Don’t Be Happy: Why a Meaningful Life Is More Important Than a Happy One

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The last few weeks have been unusually busy in my life—both in the good sense and the bad. On the positive side, I turned in the draft of a new book, released a TED Talk, and attended a milestone college reunion. On the negative side, I mourned the loss of a beloved family friend, closely monitored two loved ones in the hospital, and got COVID.

All of these events are completely singular and one-of-a-kind in how I experienced them; they’re also, in their own way, completely routine.

Some good things happened; some bad things happened; I had no choice but to try to make sense of them.

It’s that sense-making where the magic lies. Where the challenge lies.

Where the lies lie.

The lie, in this case, may be the biggest of all the big lies: That life is about the pursuit of happiness. How can this be a big lie, you ask, when it’s written right there in our American Scripture, the Declaration of Independence?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

How can this be a big lie when every day we are surrounded by books (Stumbling on Happiness), social media feeds (The Happy News), commercials (Coke: Open Happiness), and packaging (the Amazon smile) that tell us—beseech us—to be happy?

Because happiness is a transient, shallow, inhuman—maybe even unhuman—goal.

The goal of living well is not a happy life; it’s a meaningful life.

And the difference is profound.

The father of the modern meaning movement, Viktor Frankl, was four years old in 1909, living at Number 6 Czernin Street, Vienna, when he had a piercing thought one night before sleep: I too will have to die. “What troubled me then,” he later wrote, “as it has done throughout my life, was not the fear of dying, but the question of whether the transitory nature of life might destroy its meaning.”

His answer would guide his life and that of tens of millions of others in the coming century: “In some respects, it is death itself that makes life meaningful.”

At sixteen, Frankl gave his first lecture, “On the Meaning of Life.” At twenty-eight, he formed the “The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy.” His core idea: We should not ask what the meaning of life is because it is we who are being asked. Each of us is responsible for finding our own reason to live.

In many ways, Frankl was part of a centuries-long conversation about what it means to live a fulfilling life. Aristotle described the tension between hedonism—the pursuit of happiness—and eudaemonia—the search for dignity, authenticity, and what came to be called meaning. Frankl became the preeminent modern champion of the idea that seeking meaning is our key to survival.

Viktor Frankl

In 1941, Frankl was just finishing a book on his ideas when the Nazis began systematically implementing the Final Solution. As a doctor, Frankl was able to secure entrée to the United States, but he anguished about leaving his parents. Returning from picking up his visa, Frankl covered the Jewish star on his coat and ducked into a cathedral, praying for a sign from God. When he got home, his father was in tears, staring at a piece of marble on the kitchen table.

“What’s this?” Frankl asked.

“The Nazis burned our synagogue today,” he said. The chunk of marble was the only remains from the Ten Commandments above the pulpit. “I can even tell you what commandment it’s from,” his father said. “Only one uses these letters.”

“And what’s that?” Frankl asked.

“Honor thy father and mother.”

Frankl ripped up the visa on the spot. The following year, the entire family was sent to a concentration camp, where Frankl’s father died in his arms. Two years later, Frankl, his wife, and his mother were sent to Auschwitz. His mother and wife were gassed. Frankl was forced into hard labor, slept ten to a bed, and ate only crumbs a day.

And yet, what allowed him to survive was his commitment to meaning, he said. Frankl had stitched the only copy of his book into his jacket, but it was confiscated and destroyed. At night he kept himself occupied by repeating passages to himself. When he was liberated in 1945, he sat down and wrote an account of his experience. It took him nine days.

The book was published in 1946 and instantly became a defining book of the century. Man’s Search for Meaning has sold over twelve million copies. Frankl’s message was that even in the face of unimaginable bleakness, humans can find hope. “You do not have to suffer to learn, but if you don’t learn from suffering...then your life becomes truly meaningless.”

Frankl’s book arrived amidst the smoldering ruins of Hiroshima and the Holocaust during what was widely considered an epidemic of meaninglessness. Frankl called it the “sickness of the century.” Jung called it an “illness.” “Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life,” Jung wrote. “Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.”

From this ground zero, a modern meaning movement began to rise, eventually growing to include philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. If the symptoms of meaninglessness were alienation and emptiness, the balm was fulfillment and personal sense-making. The “central act of human psychology is meaning,” wrote psychologist Jerome Bruner.

Paul Wong, a modern researcher in Toronto, calls meaning-making “the best-kept secret to the greatest human adventure.”

But where does all this attention on meaning leave happiness? After all, who doesn't want to be happy?

In a landmark study published in 2013, Roy Baumeister of Florida State, Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota, and Jennifer Aaker of Stanford found that happiness is fleeting while meaning is enduring; happiness concentrates on the self while meaning concentrates on things larger than the self; happiness focuses on the present while meaning focuses on stitching together the past, present, and future.

In a pointed conclusion, Baumeister and his colleagues write that animals can be happy—after all, it’s just a passing feeling—but only humans can find meaning because only humans have the ability to take events that are fundamentally unhappy and turn them into empathy, compassion, and well-being.

“Indeed, the meaningful but unhappy life is in some ways more admirable than the happy but meaningless one,” they write. “Put another way, humans may resemble many other creatures in their striving for happiness, but the quest for meaning is a key part of what makes us human, and uniquely so.”

Perhaps the biggest difference between happiness and meaning is that it first lends itself to simple answers—be positive! be mindful! be grateful!—while the second one is not simple at all.

But it’s doable.

And what doing it requires is finding a way to achieve what Baumeister and his colleagues call “integrating past, present, and future.” What it requires is balancing both the happy and unhappy events in our lives.

What it requires is a story.

The reason stories are central to making meaning is that stories don't inherently have meaning; we must give the stories we tell the meaning we crave.

That means on the happy days, on the unhappy days, and on the days that feel like a mixture of both.

In other words: every day.

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Thank you for reading The Nonlinear Life. Please help us grow the community by subscribing, sharing, and commenting below. Also, you can learn more about me, read my introductory post, or scroll through my other posts.

You might enjoy reading these posts:

Daydream Believer: The Scientific Benefits of Letting Your Mind Wander

5 Tips for Mastering a Life Transition

How to Talk to Kids About School Shootings

Or check out my books that inspired this newsletter: Life Is in the Transitions and The Secrets of Happy Families. Or a unique service I started to gather family stories from a loved one.

Or, you can contact me directly.

cover image ©Nicholas Minijes via Canva.com