eight to ten years is because folks like me have worked hard to try to define it according to the conventions of empirical psychological signe hands, which you draw your circle around around something and you call

it that. I mean. It's a little bit like going to the beach and saying, Okay, there's the water. That's definitely the sea, and now here's super wet sand where if I dig a little bit, water pools up. But that's kind of different. That's not the sea. And then here's super dry sand and somewhere there's just moist sand.

Or we're going to draw a circle around what we think is the driest of the dry sand, a circle around the moist is of the moist sand, but that doesn't pool water when you dig it, and then the water and we're going to say those are three separate things to help us understand beach. Do you know what

I mean? So I do I think that. I mean, I love what you do, and I have immense respect for your project, and inherent in a definition that has multiple components that automatically assumes that those are separate, Like if if a definition has multiple components, that is you're

actually saying those things are separable things. So yeah, I guess what I'm saying is what my umbrella term purpose is one that encompasses things that you can still empirically show are separate, but that purpose is an integration of them. And so from my perspective, I see a reason why we can't have a term that is a higher level integration of what does your life look like when you have coherence, you have a sense of self worth, and

you have a matt you feel like you matter. Then I feel like you get what Frankel was kind of

talking about. You get what like some other people meant by the term purpose, and you know that actually is compatible with your program though, and it just becomes a matter of semantics, you know what we want to another someone else could say that the high order construct is just meaning, and that's what Probably what you would say is that you know, from a factor analysis, I assume that those three things psychometrically or correlated with each other

are zero point three four, right, Like, what does the correlation matrix look like among those three things, I'm sure it's all there's a positive manifold, right, Yeah, Well, I guess I would say I sort of we share similar ideas that there's a superordinate umbrella term. And to me, and in my read of the field, the literature was blending a lot of these different ideas together, going all the way back to the original writings by Franco. But you can even go further back than that and look

at Oddler was talking about meaning as well. You can sort of see that meaning has a bit more of a voracious So even if you take a look at the etymology of a word like meaning in a couple of different languages, it starts to embrace different perspectives. Whereas the word purpose, typically speaking, has been highly functional and motivational.

It has referred to gold type constructs, it has referred to achievement type orientations, and as a word within philosophical and psychological writings, it has had a more defined it has more constrained definition, whereas meaning is to me, and I'm not necessarily right, and I'm certainly you're not alone in thinking that purpose is a better fit for a higher order umbrella term, it just seems that in the field, in what had been done before I started even understanding

that this was a thing people could study, was that the meaning was the more richly populated term and purpose. You take a look at the items of Carol Riff's purpose subscale from restychological well being scales, and it's very much about kind of like finding interesting things to do, developing goals, you know, kind of like this very active

goal pursuit thing. Whereas you take a look at the way people had been trying to measure meaning, it was things like having a mental framework for understanding life experiences. So it just to me it made more sense than to have meaning be the bigger term, and then within that it folds together that a kind of common cast

to characters at this point. But for a while I would say that, you know, if you take a look at some of my early stuff that I was writing, I was kind of just rolling everything together, you know, like a significant purpose and you know, a sense of coherence. Yeah, but I think that if you, I mean, wherever you stand, to me, it's it's really vital that there's some continuity between the sorts of things that I say or the positions that I take and and what's been done before me.

I mean, that's that's just really important to preserve I don't know, the preserve the providence I guess of how we try to advance in understanding an idea. And you know, I've got no objection to someone reading that differently or even deciding that that's not for them, like they don't want to. You know, they've got their idea, and there's certainly ways to martial arguments in favor of that. I've got nothing against that, which is the path I chose.

It's kind of like, you know, just marching one step at a time through the way that people approach this issue. For instance, I'll throw this out there because it's a little bit cleaner than the Gilgamesh example, which otherwise I can.

I tend to go off on a little bit. But in Ecclesiastes, so one of the other oldest, oldest references to something that we understand as meaning, now there's a meditation on essentially the nature of death, you know, so taking a look around and saying things like, you know, animals, animals perish. We share the same breath as animals. Man is just like any other animal. As the animal dies, so too dies man, everything is meaningless. Does that mean that you can never have a purpose? Does that mean

that life doesn't make sense? Probably not. If you're able to say we die just like the animal and therefore life has no meaning, you've made some sort of sense. So I think there's just lots of different ways to or. And you know the job of someone like means is to make it as confusing as possible for I also understand. So I feel it, you know what I mean. I

like the through a distinction. I just can't find the way I think of way I think of purpose is that it it's very hard to have, Like a function of purpose is self organizing in a way that suddenly your life is infused with meaning, significant and significance. Now I realize why it's saying that drives you crazy, because I've just compleated meaning and significance and your model has you know, meaning is a higher order umbrella, and significance

is one of three. So I understand semantically why that must irk you, and it would irk me too if ires you, but from it every day, like if I'm talking to someone on the street, you know, I think they understand what it means to have something that you know, like, it's amazing. There's an amazing self organizing function with purpose that someone interjects something, even if like a sports team, you know, and suddenly you feel like, wow, my life, there's a reason for being alive. Yeah, I would say

anything irks me. I just think that there's a lot of open questions that we don't know. We don't know purpose self organizes anything. Actually, you know, we don't also know other than by defining it and saying it is. So we don't know these things. So in the case of a of a sports team, so let's say you're on a sports team and you know the team that I that I back is Liverpool for this year, having a thing exciting a year. Okay, So the purpose of that job, you could say, is to win games, and

so everyone's trying to do that. Let's say though, that you know, the new coach comes along, you're going to clop and instills in them the sense of you know, a spree of corps and camaraderie and you know, submission of the individual ego to the group effort, and you know, a way of playing the game. So is that a purpose that we're going to play the game in a

particular way. The purpose is still the same to some degree, Like why would you even be a part of a sports team if not to try to achieve greatness to some degree, I suppose if it's in views with purpose, what then does it self organize in that case that wouldn't already be part of do you know what I mean?

Like yourself becomes the you know, suddenly there's something on the line that's outside of your prior concerns and things seem trivial, you know, like get when we get a purpose, we suddenly it does reorganize our character, our structure of concerns in life. It changes our priority structure. Yeah, I think that's what it does. It changes priorities and it helps That's what I know by self organizing. Yeah, yeah, so, but in a sense it doesn't necessarily you still have

to make the decision to do all those things. So when you have priorities, priority is one way of think our priorities is that I think is very consistent with purpose. Is is kind of like motivational weights. So something with a higher priority you're more motivated to take the time to do, and you're more motivated to protect in your schedule. So to me, it's purpose as a motivational force is self organizing to the degree. And I'm a little fuzzy

on what people mean when they say self organizing. I'll admit that, but that's why, Yeah, I wanted to clarify what I meant by it. Yeah, makes you might mean different things by it, for sure. Yeah. So it helps people either helps people consciously and rapidly assort their priorities, or somehow at a non explicit level, it gives people some orientation to a set of priorities. So it gets tricky, right, because priorities motivation. We tend to view as identifying things

that are important to us. And if it's important, then we can say it's significant, and we get trapped in that and that circle all over again. To me, what the primary driving force behind purpose ends up being to me is is that motivation towards continuing to push into the future, striving aspect of it is I think, I think so. Yeah, in part, I think that because that helps distinguish it gives it the best shot of being distinguishable from some of these other ideas out there. But

I agree, yeah, but it does. I don't really claim to know that much about about meaning and meaning in life. I just claim to be pretty interested in trying to find out. And you know, one of the things that's that's difficult is it's such a part of the appeal is it's such a familiar word. And part of the

problem is such a familiar word. You know, we're dealing with words that we by the time we get to be thinking independent adults, we we have a relationship with words like meaning, with words like purpose, with the phrase life is worth living with you know, what's it all about? The reason I'm here? We have a relationship with these ideas.

And you know, the job of folks like me is trying to plumb the degree to which people, you know, really do make those ask those types of questions of themselves and whether they whether it matters how they answer them. It's a pretty low bar to say, does it matter if someone feels like their life is worth living or not?

But we had to start somewhere, and as we go on, the further we get, the more we get into what sometimes feels, like I said, like drawing drawing arbitrary circles on a continuum, right, I you know, the continue between the dry sand and the water on a sandy beach is impossible to delineate, so we when we try to device to find something, we miss a lot. We draw

around the most characteristic parts of it. But there's all that intermediary, liminal stuff that that is also there, also important, and just kind of too messy through MEDSI to figure out how to how to do research on. You know, it's like, uh, when people try to differentiate for me

between a sociopath and the psychopath. Okay, you're saying some words that are yeah, and you're right, I don't know what you're talking about so well in that spirit though, because I get what you're saying, and I like doing that too. I like operationalizing constructs. It's fun. Couldn't one say that, like there's value in delineating the parameters of personal strivings versus purpose, because I think a lot of

it comes down to I'm saying they're different things. I'm trying to say that like you can have I can imagine many situations where people have personal strivings, don't feel like it's a purpose, they would identify it as a purpose. Even do you see what I'm saying in that regard, Yeah, So when you take a look at all those goal constructs, there are a lot of them ultimate concerns, there's a

lot life ask personal thoughts. Actually we said jinks. Yeah, So there's a certain point where you're pretty sure something like an implementation intention is different from a life task, right, and you're pretty sure that you know a self concordate goal is different from a life purpose. But again, they're they're kind of like a rampentation attemps as are tiny, like the first part of the ramp. At some point you're really high up and you're not sure where your

life task turned into a purpose. And when I try to figure out how they differentiate, you know, the distinctions even within all of those are tough to parse out for someone like me who doesn't always understand what's going on anyways. But for me, I think there's two there's two dynamics that help that help make purpose different than other goal constructs, and it feeds off of the other

two dimensions of meaning. I mean, part of of the thing that's great about purpose is it, or that's distinct about purpose is it is part of a meaningful life. So it's going to have a relationship with the other pieces. So I tend to think of like sort of self centrality, right, the centrality of a purpose. There's gonna be tons of overlap between the content in that purpose and the content we see in ourselves. Right, So you can have goals

that have nothing to do with you. You can even have life tasks that have nothing to do with who you are, right, just the stage in life that you tend to occupy. But it would be really unfortunate if you felt maybe it could happen. But by definition we might, we might argue against this. But to just feel like you have a purpose for your life that you're not involved with, it's not central to you, and it really is.

It could be fulfilled by anybody. I mean, frankl would go crazy with that characterization, because Francle felt that there was something extremely unique, idiosyncratic, special, and yeah yeah self actualization. Yeah yeah, so self actualization is part of that. And then you know, I guess circling back to some of the thoughts we were exploring about the relationship between meaning

and the world around us and other people. You know. So, so Maslow is really pushing at the at the end of his refinement of the higher kid needs towards self transcendence. That's right. So in part, there's something about the scope of a purpose that outstrips a lot of other types of goal constructs. And I tend to think about it

as line segments with definable beginnings and ends versus rays. Right, So there's not only is purpose supposed to be very closely nestled within who who we think we are and what we think is vital to us, but it's also maybe unattainable, like it just it just it's something that you're pursuing, not necessarily for the checking of the box that says I accomplished this, but because the pursuit, the marshaling of effort, the prioritizing, if you will, is in

and of itself what it's all about. So you just keep pushing, you keep striving for it. You don't know if you accomplish it. And maybe some of the best purposes that are available for us to think about will never be accomplished, you know for sure, you know with no ambivalence or ambiguity. Are you really, like, if your purpose is to be a good parent, are you done with that? Did you do it? Are you really a

good parent? Can you say that on your deathbed. If your purpose is to shape people up about, you know, the death of the planet around us, when are you done with that? It seems like, you know, even if Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, who got us all fired up about DDT and you know, was part of establishing the Invironmental Protection Agency and Cleaner Acts in the United States, is reincarnated today, we're resurrected today, which you feel like there's more to do. I think so

and so to me, there's something about that. You don't have to check it off on the list because it is. It is how you're living in a sense, more than what you're trying to accomplish. But I'd have to admit that a lot of that comes from just my personal impression. And it's hard to define purpose in a way that that feels special and meaningful without combining it with other ideas, because there's there's another definition of purpose out there that

I think is the pro social, like Bill Damon's. Is that what you're going to say, Yeah, see, I think I'm with you that I if you noted in my definition of purpose, I didn't go that far. I explicitly and intentionally left out the must have a pro social I left that out. I left that out because I think that I'm with you that that does blend, that

doesn't from a construct perspective. That makes it extraordinarily messy because now, you know, anything that don't involve some sort of explicit, some sort of obvious, you know, big grandiose thing no longer is considered a purpose. And then we that that eliminates so many important sources of purpose, like you know, just trying to personal growth something that's mastery. I didn't mean to like put words in your mouth that I felt like we're in sync on that. So yeah, totally.

It's not that I don't love the idea of trying to accomplish trooth social things. I actually do very much love that. It's just that that's also a lot of other things. Yeah, that's begnificence, that's all torurism, you know, pro social motivations. So it makes it sticky for us, and you know, this is the this is the big divide. You know, if I'm if I'm doing a keynote, if I'm writing research articles, I am emphasizing these distinctions that I think me as a person living my life, I

probably don't care about that much. I don't think about this that much, like, oh, well, it's my purpose in life, and I would have you know, I also would agree with folks who say that you can have more than one purpose, and that purpose to shift and you allocate attention to purposes as you can and as necessity demands.

So I think I just live life trying to orient around meaning and being a good person, making a pro social difference, trying to be better all the time, trying to be authentic and honest with myself about my limitations and where things need to get better, and trying to remember that I live in a world populated by so many other people, so much other life, and that my actions have consequences all across the board. So how would

you throw that into the mix? I mean, I could, I could put circles around some of those ideas and say that's a coherence, that's a significant So when I do workshops or when I'm trying to be more helpful, I guess you know what I mean. Yeah, I just use those as springboards and say, well, look, here's what are you trying to do is meeting? Here's one way of looking at it. Here's another way of looking at it, but at it's heard, what is it to you? Let's try to let's try to work with that, so I

don't make the same you know. I think that's part of the trickiness of all of this is that it's it's very easy for me to get to go down into the details of the sort of artificial way of trying to put boundaries and definitions on something that's just huge, you know, and encompassing. And that's the job of one hat.

The other hat though, when I'm trying to help people, or working on workshops or even in my positive psychology classes, trying to you know, get people engaged in activities that can help them find some stickiness and some grip on the big fuzzy meaning stuff. I find I don't hate quite as much attention to these sort of you know, you could call it semantic details, you could call operationalization details,

you can call it artificial boundary setting. All those sorts of things that make the science be able to proceed don't necessarily help, and I think sort of kill the magic sometimes of this deeply vital, wacky stuff we're really trying to just live out every day. But I appreciate it. I appreciate that level because it really stimulates my thinking about this stuff at a level that I may not

have before. So, I mean, thanks to this research, I'm really trying to contemplate what significance really the root of it is. And I've been thinking that a lot of it ties to self esteem, it ties to me. I'm thinking it's kind of a lower order thing, like purposes is something that you really get to once you like can move beyond the question of does my life have significance or not? Like people who are suicidal, you know,

or people who are depressed, those are like depriving. It's a sign of deprivation if you're even asking yourself that question, and then like, if you can just get past that, then like people have a purpose, don't even ask themselves that question, I guess is one way I'm thinking about it. Yeah, I was just gonna say, I can see what you're thinking about it in that way that having a purpose, or maybe I should say having the right kind of

purpose answers a lot of questions. Yeah, yeah, it provides a lot of nourishment for the other areas that we need, right, So, and I can totally see that, and I think that's an awesome ideal in a life as it's lived sort of way, you know, because yeah, I can probably come up with counterexamples of someone who has a strong sense of purpose and then committed suicide. Yeah, I think we can think of that. Yeah, So so then what do

we do with that? Anyway? So, and it's because you know, when you take a look at the intellectual heritage of this research area, it involves French dudes like Camu and Sartra right talking about the death of meaning in the universe and our loneliness and ultimate futility as thinking beings to even attempt to grapple with life, and so therefore just come up with anything. It's as good as anything else. Camu arguing that the huge pressing problem of philosophy is

why people just don't kill themselves all the time? Why don't we? Yeah, yeah, why bother to stay alive? And some of that stuff really gets that what feels to me like subtly different flavors of experience than the type of thing that Franco was talking about, saying there's a purpose waiting for each of us out there, or or you know, rephrasing Nietzsche's maxim that if you have a why in your life, you can get through anything that's

slightly different to me. And then there's just the plain old You know, if life is just unending chaos and you just can't pull together any sort of sense of consistency predictability, wouldn't that end of itself also undermind some of these other areas. So oh yeah, for sure, I think that's a foundation, the coherence part. See, I view

it as like a I guess, like a pyramid. Okay, yeah, well yeah, that's I mean, that's like a developmental model, right, And I think I don't want to be inconsistent with stuff I've written or interviews. Thanks for listening to me, first of all, thanks for even like considering that what I'm saying might be interesting, Like that's I guess I appreciate it. Well, I appreciate you because obviously you have a lot of knowledge and a lot of perspective and

great intelligence in this area. And I also want to maybe express what I really do think my project is. My project is trying to just figure this stuff out. And I don't I don't think that there is I mean, there's probably maybe one or two experts on the topic

of living the most meaningful life possible. And if you have, you know, a couple of months to hang out with the Dali line, where you have a couple months to hang out with the archbishop to To or some of these other extraordinary people who seem like more than human, then by all means do that. But I think the rest of us are just trying to capture, capture perspectives that we can we can try on and grow from.

And for me, when it comes to the science side and the data side, there's there's what's been published, there's what's been found, and there's how it's been defined, and you don't get to mess with that. That just is the historical record of the science. But in terms of what are we really after, I'm not an expert at all in anybody's I'm barely I'm barely competent in my own meaning in life. I would say, in anyone else's idea of what are we really doing here in this

totally unlikely spectacle that is our lives? Why would I ever think that I know more about that than anyone else? Oh yeah, and I've sure don't claim to know more than But I'm trying to think through this stuff with you and with stuff too. I mean, that's that's interesting as well. I mean it's fun to hear someone who feels like she or he really really just knows, like, wow, it's amazing how that fits. You try to figure it out, and then I'm always back to, oh, what what about this?

What about that? What about this? What about that? That's my obnoxious No, no, no, no no, always questions. No, I would say it's your thoughtfulness, you know. I think something we can agree on is we can shift and kind of end on this. As you know, there are different sources of meaning in life. I actually would almost prefer to think of it at that level. Then different meanings of the word meaning, but there's different ways you can fill up your bucket of meaning in a sense. And

real big fan of Tajana Shells Schnell's work. I don't know if you've come across it. She has a questionnaire that measures those courses of meaning. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the most comprehensive thing. I'm going to start collaborating with her, So I'm really excited about that. On linkages between self actualization and different sources of meaning in life, we're putting

up a study on that. But I think, like the interesting thing of her research is that not all sources of meaning are equally predictive of the sense of meaning in your life. And I think that's maybe what I'm really trying to get it here and maybe end on something that we agree on completely, you know, because we can both look at the correlation matrix and you know, we can agree that that number is higher than that number. So when I'm looking at this table right now, I'm

seeing I'm going to read the top four things. I'm just there's arbitrary top four. I could have been top ten. But number one is generativity by far, you know, is generativity zero point sixty seven. And then harmony is very high attentiveness, which I guess I include mindfulness kind of being in the mindful and spirituality seems to for a lot of people. And then I'm going more than four

and look at me and development develop. But the things that are really low are things like tradition, things like just freedom. Interesting. Freedom was really well. I was surprised by that. Achievement is low, practicality is low. Fun fun is actually one of the lower ones. So at least that data is starting to tell us something interesting, I think, right, yeah, yeah, And I know about your interest in Maslow and the

higher communities. It maps on so nicely that research. And if I remember her paper, that paper correctly she characterized at least that top batch as being kind of related to self transcendent sources. That's exactly right. And I suspect that most people who do this kind of research and want of research meaning in life expect to see that

kind of result. That the people who are pushing meaning are working towards meeting the most strongly, are also thinking about what comes next, what's beyond what I see and feel right now. And I think being trapped in what I should live according to what I see and feel right now is a very anti meaning sort of stance. It's not consolidating, it's not growing, it's not expanding your

capacity or perspective. So I think we all, I won't say we all, but I know a lot of meaning researchers, and every single one of them that I know of wants to make the world a better place and thinks that that's sort of that's the apex of where we end up if things don't mess us up along the way. So you know, the earliest articulation that I can think of about that. I mean, you can see it in Franco's work. You know, at some point the way that he talks about one of the roads to suffering, one

of the roads to meaning, leads through suffering. And when everything else has been taken away from you, you still get to choose how you will endure suffering. And part of the reason why that's important is because you become a role model, or you become an example for other people. So even in your suffering, even when everything's been stripped away from you, Franco's reason to suffer nobly has a nod to how that how your suffering can serve to

strengthen other people. Right, So in Franco's work, there's numerous times where as an intervention he works to help people see that they're on display. In some sense, our lives stand for something and significance. Yeah, we'll say, sure, but yeah, right, So it's because we're able to be seen by other people. So even in our suffering, we can serve the needs

of other people. By the time the eighties roll around, Gary Rieker I mentioned him before Paul Long start talking about this idea of depth of meaning, that there's shallow meaning and there's deep meanings. The deep meanings are the ones that the humanists have talked about for years, you know, God, sports, maturing, personality, Maslow's higher give needs that was to be topped with

self transcendent. So all these trends. You can even take a look at ericson right as we'll call him a meaning research number twelve and then integration right at the end. And you know, so you see a lot of people, a lot of threads that go into this idea that as we grow into the best and richest and you know, deepest that we can be, we're spreading ourselves out to embrace large and larger concerns that have less and less to do with how I feel right now in this skin.

So it's beautiful to see that those data that Tatiana developed or published because they come from within a good long traditional meaning research of trying to get beyond just is your life meaning from one to seven and get into the sources like what's the richness, what's the fabric, what's the texture of people's lives as it pertains to meaning, Because there's a lot of stuff out there that says people who are more altruistic, people more spiritual and other

scales look more meaning filled, and people who are materialistic and oriented towards beauty and wealth and you know, they look like their lives are less meaningful. But it was really cool to see that when you even when you frame it so pointedly in terms of meaning, these people I'm getting meaning from this, they still we still see

the same thing. And actually saw something kind of similar in some research I've done over the years as well, where people who are oriented and you know, say they want to invest in certain types of ways of trying to find meaning and trying to find well being. You know, it's a little bit of an old saw at this point, like if you're just constantly chasing the thing that makes you feel good, next, you're just constantly chasing, right, And

that's not purpose. It's not purpose, That's what I would say, Right, The purpose is something different. Cool. Hey, I should stop you from yourself because or else, you know, you're I'm sure you have a life outside of the psychology podcast.

I know you do, so thank you so much for spending I can't thank you enough for being so generous with your time This might be one of the longest psychology podcast chats I've ever had, but i found it immensely stimulating and I'm deeply appreciative of the work you do so for our field. Thank you well, Thanks Scott. I think it's a testament to you and you're curiosity or ravenous intellect, so I appreciate being here and having a chance to talk about this topic. I definitely have

a ravenous curiosity. I don't know what's o. Thank you, thank you, thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at Thespsychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a

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