How to live a meaningful life, according to science

A Dalai Lama once said that our prime purpose in this life is to help others – and he may have been right. Scientists have found that having a positive impact on other people seems to be a key element to feeling like our life has meaning.

An unromantic might say that a human life has no actual meaning, but it is still a question that philosophers have pondered for thousands of years. Joffrey Fuhrer at the University of Eastern Finland says it is important to understand, because pinning down what activities, thoughts and actions lead to a sense of meaning could help therapists and counsellors guide people towards it.

To answer this age-old dilemma, Fuhrer and his colleague Florian Cova at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, carried out a series of studies, each involving online surveys of hundreds of US residents.

In some of the studies, the participants were presented with fictional characters and asked to rate the extent to which their lives seemed meaningful, happy and enviable. For example, they evaluated the life of Amelia, who won a lot of money playing the lottery and now regularly donates to charities to fight poverty and hunger, and who travels to different countries to help these organisations.

In the other studies, the pair asked the participants to rate and rank several definitions of a meaningful life, or to rate the extent to which they perceived their own life as meaningful and fulfilling across a range of measures.

“We find that there are four different dimensions,” says Fuhrer. Three of these – coherence, or comprehension of your life in the past, present and future; your life having purpose or direction; and your life having significance – have been pulled out before in similar previous studies. But Fuhrer and Cova say they have found a crucial fourth dimension to feeling like our life has meaning: when what we do has a positive impact on others.

Other psychologists have argued that the foundations are comprehension, purpose and mattering – feeling that your existence is consequential and has lasting value.

But the latest work argues that “significance” and “mattering” don’t cover what people perceive as the positive impact of their deeds and how that leads to a feeling of meaning. “I agree completely that this kind of concept belongs to the core elements of the experience of meaning,” says Tatjana Schnell at the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo. “But what’s the difference between impact and significance? There is none, really.”

Schnell’s own work proposes a different four facets to meaning, with existential belonging – the sense of having a place in this world – sitting alongside significance, coherence and purpose. More recently, a paper found that social support can give people meaning.

Regardless of how many measures there may be, Schnell says that feeling that your life has meaning isn’t about ensuring it is filled in all possible meaningful facets. “It’s more about not having an area of your life that is problematic, with no coherence, no significance, no mattering or no belonging,” she says.

Frank Martela at Aalto University in Finland gives the example of people who say they lack meaning at work. “They do their job, they get their salary, but they feel that nothing positive comes out of it,” says Martela. It is in situations like this when people can start to feel they lack purpose, and feel hopeless or depressed, he says.

To create more impact, Fuhrer and Schnell say we should move beyond self-focused concerns and invest time and energy in activities that benefit others. “Find out who you think you are, who you want to be and what you can bring to this world, and then see how you can apply that to something that sustainably benefits others,” says Schnell.

Meaning can also come through small acts you do every day, says Martela, such as bringing a cup of coffee to a colleague.