Roy Baumeister || Identity, the Self, and the Meaning of Life

psychologist Roy Baumeister. Roy is a Francis Eppi's Professor of Psychology at Florida State University. He's authored more than five hundred publications and has co authored or edited almost thirty books. He's one of the most highly cited psychologists of all time. It's an honor to have you on the show today. Roy, Wow, your heart, but it's no honor. I'm glad to be here. Great the amount of studies that you've done in topics that you study, we could chat for the rest of

our lives. So let's start with how did you get interested in psychology? Oh? Well, so, Curtis Path, I went to college to study math because I was good at that in high school, and then higher math seemed kind of weird. Those are the hippie days, and everybody talked about relevance and profundity. So I thought, well, did I study philosophy and religion and grapple with the big questions? And then it turned out psychology had some interesting approaches

to those. I was struck. I was reading moral philosophy. Well, I was over as a foreign student in Heidelbeg. The philosophers grapple with the ideas of right and wrong. I happened to read some of Freud's book so we said, well, let's look at how people actually get their ideas of right and wrong rather than analyzing the concepts. And I thought, well, that's an interesting approach. You could take kind of a scientific way of addressing and solving some of the same problems.

So that kind of got me hooked. Wow, so Freud got you hooked. And you know the kind of topics that Freud studied, did they interest you? Well? These was his books on society and human nature and morality, good and evil. So those were fascinating topics. The clinical side of Freud was less exciting to me. Right, Freud did have a nice career studying people with mental illness and then talking about basic human nature. And I liked I thought for a while I would do that. But you

can't do that anymore. If you want to talk about normal people, you have to actually study normal people. So Freud's little bridge there was earned a long time ago, but it worked for him. Now, what was your dissertation? Your doctoral dissertation about yeah, goodness. So back in the nineteen seventies, the self esteem movement was just starting to take off. People were studying a lot of social psychology processes,

thinking maybe changes in self esteem were going on. That you get a failure experience and your self esteem goes down, and that's what affects your behavior. That's a little skeptical of that. I thought, maybe we care more about what other people think of us than what we think of ourselves. So there was just a little bit of discussion of differences in that. So in my dissertation, I tried giving

people good or bad feedback about their personalities. Has had been done for a while in the guys, supposedly of manipulating self esteem. Of course, nobody checked whether it actually changed self esteem or not. They just assumed it back then. So what I did is give those same things either in a public or a private setting. Either you're the only one we'll see this confidential information it's a valuation of you, or I'm looking at it myself, I'm showing

it to other people. And if it's just self esteem, it should have the same effect, right, it's the same information having the same impact on how you appraise yourself. But it turned out if you've cut the evaluation confidentially, it really had very little effect. But knowing other people had seen it that made a big, big difference. So this was the start of study of self presentation. Actually for me, it was the start. People have been talking

about it for a while. It wasn't mainstream social psycho though gradually had caught on because lots of people started seeing, yes, yes, behavior really changes when other people are looking in ways that the same situation, the same information, the same cues don't change behavior if you're on your own. Sure was

that classified under social psychology at that point? Oh? Yes, yes, it was a social psychology dissertation and published in the Journal of Social Personal and Social Psychology, And so I yes, that's what my career started. Great yeah, you really countered a lot of the thinking at the time, especially in the media, about self esteem. And you know the famous Seray Night Live skit about looking in the mirror rate and saying, by gosh, you know, I love me or something.

What did you find were some of the downsides of having too high of a self esteem? I was positive about self esteem for a long time. I thought it was a great thing to study, and I worked on it. But I always pay extra attention to critical comments, and I remember the first few people saying, how come self esteem doesn't really predict much it's important, and I was indignant that, oh, it does predict important things. In my laboratory,

it works. But I was looking at fairly specific kinds of responses, and so I started looking out at the more broad based studies of self esteem most of the the things other people were doing, and yes, it often failed to deliver. So gradually I began to question it and doubt it, and I still feel a little bad about it. Self esteem was one of my first interests, and if it had done all the stuff we hoped it would do, I would have been a picture or something like that.

But anyway, in terms of the downside, of high self esteem. Over time, I started to look at the world in terms of trade offs, that there are very few things that are unmitigated good or bad, and it goes against the way we think. A lot of people go into psychology and social science thinking they're going to change the world. This is the right way to be and other ways are wrong, and we just got to show people that

this is what we should do. Over time, I've become much more toward trade offs, and so, yeah, there'll be some advantages to high self esteem, but some disadvantages too. One formulation that several of us came to is that the benefits of self esteem mostly come to yourself in that it feels good. It's nice to think you're a superior, competent being, and so on. But the costs are born

by the other people around you. If you've had a romantic partner or a roommate or coworker or whatever with a very high self esteem, you probably know what I mean. They can be a pain and a difficulty to deal with, and they become very sensitive to criticism and they feel

more entitled. So just inflating self esteem for its own sake, I think it contains the significant risks and leads into what later came to be known as narcissism, which is this unfounded sense of superiority, and narcissism contributes to a lot of higher aggression and less tolerance of others and so forth. Self esteem high self esteem is a mixed

category and the effects are very different. There are people with high self esteem who are simply good people, competent and moral and so on, and they know it and so that's not so bad. There are other people, though, who just think they're a lot better than they are just so in them, high self esteem leads to defensiveness and aggressiveness and all sorts of negative, risky outcomes. Right, So like unstable self esteem versus actually that distinction in

the literature, Yes, that's correlated with the narcissism. They have the unstable high self esteem. They want to think they're superior, but somebody criticizes them or whatever. Then their self esteem drops temporarily, and they hate that. That feeling of self esteem goes down is quite a bad feeling. So the

unstable ones become then hyper sensitive. Is there's this person about to criticize me, and they lash out very quickly when they think someone is being critical, and that's part of what makes those people difficult to get along with. But the true high self esteem you people who just think they're wonderful and nothing phases them. The stable high self esteem doesn't matter good day, bad day, success, failure. You still think you're great. Well, they're not aggressive or anything.

They think of them as sort of floating through life on a cloud of their own wonderfulness. Nothing's bothering them, so wow, why should they get to it? Sure? And this topic has kind of been part of a larger investigation you've had on the nature of the self more generally and what is the self? And I noticed in your earliest some of your earliest investigations of the self, you looked into masochism. I don't think a lot of people are aware of that line of research you did.

You viewed masochism as an escape from self, and you wrote later in one of your books that you were kind of disappointed with You thought that was going to be kind of the holy grail of understanding the self, but you actually realized that it wasn't the answer. I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about that line of research. Okay, I don't know about the Holy Grail. But it it did post it be elucidating. You thought

at least would be elucidating, right, Yeah. I was not sabbatical at the University of Texas, and I thought I published a book on identity and how people decided who they are and so on. I thought, well, I would do another one on how people find meaning in life. This goes back to my time in philosophy. I sort of come up with a plan of let me pick the made philosophical problems and write social science books about them. So meaning of life obviously is a grand philosophical one.

I think when social scientist says a lot have a lot to contribute, let me just read everything and see what it comes out. So I just started looking around for interesting things to read, and a couple of things that I mean this way. One was I thought, well, these people who engage in kinky sex so wanting to be tied up and spanked and stuff like that, that

they must have really interesting lives. So they're called going over to the library at Texas there spending a day or two, and pretty soon I realized that I was not going to learn much about the meaning of life from these people doing and doing weird sex. But what struck me is that this was a challenge to our theories of self. When we think of the self as you're trying to maximize esteem, you're trying to maximize control, and basically, you know, find pleasure and avoid pain, and

these people systematically do the opposite. They wanted to be humiliated, embarrassed, they wanted to be deprived of control, sometimes very obviously, tied up and rendered helpless and so on, and of course they accept pain rather than the pleasure. So I said, just goes exactly opposite of what we think about the self. How are we going to reconcile this? I have to figure this out. And after a while I realized there wasn't going to be any magic resolution that somehow the

self really did have control or whatever underneath. That read really doing these things was a way to get rid of the self. That the masochists embrace these things that are precisely contrary to their ordinary self as a way of getting out of their normal self, and that enables them to or there several possible appeals of that. One is, you know, you forget yourself when it's stressful to be yourself,

over a long period of time. Perhaps it liberates you from inhibitions and so on and produces these sort of sexual pleasures that they get out of it. So it was an interesting detour, and that whole project was done long before the Meaning of Life book ever got finished. It was the same with suicide about the meaning of life. I have to understand what causes suicide, because that's people who decided life doesn't have any meaning. And there's a

lot more literature on suicide than on masochism. But as I read through that, I realized, no, it's not a rejection of your whole life, since it's not a life is meaningless thing. It's more that the present is intolerable, and it's more an escape from this week rather than from your life as a whole. So I had another paper sort of following up the masochism on suicide, The

suicide has Escaped from self. Masochism was very frustrating to work on because there was so little information that you could think of all these theoretical issues and questions, but these people don't want to be studied, and there's just not much to find about the sexual masochists, whereas a suicide there are tons of studies. Their entire journals are going back decades. You're not all the information is great, but there's at least information. Any question you want to formulate,

you can probably find something to answer it. So to me, studying suicide was a very positive, happy experience. I know that sounds weird, and you know, later went to a conference or two of suicide researchers, and for most of them it's a personal thing. They knew somebody who killed self or whatever. I didn't know anybody who killed self. I didn't have any interest in it. For me, it was just an intellectual puzzle and it was a very

satisfying one to work on. And I was able to work out the escape from self theory much better than I could dealing with the kinky sex stuff. But again too that that was done and came out long before the meaning of life stuff was all done. You raised a lot of things that you just talked about. One is a very interesting point about death as an escape

from self. I mean essentially that is, you know, we're the ones that make death such an event to ourselves because we hold our identity as the core of who we are, and so when that dies permanently. That's when we say it's the end of us. If we were to get our arm cut off, we wouldn't say we're dead. But when we get our brain cut off, you know, people say we're dead. Right, So we don't say yes. But it's very interesting to think about, you know, where

the self is located. Yeah, there's some interesting theoretical issues on this is the Ernest Becker wrote The Denial of Death and the Dayson got a Pulitzer Prize or something, arguing that much of human life is motivated by this fear of our own mortality, and that so very bright social psychologists have developed this into a theory they called terror management, and they say that self esteem is erected

as a defense against death. To me, that's never made sense, because yourself is what dies when you die, So the more value you put on the self, the worse it makes death. That it seems to go in the opposite direction that if you really wanted to to get rid of the fear of death and cope with it, you should lower your self esteem so that it's no big

deal that you die. Indeed, was as researching the Meaning of Life book when it came to perceive and conclude is that as our society is put more and more emphasis on the self as a source of value, it's creating a very fragile meaning of life. People used to get meaning of life. You draw meaning from something that has a broader context and a bigger time span. And the standard advice for you want to increase the meaning of your life is get involved in something bigger than yourself.

So it's presumably something that will last after you're gone, a religious or a political movement, or a scientific or artistic you know, the idea that I will create something and this will live on after my life. That's what gives meaning. If you draw the meaning of your life from focusing on self, that makes you all that more vulnerable, because when you die, yourself dies. And people like to think they'll be remembered, but the empirical evidence is people

are not remembered very long. And most people can hardly come up with a few sentences about their grandparents and don't even know the names of their great grandparents. And so you know, after you die, it's a little bit of a doubtor. I suppose to reflect it. But after you die, the people who know you will remember you and think of you now and then. But the people who didn't know you will probably not give you another thought.

And even as I said, your grandchildren who are young when you're old, they don't, you know, don't think about you. But the way you think of your grandparents, which is in most cases not very deeply or often. I think about my grandparents a lot. I tell you, you may be fortunate to be tied into more of a family sort of thing, but for most people, their grandparents are

different people with different lives. And sure, so you raise a good point, because there is a study that came out recently showing that self transcendence, Like if you prime people to think of transof transcendent things, they do show reductions in terror management as opposed to thinking about the self. So there is a stuff the experimentally proving that. Okay, that's a good point. Suggesting that is okay. So your point was a good point, a good study supporting that point.

So that is true. But the idea of the self, it's such a complicated question. Ask what is the self? We both would agree that it is a very fragmented thing. It's a very multi dimensional construct. But what is the association between our self and our identity. Are they the same thing? Is it unity? Okay, getting into some difficult definitional issues. First of all, yeah, the self has lots of pieces and parts, but to say it's fragmented, you're sort of an essential feature of the self is unity.

You have oneself. And now the term self and identity are used in different ways by different people, and some use them almost interchangeably. But one way to make the distinction is sort of the identity is the definition of the self, and so in a sense, that's your position in society. Your identity is your roles, it's what other people would how they would characterize you, whereas the self might be the psychological processes that produce it and would

include your self concept. If you've lived alone, you might have some self concept. You wouldn't have much of an identity. I mean, if you never met another person, you wouldn't even need a name, you wouldn't own anything, you wouldn't have a reputation. You know, a lot of the things that are really important central concerns for the self and the things that define your identity, which is who you are, is kind of the literal definition of identity. Those are

all dependent on social interaction. As we said before talking about my dissertation on the theme of my career, is that a lot more things are based on interpersonal relations than we think. That's such a habit in psychology to think of one mind at a time, and that's what I came up against in my dissertation. People are thinking all these effects are due to changes in self esteem and so on. Starting to say and self esteem that matter much. What people care a lot about what other

people think of them. So the self too, an identity is very much a tool for connecting with other people. It's what our species evolved to do, and it's our strategy for survival and reproduction. As social animals. We need to connect with others. We've come up with fairly elaborate social systems, much more than elsewhere in nature, but they

depend on differentiated identities. Really, I don't feel like we ever really defined what the self is, you know, I take your point that the self is it feels unitary, But what I meant by fragment is it is actually comprised of lots of different, sometimes contradictory processes, and a lot of people throughout the history of psychology've talked about the importance of integrating these various selves, so to speak, to have optimal human functioning. So what is the self?

Though again they trying to come up with a definition is one of the hardest things. I think the self is not a thing. It's not a piece of the brain, but rather it's more of a process of performance. You talk about the different parts. Yeah, integration is in a sense the last step that self comes into being bottom up. And you know, the brain doesn't even have a central processing unit, It just does things separately. The brain doesn't really need a self, and like a solitary organism, doesn't

be on limited degrees either. That it's a requirement of complex social systems. We have a REVIEWERICO coming out and fairly soon brain behavioral sciences. We look through all the group's literature. Sometimes human groups are more than some other parts and sometimes less, and we try to say, what's the moderator, what makes the difference. The conclusion was groups function well when people are individually identified and participate as

separate individuals. When people all blend into the group, then the groups that produces the bad effects like mob violence and the individuation and not helping and social loafing and all those negative things. So human groups really do better with differentiated selves. The requirement to be a unique individual doesn't come from inside the person. It comes from the social system. Now we evolve to make those systems work, and they do bring immense benefits, so and we take

part in them. But the self, you know, the brain operates an identity in the social group. You know, that's how the self comes into being. As I said, it's a process of performance. It's not a thing. You're such a social psychologist. Thanks. It's funny to hear, you know, because like you could hear a different perspective from someone who like just studies the brain, or someone who like a cognitive psychology or individual differences in psychology, it's the

cognitive and the brain. People are sometimes skeptical that there is such as a self, as a hefty tradition running through them saying the self is an illusion, but they can't find any particular piece of the brain. They study all these little processes and subroutines. I had a reviewer once on a paper saying, it's really this is a

profound comment that's stuck with me ever since. Obviously it's instructive to look at which disciplines need the self and which are skeptical of it, and the ones just looking at the inner workings of the mind and the parts they're not so sure there's such a thing as a self or some like I said, some of them call it an illusion and so on. But you couldn't do economics or sociology without identities and economics, what's the point of buying something if you don't have the self to

own it next week? It's the point of selling something if you don't have a self to get the money and use it for something else that the self wants. So the assumption of continuity of identity and of selfhood is indispensable for the disciplines that study social systems. For the ones that go down into the individual mind, well, that's not so important to me. That's a profound point that the need for the self arises in personal relations, not in terms of the requirements of the single mind.

I find that very interesting. I also find it very interesting that you said that the brain does not require the self, and that is clearly illustrated when we're dreaming, because well, when we're dreaming, we certainly don't have an identity, right, I mean, but does that mean we're I'm not sure that's true. I mean, you have a dream which has yourself in it. Okay, we don't have self reflection, I guess, yeah,

not in the same way. It's the unconscious mind constructs a little scenario and it makes sense out of stimuli, makes a story that your storymaking is one of the basic activities of the human mind, and dreams are a version of that. So you think the identity is still involved in dream formation, Yes, I think so. I mean again without participation of the conscious self. These are things I don't have fu full grasp on yet, but certainly in a dream wake up you know you're write down

your dream. There's I I did this, and that's a reconstruction. Yeah, But the point is it was there in the dream, the difference between you and someone else. So typically you're dreaming about yourself doing something, being in some situation. You don't dream about the people you never met or heard of, or other things going on. Maybe some people do occasionally, but most usually people are in their own dreams, and so there is at least in fact of self identity

it is used there. You don't have all the control that you have in an ordinary life to make decisions and take responsibility, and strange things happen that certainly in dreams. But there is the basic idea of I know who I am, you know, that's still there in the dream. Very interesting. Okay, it's a good point. It's a good point. Let's move on to the meanings of life. Something that was really seminal in we're moving from one to like huge topic to another huge. I mean, they're not really

light topic. So are they death self? You go big or go home? Right? Yeah, But with the means of life, you know, something that was very seminal in your work was differentiating between happiness and meaning, saying we also have this striving for meaning in life. And obviously not the only one to say that, you know, Victor Frankel said it as well, and his idea of will to meaning. But you came up with four needs for meaning. I thought you can maybe just talk about the four okay. Well.

Franco was a genius. He was the first one to dare to bring the idea of meaning and meaning of life into psychology. For him, it was pretty much about purpose, you know. When he talks about meaning it's having a purpose. And he started with his observations and concentration camps, and I went on to study people and so ons some purposes there, and a purpose is certainly a big aspect of meaning of life. So to me that was one of the four needs for meaning, and I would have

been happy if that explained everything. But as I read endless amounts of stuff to try to put together that book, you wanted to say, Okay, what is it that a person needs wants when you were looking for a meeting of life? So purpose is one. But just having a purpose wasn't enough. I seem there also has to be some sense of right and wrong, some basic values in some way, even to justify yourself so that you think

you are a good person and right. You know, if you have a purpose but it's associated with something bad or whatever, that's not fully satisfactory. And then if that two more came in after a while. The third is efficacy. You have to believe you can make a difference. Having a purpose is not going to make your life meaningful if there's nothing you can do to fulfill that purpose.

So apart from having the idea that this is the purpose of my life, it's also there has to be something I can do to make that true, to advance that, to reach those goals, to achieve fulfillment, to get to heaven, to provide for my children, or whatever. The purpose is so efficacy, and then thinking again about self esteem and so on, some basis for thinking that you're a person of value of worth. That's also implicated with those four

people who have a purpose that they're striving for. I have a strong sense of what's right and wrong, of value, who feel some efficacy of being able to make a difference in life in a positive way, and who have some basis for thinking that they're a worthwhile person. For them, life is pretty meaningful. For people who don't have those things, well, I think they have a problem and meaning of life and will tend to say no, things don't make sense,

My life is not meaningful. But something to address each of those four basic needs. Sure, and you also argue that there is a myth of higher meaning, of there being a higher meaning. Can you tell me why that's a myth? Yes? Well you like that question? You like that question? Yes? Yes. A lot of things develop in a bottom up fashion. We said this about the self.

You know, that you have different responses and so on, but to integrate them into a single self is a gradual process that perhaps never becomes complete, and a lot of reality is like that, and biologically it makes a sense. That's how we evolve. So with meaning, we like to think there's one explanation that will all fit together. The process of constructing meaning is gradually putting things and integrating them and so on, and to imagine eventually it will

all all come together and all makes sense. There's no guarantee that that's true, but it's an appealing idea. So people ask what is the meaning of life, as if there's going to be a single answer or one formula that explains and integrates everything, Whereas, in fact, it struck me that the meaning of most people lives is something

stitched together out of several unrelated things. They have their family and romantic relationships and one, and they have their work, and those may or may not be related, they may be quite separate. And they may have their religious faith, which is yet another thing, or other sources of meaning. People might have hobbies and other activities. So idea, though even one person's life, that there is a single meaning to it that's probably not right or at least doesn't

fit the data. But that faith I see signs of it. People think it's all going to make sense and all going to come together. So that's what I meant by the myth of higher meaning that eventually will get to a place where you know, we can understand it all. But I'm not sure we will. Even with a single life. There's so many events in a particular life. You can write the most perfect, exquisite biography, but it's not going to include every thing that you did in your life.

And the time you've got lost and you're looking for the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the time you had the flu and you vomited in the living room. You know, those are a meaning of life. There's a stitch together integration,

picking out some high lights. I'm particularly interested in the same person writes several different autobiographies that how do they reinterpret and reconstruct their life and they take some things out and add new things in, and even going back that write your autobiography as a young adult, and then later maybe you have some big religious awakening or political conversion or something, you would write a new autobiography and when stuff that happened when you were a childhood that

might have been left out of the first biography is sort of out of the way. Suddenly that might become central and important as the first steps that the integration wasn't there till later. Meaning is basically connection meaning as in everything from meaning of life to the meaning of a sentence or the meaning of a word. It connects things in a non physical way. It's not moleculed and molecule, but it's a more of a symbolic connection. That's why

meaning comes in webs and structures and clusters. So as we're talking about constructing a meaning of life, we're talking about putting things together and integrating things and do that to a greater and greater extent. If you think a great detail about your life, but you're probably never going to get it all in the same story, You're not going to come up with one means sense. Okay, yeah,

that does make sense. And we may have multiple purposes throughout our lives or feel there's multiple things in our life that have a whole different meaning at different points in our lives. So that speaks to this against this notion of there being a single higher meaning like a higher, superordinate meaning that that transcends our whole life, that we need this better whole life searching for. So I think that makes sense. Well, thank god, just kidding, it's a

little bit. I came grad it round about, so you know. But the idea isn't so much messier theory that I came up with, and I like clean, elegant theory, so it's too bad. But sometimes that's the way reality is that if there were a meaning of life, that you could pick one person and say, okay, the meaning of your life is blah blah blah and say it in one sentence, that would be That would be lovely and elegant.

But more it's a matter of do you have what are the purpose says you strive for, what are the basis for knowing what's right and wrong? And how do you justify what you're doing? You have efficacy, you have self worth. You might have several different schemes or aspects of your life that satisfy different ones of those, but if you've got them all covered one way or another, you probably think life is meaningful. Even if they don't

all fit into a single meaning. That's right, But ultimately meaning comes from what other people find you doing, Like if other people find what you're doing meaningful, that's meaning. You know. It's funny we measure in positive psychology with self report scales of meaning, and it's kind of silly in a way that like we're measuring whether you have meaning based on your self reported Like what if like what you're doing does not offer meaning to anyone else

in your environment? Is you know? Like and then you die? Was their meaning? Do you know what I mean? I think I know what you mean? And you're bringing up another point again, the interpersonal, that we're not solitary self contained units, and meaning is connection and some of that in books in a personal connection. So it's possible to be quite deluded and have a meaning for your life

that nobody else can see. You might think you're a great artist or something, and everybody else takes one look at your paintings and says, oh, get me out of here. But then I guess that's how they reacted to van Go, and later he was people judged to be one of the great geniuses of all time. Sometimes the one's own meaning is right, but more often it requires validation from others. And I think you're good at something and nobody else thinks.

So odds are others are all right and you're not sure? Sure? Yeah, absolutely, I think that it'd be good to develop measures of meaning that survey your community, your peers, your friends, not just yourself. Actually, Tom Stoppard me this point in a Q and A he had with the philosopher David Chalmers. So asked about meaning, and he said, how can I ever assess meaning? That's for other people to us about me anyway? So it just made me, you know, I thought that was a really good point. I'm a big

fan of his. But in empirical fact, people do iss as the meaning of their lives. They may be wrong, which maybe is fine, but they certainly are able to do it. But it suggests what are they responding? In a really spread of these studies where the dependent variable is they'll have college students rate on a twelve point scale or whatever, how meaningful is their life. We don't really know what goes into them saying yes or no. It's easy to say, oh yeah, my life has cobs

of meaning. But I think the next generation of research we need to push them a little further and say, okay, what exactly does your life mean can you articulate what this meaning is? Meaningfulness might just be a feeling if something seems emotionally rich, maybe that is enough to seem meaningful and sway people into that. But is that really an answer or not? Right? And well, you've done great

work differentiating happiness from meaning and meaning being. A key difference is this integrate of complexity from your past, your future, and your presence. And maybe when people are coming up with that sort of judgment, they're trying to integrate all these three levels of time. Yeah, meaning a happiness thing. Clearly happiness is part of the meaning. That was incidentally one I thought, going to research my book on meaning of life, I'll have to read the literature on happiness,

And that did get in. That's clearly there. It's being happy and having meaningful life. I'm not the same thing, but there's certainly some overlap. Sure, you can be a meaningful life without being very happy, But I'm not sure about the revise that you can be really happy if

you find your life meaningless. That I'd rather doubt. Right, So, even if you live an entirely hedonistic lifestyle, it's still likely that you'll find meaning in that right, I mean you'll say that's what I'm kind of here for in a way. Yeah, we had more studies on people who actually do that and what they think and feel and do they rationalize, do they come up with at least meaningful constructions or are they able to say, I'm just here to eat candy, take drugs, masturbate, I don't know,

just going for the pleasure from day to day. Conventional wisdom, which probably right on this, is that living a purely hedonistic life doesn't satisfy you in the long run, which sure Victor Francle's point that we need something more, We need meaning too. There also some studies suggesting that you pursue happiness for its own sake, and pursuit of happiness of course one of the founding American ideals. Pursuing happiness

for your own sake doesn't really work. But if you try to cultivate a meaningful life, that can work and that will make you then happy too. So Fitz that I said meeting is more of a prerequisite for happiness and not so much the other way around. Excellent point. Stay tuned everyone for next week for part two of this two part series with Roy. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott barrk Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought provoking an 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