The Psychology Of Finding Meaning In Life - John Vervaeke - #891

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Given that we are biological creatures, why do we need meaning? Why do humans need to do all this extra work in order to be satisfied with life?

**John Vervaeke** (0:12)
Well, I have to tell you that I've been going through a, since the publication of the book, I've been going through a serious reflection on this question again and going deeper into it.
There's many levels of answering that question. At one level, meaning has to do with sense-making. It has to do with how we properly pay attention to the right kind of information that can allow us to reliably solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains. And that's one aspect of meaning, that sort of agentic aspect. But consonant with that is we need to be connected to other people because most of our problem solving is done in connection with other people. So, there's an initial sense making dimension. This is often talked about as sort of coherence in the meaning in life literature. Does your world sort of, is your sense making making sense to you is how I sometimes put it. Like the sense making is what you're doing sort of automatically. And when you reflect on it, you go, yeah, that makes sense. My world isn't absurd or things like that. And then we need to feel connected to other people because most of our problem-solving is done via other people. That's our great superpower, individually, biologically, as you framed it. We're pretty pathetic animals. You know, a really angry dog can take us out. And so our superpower is we can coordinate together and, you know, train some of those dogs and sharpen some of those sticks and then kill anything on the planet. And so we need to be connected to other people. And that brings with it its own special problem that my friend Greg Enriquez made sort of prevalent. We developed the superpower of connecting and coordinating called language. And language is something really, really powerful in helping us coordinate. But it also does something really novel. It makes the content of our minds accessible. We're sort of exposed to each other in a way in which no other organism is exposed to its fellow creatures. And so we have to also develop this way of balancing between coordinating with other people, but not being overexposed. So we have to develop relationships of trust and forgiveness and belonging. And we have to balance between being individuals and having an individual identity and a group identity. So that's all central to meaning.
And then beyond that, we fall prey in both of those domains to massive self-deception. I don't pay attention to the right things. I misframe you. I'm biased in my attitude towards you. And so we have to do a lot to correct that. We have to try and ameliorate that. And what that means is we also have to be connected to standards by which we can correct ourselves. Standards about what is most real, what is best, what is most beautiful. And that's a deeper kind of connectedness. That's kind of a connectedness to what we consider ultimacy. So I've tried to show you how all of these things are all important dimensions in why we have to pursue meaning in life. I've become increasingly dissatisfied with the standard psychological construct called meaning in life to measure and talk about all those dimensions in a coordinated fashion.

**Chris Williamson** (3:48)
Can you talk to me about the sort of established body of work when it comes to meaning and how you diverge from that or what you would suggest as an improvement?

**John Vervaeke** (3:57)
So the standard metrics are around sort of four dimensions, really three. One is coherence, which I mentioned, which is, does your sense making make sense to you?
Another one is purpose. That's not well posed, because if you think standardly of how people think of purpose, purpose is you're working towards some ultimate goal. That's a very dangerous way of framing meaning, because if you never reach a goal, your life was meaningless. If you reach it, going forward, you're pretty meaningless. I discovered that way back in high school, and that sort of really bothered me. So I think what they're talking about more is orientation. And then orientation is a more important way. People have to feel not disoriented, but oriented in the world. And then the next one they talk about is significance, that you have things in your life that aren't transitory, ephemeral, shallow. But that seems to be just sort of one side of this deeper thing, which is called mattering. You need to feel connected to something.